The Club Dumas

The Book: The Club Dumas, by Arturo Perez-Reverte

The Blurb: Lucas Corso is a book detective, a middle-aged mercenary hired to hunt down rare editions for wealthy and unscrupulous clients. When a well-known bibliophile is found dead, leaving behind part of the original manuscript of Alexandre Dumas's The Three Musketeers, Corso is brought in to authenticate the fragment. He is soon drawn into a swirling plot involving devil worship, occult practices, and swashbuckling derring-do among a cast of characters bearing a suspicious resemblance to those of Dumas's masterpiece. Aided by a mysterious beauty named for a Conan Doyle heroine, Corso travels from Madrid to Toledo to Paris on the killer's trail in this twisty intellectual romp through the book world.

The Review: The book was better. We’ve all heard this and it’s usually true. It’s why one of my guilty pleasures is reading source material after seeing a movie. The Club Dumas, however, swims in exposition veiled as conversation to move the hero, Lucas Corso, on his task to authenticate a demonic tome. Literally pages describing the history of book making. So the devil’s in the details for both protagonist and reader. Yet although I found myself skipping over chunks of, in my eyes, boring details the book kept me interested enough to finish it. Was the movie better this round? Possibly.

Next on Nolan’s To Be Read Shelf: As You Wish: Inconceivable tales from the making of The Princess Bride, by Carey Elwes