“The Club Dumas” by Arturo Perez-Reverte – The Musketeers Revisited

With The Club Dumas Arturo Perez-Reverte dishes out yet another page-turner, following the long and twisted journey of Lucas Corso, a middle-aged book hunter whose job is to seek out the rarest of works for private collectors.

The death of a known bibliophile and the manuscript he left behind, that of the original The Three Musketeer, lead Corso to be brought in as an authenticator.

Faster than he knows it, Corso becomes embroiled in a sinister world involving cults and demon worship, a world where far too many characters appear as if they have been plucked out from Dumas' arguable magnum opus and rearranged or modern times.

When looked at on the surface, The Club Dumas appears to be your common thriller, one perhaps a notch higher than others due to it being centered in the inexhaustible world of books. However, as you begin to turn the pages it becomes apparent there are plenty of other positive factors to consider.

To begin with, the protagonist himself, Corvo, ends up being defined and described down to the tiniest of details, whether through his thoughts, actions or reactions. The other characters are certainly a handful as well, with many of them feeling rather surrealistic, sharing rather interesting similarities with many of the ones found in The Three Musketeers.

They really help turn this adventure into a rather lively one, leaving you constantly guessing as to who is going to pop out next from around the corner. Though the premise may sound just a tad ridiculous (the good kind of ridiculous, of course), the book still manages to retain an air of seriousness and importance about it, despite the countless nods and references to numerous other chef-d'oeuvres in the world of literature.

As was mentioned before, it does play a huge part in the shaping the whole of the story, and bibliophiles could hardly ask for a work which makes such numerous connections between so many books. In the end, it almost feels as if you are reading some kind of insider literature, something only you and the author are privy to knowing and understanding.

The murder mystery itself certainly doesn't lack in intrigue to offer, leading our hero on a grand chase from one country to the next, beginning in Madrid and ending in Paris.

There are more twists and turns than you can count, though fortunately few of them fall under the category of cliches; Perez-Reverte knows how to keep things fresh and interesting, even for those who care for nothing but the killer's unmasking and apprehension.

All in all, The Club Dumas is a one-of-a-kind thriller, one that would certainly be likened to ecstatic literary candy for the book lovers out there. Regardless of whether or not you consider yourself as one, the book is still more than worth reading for the murder mystery itself and even the way in which it was written.

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Arturo Pérez-Reverte Gutiérrez Arturo Perez-Reverte is a Spanish novelist and journalist born in Cartagena. He worked as a war correspondent from 1973 to 1994 and published his first novel, El husar in 1986. On June 12th 2003 he was inducted as a member of the Royal Spanish Academy.