acclaim for Arturo Perez-Reverte’s
The Club Dumas
“Perez-Reverte has... improved on the detective story, taking the often predictable formula and con-voluting it with delicious material about eclectic aspects of the literary world.”
—Los Angeles Times
“The action parallels the design of 19th-century serial-adventures such as The Three Musketeers, in which crisis after crisis explodes like a string of firecrackers. The Club Dumas rises above the level of the formulaic thriller.”
—Boston Globe
“Mystery addicts who believe that the genre has certain rules of fair play will be infuriated by Mr. Perez- Reverte’s gothic eccentricities. Readers with a taste for Dumas and demonology will enjoy his devious inventions.”
—Atlantic Monthly
“Among the pleasures of The Club Dumas is the intimate sense it conveys of this highly specialized type of commerce... An intelligent and delightful novel.”
—Margot Livesey,
The New York Times Book Review
“Suspense-filled and ingenious ... a witty meditation on the relationship between book lovers and the texts they adore.”
—Publishers Weekly
“The richly reported book trade, the European landscape, and the inventive plot provide much to recommend in this murky tale, which drips with atmosphere.”
—San Jose Mercury News
“Tightly crafted and entertaining.... Filled with elaborate twists and turns, and steeped in book and literary lore, it’s bound to be a bibliophile’s delight.”
—Denver Post
“Puzzles and secrets of the occult are the driving forces behind this tale, and Perez-Reverte pulls it all together with elegance.”
—Chicago Tribune
“A fast-paced, joyously complex and inventive book... Prepare to be amused and amazed by this funny, bizarre set of puzzles within puzzles ... this novel is an unforgettable feast.”
—Detroit Free Press
“Fascinating ... a wonderful vehicle for speculations about the nature and range of what people want to know, might know and should know, and some cautions about trusting what you think you finally find out.”
—San Francisco Chronicle
Arturo Perez-Reverte
The Club Dumas
Arturo Perez-Reverte was born in 1951 in Cartagena. He is a television journalist who has reported on some of the world’s most dangerous crises. He is the author of two previous books, The Fencing Master and The Flanders Panel.
The Club Dumas
A Novel
Arturo Perez-Reverte
Translated from the Spanish by Sonia Soto
The flash projected the outline of the hanged man onto the wall. He hung motionless from a light fixture in the center of the room, and as the photographer moved around him, taking pictures, the flashes threw the silhouette onto a succession of paintings, glass cabinets full of porcelain, shelves of books, open curtains framing great windows beyond which the rain was falling.
The examining magistrate was a young man. His thinning hair was untidy and still damp, as was the raincoat he wore while he dictated to a clerk who sat on a sofa as he typed, his typewriter on a chair. The tapping punctuated the monotonous voice of the magistrate and the whispered comments of the policemen who were moving about the room.
“... wearing pajamas and a robe. The cord of the robe was the cause of death by hanging. The deceased has his hands bound in front of him with a tie. On his left foot he is still wearing one of his slippers, the other foot is bare....”
The magistrate touched the slippered foot of the dead man, and the body turned slightly, slowly, at the end of the taut silk cord that ran from its neck to the light fixture on the ceiling. The body moved from left to right, then back again, until it came gradually to a stop in its original position, like the needle of a compass reverting to north. As the magistrate moved away, he turned sideways to avoid a uniformed policeman who was searching for fingerprints beneath the corpse. There was a broken vase on the floor and a book open at a page covered with red pencil marks. The book was an old copy of The Vicomte de Brage-lonne, a cheap edition bound in cloth Leaning over the policeman’s shoulder, the magistrate glanced at the underlined sentences:
“They have betrayed me,” he murmured.
“All is known!” “All is known at last,” answered Porthos, who knew nothing.
He made the clerk write this down and ordered that the book be included in the report Then he went to join a tall man who stood smoking by one of the open windows.
“What do you think?” he asked.
The tall man wore his police badge fastened to a pocket of his leather jacket Before answering, he took time to finish his cigarette, then threw it over his shoulder and out the window without looking.
“If it’s white and in a bottle, it tends to be milk,”he answered, cryptically, at last, but not so cryptically that the magistrate didn’t smile slightly.
Unlike the policeman, he was looking out into the street, where it was still raining hard. Somebody opened a door on the other side of the room, and a gust of air splashed drops of water into his face.
“Shut the door,” he ordered without turning around. Then he spoke to the policeman. “Sometimes homicide disguises itself as suicide.”
“And vice versa,” the other man pointed out calmly.
“What do you think of the hands and tie?”
“Sometimes they’re afraid they’ll change their minds at the last minute ...If it was homicide, he’d have had them tied behind him.”
“It makes no difference,”objected the magistrate. “It’s a strong, thin cord. Once he lost his footing, he wouldn’t have a chance, even with his hands free.”
“Anything’s possible. The autopsy will tell us more.”
The magistrate glanced once more at the corpse. The policeman searching for fingerprints stood up with the book.
