Review: "The Taking of Jemima Boone," Matthew Pearl

By Paul Carrier

In the summer of 1776, mere days after the adoption of the Declaration of Independence, 13-year-old Jemima Boone and two of her friends, sisters Betsy and Fanny Callaway, were abducted near their Kentucky home by Shawnee and Cherokee Indians.

If one of those names sounds familiar, it’s because it is. Jemima Boone was the daughter of Daniel Boone, founder of the frontier settlement of Boonesboro, where the Boone family lived at that time with a small group of fellow settlers.

Matthew Pearl, a celebrated author of historical fiction, documents the kidnappings and their aftermath in The Taking of Jemima Boone, a nonfiction look at the turmoil that engulfed Engish-speaking settlements west of the Appalachian Mountains in a contentious era.

We tend to think of westward expansion as the 19th century clash between Americans and Indigenous tribes "out west." But in the 1770s, Kentucky was the frontier, making it a flash point between Indians and settlers. Violent clashes were a fact of life there in 1776, and in the years that followed.

Pearl describes the abductions, the forced march toward Shawnee lands and the pursuit by Daniel Boone and his men with a dramatic flair and an eye for telling anecdotes. But most of the book focuses on subsequent events, as our attention shifts from the kidnappings to later conflicts between settlers and Indigenous people.

While the Declaration of Independence pitted British and American forces against one another as the Revolutionary War intensified, Indigenous leaders in Kentucky had other priorities. They struggled to retain or reclaim ancestral homelands threatened by American settlements. Some Natives allied with the British, who encouraged Indigenous warfare against pro-independence settlers.

Indians and settlers had widely varying relationships in that era, sometimes acting as sworn enemies but also, in other cases, as allies and even marriage partners. With the passage of time, however, Indigenous opposition to American settlements in Kentucky grew. There were so many Indian attacks in 1777, Pearl writes, that it came to be known as “the year of the bloody sevens.”

It didn't help that Americans could be sickeningly cruel in their dealings with Indians. Vicious murders of blameless Indians were not unheard of. In one notorious case, Cornstalk, a Shawnee chief known for his tolerant attitude toward settlers, was murdered together with his son and another Indian while on a diplomatic mission to an American fort in 1777. Cornstalk’s murder lifted the restraints that had constrained more aggressive Shawnee, including a war chief named Blackfish.

With British support, Blackfish assembled an army of some 400 men in 1778, to convince the grossly outnumbered Boonesboro settlers to surrender or face annihilation. The two sides negotiated a peace treaty under which the Indians agreed to withdraw and the Americans promised to abandon the fort and turn themselves in to the British at Fort Detroit.

But for reasons that remain unclear, one side or the other — or perhaps both at once — opened fire and, as Pearl writes, “everything fell apart.” The siege of Boonesboro had begun. It dragged on for days, as Pearl chronicles in riveting detail.

Boone and his small settlement survived the ordeal, but he could not rest on his laurels. A resentful adversary quickly accused him of treason, forcing Boone to endure a court-martial at a nearby fort. A militia captain at the time, Boone was acquitted and promoted to major, further burnishing his legacy.

Jemima Boone resurfaces throughout the book that bears her name, a devoted daughter who returned to Boonesboro and eventually participated with her father in defending the fort during the 1778 siege.

Pearl’s subtitle may overstate Jemima’s importance by describing the girls' abductions as "the kidnap that shaped America." Still, that does not detract from this compelling examination of what is now a little-remembered but mesmerizing slice of 18th-century life. And to Pearl’s credit, there is nary a mention of a coonskin cap anywhere in The Taking of Jemima Boone.

Review: "The Dante Chamber," Matthew Pearl

By Paul Carrier

Fifteen years ago, Matthew Pearl released his debut novel, The Dante Club, a chilling tale about a fictional series of gruesome murders in 19th-century Boston inspired by the hellish punishments in Dante’s Inferno, part of the Divine Comedy. Boston luminaries Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., and James Russell Lowell, who are working on the first American translation of the Comedy, set out to nab the killer.

