The Club Dumas

Arturo Pérez-Reverte's great novel that paved the way for the international success of thrillers inspired by the world of books

Can a book be investigated by the police as if it were a crime, using its pages, paper, engravings, and printing marks as clues, in a thrilling three-century journey?

Lucas Corso, a mercenary of bibliophilia, a book hunter for hire, must find an answer to that question when he receives a double commission from his clients: to authenticate a manuscript of The Three Musketeers and to decipher the enigma of a strange book, burned in 1667 with the man who printed it.

The investigation drags Corso — and with him, irremediably, the reader — into a dangerous search that will take him from the archives of the Holy Office to condemned books, from dusty old bookstores to the most select libraries of international collectors.

Constructed with exceptional narrative talent, The Club Dumas meticulously and complexly sets up an exciting plot, where the ingredients of the classic serialized novel, detective and mystery stories, guessing games, and the techniques of adventure feuilleton come together.

This novel was adapted into a film by director Roman Polanski with the title The Ninth Gate.

Critics have said...
«A true thriller, a wonderfully complex plot.»
The New York Times Book Review

«Between The Name of the Rose, role-playing games, and Agatha Christie.»
L'Express

«There is a Spanish writer who resembles the best of Spielberg plus Umberto Eco. His name is Arturo Pérez-Reverte.»
La Repubblica

«Not even the most astute reader could anticipate the electrifying surprises of this mystery as elegant as an Escher.»
The New Yorker

«The Spaniard Pérez-Reverte gallantly walks in the footsteps of the great Alexandre Dumas, juggling characters, multiplying false clues and intriguing mysteries.»
Bertrand Audusse, Le Monde