By ARTURO PÉREZ-REVERTE (Harper; 1993/96)

Am I wrong for admitting I didn’t much like THE CLUB DUMAS?  It was widely admired back in the nineties (when it was adapted into the lackluster Roman Polanski film THE NINTH GATE), and is still highly revered, having led to a prolific English language publishing career for Spain’s Arturo Peréz-Reverte (who initially refused to have his writing translated into any language other than French).  My problems with the book may be due to a subpar English translation by Sonia Soto, or perhaps the overtly literary veneer, which, in a not-at-all-unusual occurrence, evidently seduced quite a few readers and critics into believing the book offers more riches than it actually contains.

Spanish book dealer Corso, who is not incidentally a reckless asshole, is contracted to authenticate ANJOU WINE, an alleged lost chapter from THE THREE MUSKETEERS.  Much is made of that novel’s long-deceased author Alexander Dumas (including the possibility that he might have been a Satanist) in a highly involved subplot that provides the book’s title yet adds very little overall.  The main portion concerns another assignment: the legitimization of an ancient tome called OF THE NINE DOORS TO THE KINGDOM OF SHADOWS, three copies of which (two of them forgeries) are known to exist.

Corso’s odyssey, which takes place largely in Paris, involves a mysterious female companion who travels with Corso from Spain to France, and acts as a combination guardian angel-sex partner (a character who, in an almost unheard-of occurrence, was more concretely fleshed out in the film adaptation).  Multiple murders, patterned on passages from THE THREE MUSKETEERS, occur as Corso is let in on the NINE DOORS’ alleged satanic properties—it apparently contains instructions for summoning the Devil, albeit only in the legitimate, non-forged version.  Corso’s challenge, upon finding the three copies, is to sort out what portions of the text are genuine, a task complicated by the fact that there’s an unseen someone on his trail who (it seems) is also looking to track down, and possibly destroy all trace of, THE NINE DOORS.

This intellectually-grounded narrative refrains from exploitation and cheap thrills.  That’s unfortunate, as I’d have preferred exploitation to the lengthy dissertations on Dumas, a chapter on the hows and whys of forging a centuries-old manuscript, another on a role-playing game in which Corso attempts to figure out how Napoleon might have won the battle of Waterloo, and the many, many excess literary references (Jacques Cazotte’s DEVIL IN LOVE in particular).  We also get plenty of detail about the satanic properties of THE NINE DOORS, and illustrated depictions of its pertinent engravings.

All this is tied into a mystery that I found only marginally satisfying.  The talk-heavy intellectual bent makes for an extremely leisurely narrative with too many detours, and matters certainly aren’t helped by the lackluster denouement, which solves the mystery yet still feels curiously open-ended.  I’ll give this novel credit for uniqueness, it being a rare, and possibly sole, supernatural thriller that pivots on book collecting, but to these eyes it read like an uneasy mixture of Umberto Eco and Dan Brown.