Pearl has written several novels since then, all with historical settings. Now he renews his focus on Dante with The Dante Chamber, a sequel of sorts to the The Dante Club that changes the setting from Boston to London.

It’s 1869, or thereabouts, and a member of Parliament dies with a heavy stone attached to his neck, reminiscent of one of the punishments described in Purgatory, a section of the Divine Comedy. In short order, an opera singer dies as well, again in Dante-esque fashion with her eyes sewn shut.

Both deaths occur in public, and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, an eccentric, real-life British artist, poet and translator preoccupied with the medieval Italian writer, appears to have witnessed them. In Pearl’s telling, Rossetti’s Italian-born father was so obsessed with Dante that it seems to have driven him mad. His son is not far behind.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti quickly disappears following the macabre deaths, leaving no clues in his disorganized home as to whether he is a killer, a potential victim, or merely an innocent bystander who has gone off on some quirky adventure entirely unrelated to the deaths.

Several literary lights band together to find the missing artist, whose disappearance they assume is somehow linked to the apparent murders. They include the artist’s sister, poet Christina Rossetti; and fellow poets Robert Browning and Alfred Tennyson. Holmes, a poet and physician (and father of the Supreme Court justice), is traveling in Europe at the time; he plays a major role in the plot as well. The stakes grow as the death toll mounts, in each case with an obvious parallel to Dante’s masterpiece.

Pearl does a fine job of portraying Tennyson, Browning and Holmes as flesh-and-blood characters rather than mere icons, but he is especially insightful in describing the complex psyche and reclusive nature of Christina Rossetti, the youngest of four children in a famed family.

For added spice, Pearl throws in a dogged police inspector, Adolphus “Dolly” Williamson, who suspects that Dante Gabriel Rossetti is behind the macabre deaths; and Simon Camp, an unscrupulous pamphleteer and former Pinkerton detective from Boston who arrives in London convinced that the murders will prove to be a moneymaker for him.

Several of Pearl's novels have focused on literary figures, including The Last Dickens (Charles Dickens), The Last Bookaneer (Robert Louis Stevenson) and The Poe Shadow (Edgar Allan Poe). But he seems to have a particular fascination with Dante. Pearl won a prize from the Dante Society of America in 1998, several years before he released The Dante Club. And he has edited an edition of Dante’s Inferno.

It’s possible to enjoy The Dante Chamber without being a serious student of Dante and his work, but being an ardent admirer probably is a plus. Pearl allows his scholarship and his apparent devotion to Dante to get the best of him from time to time. The novel posits that Dante could have developed a quasi-religious following in the 19th century because some admirers supposedly believed that he offered a metaphysical perspective on life that would be the key to nothing less than the imminent salvation of mankind.

As Pearl points out in an author’s note, “cultlike collectives” were common on both sides of the Atlantic in the 19th century. Still, the fictional group Pearl describes in The Dante Chamber may strike some 21st-century readers as too far-fetched and esoteric to be remotely plausible, even by Victorian standards. It's goofy stuff.

Review: "The Last Dickens," Matthew Pearl

By Paul Carrier

Matthew Pearl has made something of a name for himself writing literary-themed novels. The Dante Club dealt with a series of 19th-century murders seemingly inspired by The Divine Comedy. The Poe Shadow offered a fictionalized investigation of the death of Edgar Allan Poe. And The Last Bookaneer detailed the attempted theft of Robert Louis Stevenson’s final novel before its publication.

The Last Dickens is yet another tale along such lines, this time focusing on The Mystery of Edwin Drood by Charles Dickens, who was in the process of serializing Edwin Drood when he suffered a fatal stroke on June 8, 1870. Dickens died the next day, leaving unanswered the question of whether Drood, a young man who has disappeared, has been murdered or is still alive.

