ENAPAPER
Literary murder
PRADEEP SEBASTIAN
NETRA SHYAM
HERE'S how you spot a literary mystery: The Dante Club (2003) by Mathew Pearl: in which four renowned American poets track down a serial killer in Boston at the turn of the century. The killer models the deaths of his victims after Dante's "Inferno".
The Grand Complication (2002) by Allen Kurzweil: in which a stylish young reference librarian of arcane interests is hired by a rich bibliophile to hunt down a rare book. People have died trying to find this book.
The Lecturer's Tale (2001) by James Hynes: in which an adjunct lecturer at a prestigious American university finds himself investigating a series of bizarre deaths linked to the English Department. The department has gone to war over literary theory and there are those who will kill to defend Derrida.
The Club Dumas (1993) by Arturo Perez Reverte: in which a book detective searches for a secret society of antiquarians who can lead him to a rare book of satanic lore. Only one copy of The Book of the Nine Doors to the Kingdom of Darkness has survived — whoever finds it will supposedly discover the secret to summoning the Devil.
The Name of the Rose (1980) by Umberto Eco: in which several monks in a medieval monastery are murdered because of a forbidden book stashed away in a secret hiding place in the library. Only Brother William of Baskerville, a Benedictine Monk with experience in such matters, can solve the case and find the diabolical killer who poisons the pages of books.
It's obvious what all these books have in common — books. Or the world of books — libraries, universities, antiquarian bookshops, book collectors, scholars, librarians, bibliomanes. The literary thriller is a double treat for book lovers: you get to curl up with a sophisticated thriller and a book about books. It began, of course, with Eco's The Name of the Rose. The first contemporary literary mystery that kicked off a trend. Eco's marvellously inventive and erudite novel lead to the historical mystery, the academic mystery, and the literary mystery — three sub-genres of the literary thriller.
Of these the most delightful and the rarest is the literary mystery, which usually features a detective who is knowledgeable about books in a series set against a background of bookshops, book collectors and rare books. There are only a handful of such mystery series, none better than those written by John Dunning, who actually owns and runs an out of print bookstore. His Booked to Die and The Bookman's Wake feature Cliff Janeway, a cop turned bookman. Having taken early retirement, he runs a second-hand bookstore. People from his past who know he was once a cop come to him with cases dealing with rare books and murder. You'd never realise there would be so much fraud and violence in the booksellers' world! His mysteries are precious for the fascinating glimpse they offer into the world of rare book collecting. The murder investigation is usually interspersed with booklore: publishing arcana, tidbits on first edition prices, eccentric book traders and book scouts (they hunt books for you). His mysteries are virtual primers on how to open a second hand bookstore, spot a first edition, warehouse it, price it, and enjoy it for its own sake.
No literary thriller to date has equalled Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose. The first still remains the best (he must, must write a sequel — the book is begging for it) but if in recent times a book has come close to The Name of the Rose, it is Mathew Pearl's The Dante Club. In the ingenious new literary mystery, someone with intimate knowledge of The Divine Comedy appears to be staging murders that mirror the punishments of Dante's "Inferno". Working on a vast canvas, Pearl keeps this mystery sparkling with erudition. The tension is more cerebral than visceral but this is still a most inventive page-turner. Eco confirmed the enduring fascination that the gothic frisson of the Middle Ages still holds for modern readers. In 1865, a group of America's eminent men of letters, the Harvard scholars Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, James Russell Lowell, Oliver Wendell Holmes and their publisher, J.T. Fields meet and undertake to complete the first American translation of Dante. This much is historical fact. But in Pearl's version of their story, it soon becomes clear to the Dante Club that their translation faces graver opposition, from a murderer trying to taint Dante's name by ingeniously visiting the Inferno's punishments on Boston's public figures. Unlike Eco, he doesn't abandon his mystery for pages of historical background, but incorporates Dante's biography and work into the action, as his characters hunt around Boston in search of literary clues and horribly maimed corpses.
A prodigiously gifted writer, Pearl, still in his twenties, is a Dante scholar. Pearl's heroes are charmingly eccentric. James Russell Lowell smokes cigars while bathing and reaches for his rifle at slight provocation. The compulsive but kind-hearted narcissist Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. writes as much for profit as for inspiration. The club leader, stoic Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, does not sleep at night. In addition to the Pickwick-like central cast, cultural celebrities Louis Agassiz, Ralph Waldo
Emerson and Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. figure in this highbrow adventure that melds scholarship with mystery.pradeepsebastian@hotmail.com
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