It's a tale of shame, disappointment and embarrassment, a heartrending story of cruel deception and shattered dreams - and it's not even published.

And there's the rub. Earlier this month a number of authors who had signed contracts with the Hill and Hill literary agency, supposedly based in Edinburgh, received an email telling them that the agency's operations had been "frozen", blaming adverse coverage in writers' forums such as Absolute Write.

These writers had all paid upfront fees of about £100 to an agent calling himself Christopher Hill, who promised to submit their work to major publishing houses and send bi-weekly reports on their progress. And at least some of them were doing rather well - or so it seemed ...

Maria Osborne Perry, a "bestselling author of literary fiction and romance", tells on her blog how Hill informed her of interest from a number of major publishing houses, and a "verbal contract" which was due to be confirmed later in the year.

Kate Hyde, a senior editor at HarperCollins, describes on the 5th Estate blog how she discovered writers had been sent fabricated responses, invented reports and even a questionnaire which Hill's clients were asked to complete to assess their suitability as authors.

All of which points to a scam of some sort - though as Victoria Strauss suggests on Writer Beware, it's not a scam which is making very much money.

So what's going on here? Is it a prank? A sadistic hobby for someone with a little too much time on their hands? Maybe it's just a misjudged multimedia project from a struggling theatre company. When a character called "Christopher Hill" starts his own blog to call his own sanity into question and exult in his new-found notoriety, the hall of mirrors that is the internet seems to have refracted itself through the looking-glass once more.