Product Description

In the world of rare books everything has its price. But when the book is a satanic tract, the currency is not money but life. A well-know bibliophile is found hanged days after selling a rare manuscript of Alexander Dumas's classic, The Three Musketeers. Across Madrid, Spain's wealthiest book dealer has finally laid his hands on a 17th-century manual for summoning the devil. Lucas Corso, solitary and obsessive, is the detective hired to authenticate both texts. But the further he follows the trail of devil worship, the more it leads him back to Dumas. He's the unwitting protagonist in someone's evil plot, but is he sleuth or hero, Sherlock Holmes or d'Artagnan?

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #76225 in Books
• Published on: 1997-06-05
• Original language: Spanish
• Binding: Paperback
• 336 pages

Michael Kerrigan, Scotsman
‘A dizzyingly complicated, dazzlingly allusive, breathlessly exciting novel of adventure and detection’

New Yorker
'Even a reader armed with a Latin dictionary and a copy of The Three Musketeers cannot anticipate the thrilling twists of this Escher-like mystery’

About the Author
Arturo Perez-Reverte was born in Cartagena in 1951. Since the publication of The Fencing Master, his first novel, Perez-Reverte has become one of Europe's bestselling authors. The Flanders Panel was awarded the Grand Prix Annuel de Litterature Policiere in France. His novel The Dumas Club has been made into the film The Ninth Gate by Roman Polanski and starring Johnny Depp.

Customer Reviews

Occult and literary plot twists and turns
This novel which features two intertwined story threads, one regarding a Dumas manuscript and the other the quest to authenticate a satanic text kept me guessing to the end. Perez-Reverte skillfully combines fact and fiction to create a convincing world where fabled books such as the Delomalenicon (like HP Lovecrafts' Necronomicon) are real and the boundaries of reality and fantasy become blurred. Buy it, you wont be able to put it down.

Quality
I loved this book.

I am a fan of mystery and intrigue, and this book is nothing but! About the world of antique books and the lengths some will go to get their hands on them, it starts as a mystery and descends into devilry and murder.
It is the story of a man hired to find the only three known copies of a 16th century book on Satanism for which the author was burned alive. His client wants the books, he just wants his money. But as events unfold, things suddenly don’t seem as black and white as he first thought. More and more the puzzle points to the long dead author Alexander Dumas, author of The Three Musketeers. How is his work related? And what does it have to do with a well-known book collector, found hanged days earlier...

Quality stuff!

Making antiquarian books exciting? Here's how.
Five stars without hesitation. This is a true, break-neck speed, thriller somewhat in the flavour of The Thirty-Nine Steps. In fact, if you dig deep enough there are other parallels. Set in the scholastic and obsessive world of antique book collections, Perez-Reverte manages to infuse his writing, and his characters, with a infectious passion for the literary classics. In Lucas Corso we find a typically Perez-Revertine lead (a modest and withdrawn existential hero of curious yet fanatical habits - a man living in the past) struggling with familiar themes of murder, intregue, and especially, conspiracy. Naturally this is a conspiracy bound-up with at least one feme fatal. Here the plot surrounds Corso's expertese in authenticating collectable antique publications, one of which is an Alexandre Dumas manuscript. The other text is similarly old, similarly precious work - the demonic 'Nine Gates to the Kingdom of Shadows', a text that cost it's author his life and possibly even his soul. It is these two strands that come together so potently in this book as members of the mysterious 'Dumas Club' and collectors of the occult become indistinguishable as Corso is pursued across Europe leaving a trail of corpses in their wake. Such pressure is always required to draw-out Perez-Revertes's characters' true natures - and here some of Corso's more dubious character traits emerge, leaving as ambiguous but believeable a human-being as you will find in modern fiction. However, it is the technique of the classic mystery/thriller that makes this such an extrodinary exciting read. Sadly it is one that is absent from the feature film - directed by Roman Polanski and staring Johnny Depp - The Nine Gates. So my advice is both to read this book, and to read it first: since, of the two strands of the novel, Polanski takes only the occult (cheerfully removing characters, rearranging plotlines) and shamefully makes Corso an American purely for the benefit of americans. The result is a rather formulaic occult-horror flick that co-stars his wife. Enjoy the book first and you'll find the film receives an added dimention as a result.