As The Last Dickens opens, three of the 12 installments of Edwin Drood have been released to the author's British and American publishers. When three more installments arrive in Boston, Daniel Sand, a young clerk from Fields, Osgood & Co., Dickens' American publisher, is mysteriously run over by an "omnibus" while carrying the latest chapters from the harbor to the publishing firm.

An unscrupulous lawyer steals the papers from Sand as the clerk lies dying in the street, but a tall, hulking man sporting a turban and claiming to be named Herman later murders the lawyer and makes off with the chapters. Fields, Osgood & Co. obtains replacement copies of parts four, five and six from London, but the struggling company's future is imperiled when Dickens dies, leaving the American publisher with only six of the 12 chapters in hand.

Did Dickens finish the novel? Is the second half tucked away somewhere in England? If not, are there clues to be found there indicating how Dickens planned to resolve Drood's disappearance?

The United States and Britain have no copyright agreement, so as the available chapters are serialized in Britain, unscrupulous American publishers are free to publish here as well, undercutting Fields, Osgood & Co.  and threatening the Boston's firm's survival unless it can land an exclusive. The reading public has much at stake too. By serializing the early chapters, the phenomenally popular Dickens built up feverish interest in the outcome. His untimely death at 58 leaves desperate readers hanging midway through Edwin Drood.

James Fields, the real-life senior partner in the 19th-century publishing house, dispatches James Osgood, the firm's actual junior partner, to England to ferret out the remaining six parts of Edwin Drood, or at least learn how Dickens intended to wrap things up. Osgood takes along company clerk Rebecca Sand, sister of Daniel Sand, to help with the research.

Pearl works in a set of subplots that add more spice to his already lively tale. They involve an opium theft in Bengal that is being investigated by a police unit headed by Dickens’ son, lengthy flashbacks to Dickens’ 1867-68 visit to the United States, a deranged Boston fan of the author, a budding romance between Osgood and Sand, and a vengeful U.S. Treasury Department agent determined to illegally collect taxes on the profits from Dickens’ U.S. tour. Even the impeachment of President Andrew Johnson figures in the plot.

The sections of The Last Dickens set during Dickens’ second and final U.S. tour are especially compelling. The famed genius comes to life as a bit of a scamp, a genial, bubbling mix of wit, charm, energy and neuroses.

The novel “aims to portray Charles Dickens and the atmosphere surrounding his life and death as accurately as possible,” Pearl writes in an author’s note. Dickens’ “language, behavior, and personality as they appear in this novel incorporate many actual conversations and actions.”

The Last Dickens skates its way through a dizzying number of dramatic twists and turns that repeatedly leave the reader desperate to learn what happens next, only to be surprised by the answers. Seemingly tangential developments eventually dovetail with the plot, although the story line set in Bengal peters out in disappointing fashion.

Still, Pearl has concocted a thriller that builds (the Bengal detour notwithstanding) to a pulse-pounding climax. This elaborate, clever exercise in storytelling is a credit to Pearl's vivid imagination and generally skillful plotting.

Review: "The Poe Shadow," Matthew Pearl

By Paul Carrier

The facts surrounding Edgar Allan Poe’s death, on Oct. 7, 1849, at the age of 40, were a mystery at the time. They remain so today.

Ostensibly en route from Virginia to New York with a stop in Philadelphia, Poe was inexplicably found in a delirious state at Ryan’s Tavern in Baltimore on Oct. 3, wearing someone else’s clothes. Hospitalized in that city, he was agitated and incoherent, calling out over and over again for someone named Reynolds before he died. A death certificate has not been found. The cause of Poe's death remains the subject of conjecture.
 

Why did Poe end up in Baltimore? What accounts for his sorry state when he materialized at Ryan’s Tavern? How can we explain what Matthew Pearl describes as “one of literary history's most persistent gaps,” the five days preceding Poe’s arrival at the tavern?

It is that mystery that Pearl attempts to unravel in The Poe Shadow, a novel.

