TORONTO -- Was Jay Gatsby, the title character of F. Scott Fitzerald's most famous novel, a distinguished Austrian baron,or a poseur bootlegger who changed his name to cavort with the rich and famous of Prohibition-era New York?

That is the question at the centre of an international literary hunt to unearth the shady details of Max von Gerlach, the man experts believe to be the prototype for the mythic American tycoon who graced the pages of the 1925 novel The Great Gatsby.

The book tells of the mysterious Jay Gatsby's rise to the pinnacle of the 1920s Long Island social set based largely on his newfound wealth. The main character's popularity and reckless living eventually give way to disenchantment and the tale ends with Gatsby's murder after he is wrongly suspected of sleeping with another man's wife.

The character has been described as emblematic of the American dream and the novel has been made into a movie (in which Robert Redford played Gatsby) and an opera, has been compared to a Greek tragedy and has been the subject of many scholars' lifetimes of study.

For University of South Carolina literature professor Matthew Bruccoli, the world's foremost Fitzgerald scholar,the search to discover the origins of the Gatsby character began almost 30 years ago in the archives of the Princeton University Library and could end this summer in eitherNew York City, a villa near the Austrian-Italian border or auniversity innorthern Germany, depending on whose view of von Gerlach's origins prevails.

Howard Comen, aprivate detective also from South Carolina, has also now joined the hunt in hopes of nailing the final details. And Comen has a hunch that despite the information that has already been discovered about the mysterious von Gerlach, there is more evidence to be considered.

"I deal in facts," said Comen, who has given himself the summer to close the case, "and I think there's some facts missing."

The first evidence that might point to a link between von Gerlach and Fitzgerald turned up in 1973, when Bruccoli, also a former trustee of Fitzgerald's estate, came across a 1923 newspaper clipping showing a photograph of the storied author -- who died in 1940 -- withhis wife, Zelda, and the couple's daughter, Scotty, on the lawn of their modest Long Island home.

What he saw set off alarms: In cursive script across the top of the picture, the writer inquires, "How are you and the family, old sport?"

The writer, Bruccoli points out, is using the familiar moniker, "old sport," used by Jay Gatsby in the novel.

In the bottom right-hand corner of the clipping, the writer signed his name, "Gerlach."

Next, "I began digging through newspaper morgues and I found a picture of Max Gerlach during a parrot-fever scare. He was kissing a parrot in a New York newspaper," Bruccoli said. (The context is unclear: Parrot fever is a respiratory disease passed from birds to humans; possibly von Gerlach was disputing the point in dramatic style). "It described him as a yachtsman. In the 1920s, that was another name for a bootlegger."

The third, and perhaps most telling piece of evidence, is a series of newspaper articles dated Dec. 22, 1939, the day after 55-year-old Max von Gerlach's botched suicide attempt, which left him blind.

A police report quoted in the Long Island Star-Journal said von Gerlach attributed his actions to "financial reverses" after his used-car dealership went bankrupt.

Police found four letters in his pockets, the contents of which were not disclosed. His girlfriend, Elizabeth Mayer, told police that von Gerlach was a retired U.S. Army officer, had a military bearing, "an Oxford accent" and was a former German baron.

"In The Great Gatsby, those are the rumours about Jay Gatsby," Comen said.

The search has also turned up a letter from 1954 addressed to one of Fitzgerald's biographers,Arthur Mizener, written by a close friend of von Gerlach.

"Max, as Nietzche said it first, 'lives alone and dies alone.' He has stopped drinking and giving parties."

The plea for Mizener to contact von Gerlach, whose pathetic depiction in the letter recalls a Jay Gatsby in decline, went unheeded (to Mizener's lasting disgrace, Bruccoli said).

"Whatever he wanted to tell Mizener went to the grave with him," Bruccoli said.

However,Horst Kruse, a German scholar of American studies at the University of Munster who has been doing his own investigation, disputes the line taken by Bruccoli and Comen about von Gerlach's background.

Kruse believes he has solved the matter once and for all based on American military records. He first contacted the von Gerlach family in Germany, who claim to have had no relatives in America at the time Max von Gerlach lived there. Then, in the military enlistment records for the First World War, Kruse found that a Max Stork Gerlach, a mechanic born in 1886, had served in the army.

Kruse recently told London's Daily Mail that, according to his information, the Gatsby prototype was born in Yonkers, N.Y., changed his name to "von Gerlach" to sound more aristocratic, told people that he was a baron and earned his money running booze to Fitzgerald and his friends on Long Island.

But when Comen heard the boasts, he said he thought the professor had jumped the gun."There's a lot of speculation and there are a lot of von Gerlachs," Comen said. "But I question whether he was a mechanic from Yonkers."

Instead, he is investigating a lead that could show Max von Gerlach's Austrian roots. In a letter to the Globe and Mail, Comen wrote, "Although I have the greatest respect for Kruse . . . I do not agree with [his] analysis at this point.

He said his reservations are based on the fact that a Yonkers mechanic could not fool relatives of the real Baron von Gerlach as to his authenticity, and he thinks that it would have been difficult to avoid members of the aristocratic family in 1920s New York high society.

"I am on the trail of Baron Admiral von Gerlach (Austrian, I believe), who was married to the Countess Albrizzi [whose family originated in Italy, near the Austrian border]," Comen explained.

"Information from Albrizzi Furniture's New York representative indicates that the Countess Albrizzi family was active in the NYC area during the Roaring Twenties."

If this is true, Comen said, he doubts that the pretender Kruse claims to have unearthed is the same von Gerlach that was the basis for Jay Gatsby. "My basic concern is that I don't think the Albrizzi family would have allowed this man to usurp the von Gerlach title," he said.

But the search for the truth could very well be the jewel in the crown of a scholar who, by his own count, has been studying Fitzgerald's work since the age of 18 and was owner of the largest collection of paraphernalia related to Fitzgerald before he donated it to his university.

And Comen couldbe another beneficiary of the secret von Gerlach appears to have taken to his grave. He is already working on a book about the investigation, which he has titled God Sees Everything, after a popular line from the novel.