In July 1900 George Morrison, the fabled Peking correspondent of The Times, had the strange experience of reading his own obituary in this newspaper. “Morrison of Peking”, as he was universally known, was reported killed while attempting to save the life of another man during the Boxer Rebellion. His obituary was most laudatory: “devoted... fearless... able.”

What an odd, and oddly pleasurable, feeling it must have been for Morrison to read those words. To be formally dead — for death comes in many forms, but a Times obit is the most absolute — and yet still alive. To be eulogised while still able to enjoy it. To have cheated death for a while.

That opportunity comes to few, yet it is an almost universal fantasy. In Mark Twain's Tom Sawyer, Tom is moved to tears of self-pity when he witnesses his own funeral. Twain himself knew what it felt like to be mourned prematurely. When a newspaper published news of his demise, he wrote to say that reports had been “greatly exaggerated”.

Perhaps John Darwin, the canoeist now suspected of faking his own death, felt the same exquisite pang of self-condolence after paddling off to a new, and as yet mysterious, life more than five years ago. Perhaps he read about the search for his body, his wife's public grief (whether real or feigned) and the coroner's verdict confirming his own (greatly exaggerated) death.

Whatever the reason for Mr Darwin's disappearance and reappearance, he is now part of a long and peculiar cultural tradition. The individual who vanishes, apparently dead, only to reappear in a different guise, is one of the world's most cherished myths, a staple of high art and low farce, from Reggie Perrin to The Return of Martin Guerre to The History of Mr Polly by H.G.Wells.

Every culture has someone who vanishes and becomes a sort of folk icon as a result. Lord Lucan is still being spotted as far afield as Africa, Ireland, Paraguay and, most recently, living in a clapped-out Land Rover in New Zealand with a possum called Redfern. Even longer on the run is D.B.Cooper, the aircraft hijacker who jumped out of a Boeing 727 over Northwest America in 1971, with a parachute and $200,000 in ransom money, never to be seen again. In Australia, the equivalent figure is Harold Holt, the Australian Prime Minister who went for a swim off a beach in Victoria in 1967 and never came back. In Venezuela, the role is occupied by Edison Vicuña, who reappeared, dead drunk but otherwise healthy, at his own funeral in 2002, causing several mourners to faint.

An extraordinary romance attaches to the vanishing trick, even if, like Lucan, the vanishee is escaping from horrible crimes. Part of the continuing cult of Osama bin Laden lies in the simple fact that he has successfully disappeared while remaining visible.

“Pseudocide”, in which men (it is almost always men) fake their own deaths, is a growing phenomenon. No one should underestimate the suffering for those left behind by this supremely selfish act. Some are escaping debts, or violence, or unhappiness, and some, it seems, are simply seeking to recreate themselves, trying to start anew.

Yet the opportunities to disappear are gradually disappearing. Millions of people embrace anonymity or alter egos on the internet because there is almost no opportunity to pretend to be someone else in the real world. In a society bristling with surveillance cameras, where every credit-card transaction trails you and every telephone call pinpoints you, the idea of simply stepping off the stage and then entering stage right in an entirely new costume has a peculiar appeal.

This surely explains what the story of the disappearing canoeist has been treated with a combination of amusement and sneaking sympathy. Even the police seem to be relishing the case. The police statement on Mr Darwin's arrest was entitled “Lazarus Press Conference”. Say what you like about the British constabulary, they have a faultless grip on ironic biblical reference.

In Britain, there has always been a subversive admiration for the imposter, the pretender, the double man living a double life. Robert Louis Stevenson's Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde is, in some ways, a reflection on British character, the dark urges beneath the respectable exterior, probity in conflict with pleasure. Henry VII seems a dreary figure compared to those romantic charlatans claiming his throne, Lambert Simnel and Perkin Warbeck.

We cannot help admiring the brazen fraud. In 1865, a man living in Wagga Wagga, Australia, came forward claiming to be Sir Roger Tichborne, the heir to a large estate who was believed to have perished at sea 11 years previously. The real Tichborne had been small, dark, sharp-featured and well educated; “the Claimant”, as he became known, was freckled, semi-literate and fantastically fat. In reality, he was Arthur Orton, a butcher from Wapping who had jumped ship in Chile and wound up in Australia.

Tichborne's elderly mother, however, insisted this vast imposter was her son. The public adored the Claimant, espousing his cause as a way of annoying the Victorian Establishment. After a dramatic trial, Orton was exposed and jailed for ten years, eventually dying in poverty and obscurity. But he still insisted on being buried under the name “Sir Roger Charles Doughty Tichborne”, a dedication to his own hoax that is hard not to admire.

Mr Darwin has now joined that long and dishonourable parade of people who have given in to a strange but widespread human urge, by apparently setting out to become someone else. The smile he wears in the photograph taken in Panama a year ago is that of a man enjoying his afterlife.

But if he is found guilty of fraud then the Prodigal Canoeist, like the Claimant, will have plenty of time in prison to reflect on who he really is.

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