"The Dumas Club" by Arturo Perez-Reverte

 

A murder mystery set in the world of book-collectors. 

Lucas Corso is an investigator for booksellers and bibliophiles. At moment he has two missions: firstly to authenticate some manuscript pages of chapter forty-two of The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas and secondly to track down the three extant copies of the Book of the Nine Doors of the Kingdom of Shadows, a book of occult and esoteric knowledge which includes nine prints reproduced from a another book supposedly written by the devil himself. Corso travels from Spain to Sintra in Portugal and then to Paris. But his life appears to be in danger from a man with a scar, the double of d'Artagnan's adversary Rochefort, and Rochefort's accomplice Milady. And who is the strange girl who follows him: a guardian angel or something else?

The mystery is compounded by the fact that the three copies of 'Nine Doors' have illustrations which at first sight seem to be the same but on closer inspection contain differences that may or may not be significant. The present day story repeatedly harks back to the storyline of the 'Musketeers' and we also learn about occult literature. There some interesting twists at the end, although one had been heavily signalled (from the first paragraph of chapter one) with bookish references. 

It's an entertaining read but there was a lot about books and this rather overshadowed the mystery/ thriller element of the plot.

I did enjoy the self-confessed cowardice of the sidekick.

Also by this author: The Flanders Panel, a murder mystery set in the world of fine art.

Selected quotes:

• "Although I am narrating this story after the resolution of the momentous events to come, the very nature of the loop - think of Escher's paintings, or the work of that old joker, Bach - forces us to return continually to the beginning." (Ch 5)
• "It's Julian the Apostate crying, 'You have defeated me, Galileo'." (Ch 7)
• "The art of locking devils inside bottles or books is very ancient ... Gervase of Tilbury and Gerson both mentioned it in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. As for pacts with the Devil, the tradition goes back even further: from the Book of Enoch to St Jeronimus, through the Cabbala and the Fathers of the Church." (Ch 10)
• "Like any intelligent being, the Devil likes games, riddles." (Ch 10)
• "In the real world many things happen by chance but in fiction nearly everything is logical." (Ch 14)

July 2025; 323 pages

First published in Spanish by Alfaguara in Madrid in 1993

My paperback edition (translated by Sonia Soto) was issued in 1996 by The Harvill Press

Filmed as 'The Ninth Gate' starring Johnny Depp and directed by Roman Polanski.

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God