By Paul Carrier
The Civil War has finally come to an end, and in Boston and nearby Cambridge, the public’s attention shifts from that cataclysmic conflict to a series of bizarre murders that have the police baffled.
The chief justice of Massachusetts is found naked in his yard, covered in flies, wasps and maggots and with a white flag posted near his body.
A prominent minister turns up in a burial vault beneath his church, planted head first in a hole before his feet were set ablaze. A third murder is at least as gruesome as the others. And even then, the killer has not completed his grisly work.
The monstrous nature of these crimes is beyond the ken of most of the ignorant or corrupt investigators in Matthew Pearl’s thriller The Dante Club, although Nicholas Rey, the city’s first black police officer, begins a lonely but enlightened crusade to nab the killer.
On a parallel track, poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and a small group of his friends -- the Dante Club of the title -- launch an unlikely investigation of their own when they recognize clues that the police do not comprehend.
Longfellow and his colleagues have been preparing the first full-length American translation of Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy, and they realize that the murders mimic punishments inflicted in the Inferno, one of the three parts of the Comedy. The killer — dubbed Lucifer by the literary sleuths — is borrowing from Dante to create his own hell on earth, with Boston’s elite as his victims.
The Dante Club — Longfellow, Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, poet James Russell Lowell and publisher J. T. Fields — decide they cannot reveal what they know to the police without becoming suspects themselves. They believe they must find the killer quickly, both to prevent more murders and to protect Dante’s reputation in America.
Already the Brahmin powers that be at Harvard are trying to block the translation of the Inferno, which they view as decidedly Catholic and, therefore, corrupting. If the murders are publicly linked to the Inferno, it will further the effort to demonize (pun intended) Dante and make him anathema to American readers.
On the one hand, the list of potential suspects would seem to be limited because the killer clearly has a working knowledge of the Divine Comedy, which remained largely unknown in America at the time. On the other hand, the murderer is methodical, cunning and extremely careful to avoid detection.
Could Lucifer be Pietro Bachi, an embittered Italian scholar who has lost his teaching job at Harvard? Or perhaps one of the students from Lowell’s Dante course at Harvard? The Dante Club’s search takes a chilling turn when it becomes clear that each of the killings mirrors a section of the Inferno that the club is about to finish translating. Somehow, Lucifer anticipates the club’s schedule and reacts accordingly.
Potential suspects fall by the wayside as the novel progresses and tension builds. An extremely sharp-eyed reader may pick up on one subtle clue regarding the murderer’s identity, but I missed it. So do Longfellow and the other protagonists, until they look back on events after Lucifer’s identity has finally been revealed.
Pearl’s thrilling tale is clever, complex, entertaining and revealing, using an impressive array of factual tidbits and historical context to transport readers to a convincing recreation of postbellum Boston, while also introducing us to the greatest literary figures of the age. Although the murders are fictional, the club and its scholarly work are not. Published in 1867, Longfellow’s Divine Comedy was, in fact, the first American version of Dante’s Italian-language masterpiece, and it was widely hailed.
Released in 2003, The Dante Club is the first of five historical novels by Pearl to date and, presumably, close to his heart. Pearl himself is a Dante scholar, having won the Dante Prize from the Dante Society of America in 1998. He also edited a recent edition of Dante’s Inferno, as translated by none other than Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.
The chief justice of Massachusetts is found naked in his yard, covered in flies, wasps and maggots and with a white flag posted near his body.
A prominent minister turns up in a burial vault beneath his church, planted head first in a hole before his feet were set ablaze. A third murder is at least as gruesome as the others. And even then, the killer has not completed his grisly work.
The monstrous nature of these crimes is beyond the ken of most of the ignorant or corrupt investigators in Matthew Pearl’s thriller The Dante Club, although Nicholas Rey, the city’s first black police officer, begins a lonely but enlightened crusade to nab the killer.
On a parallel track, poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and a small group of his friends -- the Dante Club of the title -- launch an unlikely investigation of their own when they recognize clues that the police do not comprehend.
Longfellow and his colleagues have been preparing the first full-length American translation of Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy, and they realize that the murders mimic punishments inflicted in the Inferno, one of the three parts of the Comedy. The killer — dubbed Lucifer by the literary sleuths — is borrowing from Dante to create his own hell on earth, with Boston’s elite as his victims.
The Dante Club — Longfellow, Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, poet James Russell Lowell and publisher J. T. Fields — decide they cannot reveal what they know to the police without becoming suspects themselves. They believe they must find the killer quickly, both to prevent more murders and to protect Dante’s reputation in America.
Already the Brahmin powers that be at Harvard are trying to block the translation of the Inferno, which they view as decidedly Catholic and, therefore, corrupting. If the murders are publicly linked to the Inferno, it will further the effort to demonize (pun intended) Dante and make him anathema to American readers.
On the one hand, the list of potential suspects would seem to be limited because the killer clearly has a working knowledge of the Divine Comedy, which remained largely unknown in America at the time. On the other hand, the murderer is methodical, cunning and extremely careful to avoid detection.
Could Lucifer be Pietro Bachi, an embittered Italian scholar who has lost his teaching job at Harvard? Or perhaps one of the students from Lowell’s Dante course at Harvard? The Dante Club’s search takes a chilling turn when it becomes clear that each of the killings mirrors a section of the Inferno that the club is about to finish translating. Somehow, Lucifer anticipates the club’s schedule and reacts accordingly.
Potential suspects fall by the wayside as the novel progresses and tension builds. An extremely sharp-eyed reader may pick up on one subtle clue regarding the murderer’s identity, but I missed it. So do Longfellow and the other protagonists, until they look back on events after Lucifer’s identity has finally been revealed.
Pearl’s thrilling tale is clever, complex, entertaining and revealing, using an impressive array of factual tidbits and historical context to transport readers to a convincing recreation of postbellum Boston, while also introducing us to the greatest literary figures of the age. Although the murders are fictional, the club and its scholarly work are not. Published in 1867, Longfellow’s Divine Comedy was, in fact, the first American version of Dante’s Italian-language masterpiece, and it was widely hailed.
Released in 2003, The Dante Club is the first of five historical novels by Pearl to date and, presumably, close to his heart. Pearl himself is a Dante scholar, having won the Dante Prize from the Dante Society of America in 1998. He also edited a recent edition of Dante’s Inferno, as translated by none other than Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.
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