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The Club Dumas
Arturo Pérez-Reverte
A thriller for people who love books about books, The Club Dumas follows Lucas Corso, a cynical mercenary hunter of rare volumes, through two tangled commissions. One is to authenticate a handwritten chapter of Alexandre Dumas's The Three Musketeers; the other is to compare three surviving copies of a seventeenth-century occult manual reputedly capable of summoning the Devil. As Corso travels across Europe, the two quests braid together amid bibliophiles, forgers, devil-worshippers, and a watchful femme fatale, and the line between literary detective story and gothic puzzle blurs. Arturo Perez-Reverte, a former war correspondent turned bestselling Spanish novelist, packs the book with bibliographic arcana and sly homage to Dumas. Readers who relish erudite, atmospheric mysteries will find it a treat; those who know only Roman Polanski's loose film adaptation, The Ninth Gate, will discover a richer and stranger original.
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The author
Arturo Perez-Reverte (b. 1951) spent two decades as a war correspondent before turning to fiction, and a reporter's eye for danger and detail carries into his novels. A member of the Real Academia Espanola, he is among Spain's most widely read authors, known for erudite thrillers steeped in history, fencing, chess, and old books.
The book
The Club Dumas (El Club Dumas, 1993; English translation by Sonia Soto, 1996) sends the mercenary book-hunter Lucas Corso after two prizes: a genuine handwritten chapter of The Three Musketeers and three copies of a diabolical occult manual, one of which may be authentic. Part literary detective story, part gothic puzzle-box, it revels in the world of antiquarian dealers and in the pleasures of reading itself.
How it reads
It is clever, atmospheric, and unapologetically bookish, delighting in Dumas homage and bibliographic detail. The two plots never fully resolve into a single mechanism, which some readers savor as ambiguity and others find unfinished. Roman Polanski filmed only the occult strand as The Ninth Gate (1999), discarding the Dumas thread entirely, so the novel is fuller and stranger than the movie suggests.
For more context
For more of his historical-puzzle mode, try The Flanders Panel or the Captain Alatriste series.
Sources - The Club Dumas (Wikipedia) - Kirkus review
- Type
- Book
- Author / Maker
- Arturo Pérez-Reverte
- Publisher
- Harcourt Brace & Company
- Place of publication
- New York
- Year
- 1996
- ISBN
- None
- Shelf
- Fiction
- Location
- Colorado