Book Review: The Club Dumas by Arturo Perez-Reverte

It's the middle of the night when your contact phones. He has selected a particularly out of the way, perhaps a little too out of the way, site. Carefully you prepare yourself to sneak out to your clandestine meeting, ensuring you have to hand the resources supplied by your client. Twice you suspect someone has tailed you to the rendezvous, but you know that can't be possible. Who could be on to you? Only your client and the contact know about this so unless one of them are playing a double game, there shouldn't be anyone there. You're jumping at shadows you tell yourself.

He's exactly where he says he would be, a small shop on the Left Bank in Paris specializing in the kind of antiquities for which people like your client would pay a fortune. For 15 badly hand-written pages of foolscap that has seen better days, you hand over the agreed amount and scurry off into the night with the papers secreted in the depths of your bag. The adrenaline is only now starting to dissipate as you have yet again negotiated the paths needed to walk through the mysteries of the antiquarian book world. You won't breathe easily until you've handed the pages of manuscript to your client, but the worst is over now. The buy has been successfully negotiated.

If you've never thought of the world of antiquarian books as being something that could inspire passion, betrayal, and even murder, The Club Dumas by Arturo Perez-Reverte will open the casket lid on a hither-to unknown world of skullduggery, academia, bibliophiles, and mystery. You will be drawn into a world full of arcane knowledge relating to authorship, bindings, publications, engravings, and forgery that is the backdrop for one of the finest literary mysteries ever written.

The story revolves around Lucas Corso, a book detective for hire. His clients, the rich, famous and infamous, hire him to track down rare titles, investigate a manuscript's provenance, or to act as the intermediary in a sale. His only loyalties are to the books and the money he is paid by his client to procure them. Like all good mercenaries he could one day be working for you, aiding your efforts to buy a rare second printing with a misspelling, and the next you'll find he has been there an hour before you securing the rights to first refusal for an estate sale of books.

Article Author: Richard Marcus

Richard Marcus is the author of the What Will Happen In Eragon IV? and The Unofficial Heroes Of Olympus Companion, both published and commissioned by Ulysses Press. He has had his work published in print and online all over the world including the …

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