Quentin Clark, a young lawyer from Baltimore and an obsessive fan of Poe’s work, stumbles upon his poorly attended burial in a local cemetery. Appalled by speculative newspaper accounts of Poe’s death that attribute it to drunkenness and dissolute living, Clark sets out to set the record straight, convinced as he is that Poe’s reputation is being unfairly tarnished by irresponsible journalists.

Clark believes he’s on an all-important mission, despite the disapproval of his law partner, two of Poe’s cousins living in Baltimore, and the family of his fiancée. Having corresponded with Poe near the end of the author’s life, Clark had vowed to defend the writer against libelous assaults as Poe worked to launch a literary magazine to be dubbed The Stylus. Poe died before the journal ever saw the light of day, but Clark insists his promise to represent Poe requires that he try to restore the author’s good name.

Initially, Clark struggles to solve the puzzle of Poe’s last days on his own, but without success. When a newspaper story claims that C. Auguste Dupin, a brilliant fictional detective created by Poe, supposedly is modeled on a real-life crime fighter in Paris, Clark sets out in search of Auguste Duponte, whom he believes to be the inspiration for Poe’s Dupin. If Dupin has a real-life counterpart, Clark hopes to solicit his help in ferreting out the facts surrounding Poe’s demise.

Convoluted complications ensue, of course, making The Poe Shadow yet another page-turner from Pearl. Once in Paris, Clark finds Duponte, only to learn that another man, Baron C. A. Dupin, claims Poe's creation is based on his life. Duponte and Dupin find their way to Baltimore, each determined to beat his competitor in ferreting out the truth of Poe’s demise.

Pearl, who conducted extensive research for his novel, rejects the claim that Poe was a notorious alcoholic whose excessive drinking caused his death. The author contends, both in the novel and in interviews, that although Poe did consume alcohol, he had such a low tolerance for it that he rarely went on binges.

Poe “clearly could not handle even a small amount of alcohol,” Pearl said in a 2006 interview with litkicks.com. “This does not mean there were not times when he actively drank too much; he admitted he did, but the idea of Poe as Bohemian drunk, as a pre-Jim Morrison, seems to me all wrong.”

In which case, Pearl (and Clark) argue, there must be some other explanation for Poe's untimely end.

Pearl is a master of frequent and surprising plot shifts, sometimes involving extravagant, melodramatic developments. There are more twists and turns here than on a country road in rural New England. The Poe Shadow races along at a dizzying clip, leaving the reader turning the pages as quickly as possible to discover what happens next.

The Poe Shadow is the second in a series of literary-themed novels by Pearl, the first of which was The Dante Club. Others deal with Robert Louis Stevenson (The Last Bookaneer) and Charles Dickens (The Last Dickens). Another work of historical fiction, The Technologists, is a thriller set in 19th-century Boston, but without the famous author tie-in found in much of Pearl’s work.

Review: "The Dante Club," Matthew Pearl

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.

Review: "The Last Bookaneer," Matthew Pearl

By Paul Carrier

Bookaneer. No, it isn’t a misspelling of buccaneer, although it is a play on that word, referring as it does to a specialized type of pirate who performs his (or her) dastardly deeds on the periphery of the publishing world, rather than on the high seas.

In The Last Bookaneer, Matthew Pearl’s protagonists are swashbuckling 19th-century thieves who steal the newly completed manuscripts or printers’ proofs of popular authors and sell them for a handsome price to unscrupulous publishers who then rush them into print.

This lucrative criminal activity is highly profitable because there is no global copyright treaty; copyright laws only apply in the nations that enact them. Thus, a British author’s stolen works can be legally published without the writer’s consent in the United States, for example, just as an American writer’s book can make it into print without authorization in Great Britain.

As the novel opens in 1890, this glaring legal loophole is about to be closed by a new international copyright agreement, signaling the eventual demise of bookaneering. Its greatest surviving practitioners, Pen Davenport and a rarely seen competitor who goes by the name of Belial, square off to complete one last “mission,” by stealing the final novel of a dying Robert Louis Stevenson as soon as he finishes writing it.

Stevenson and his family are holed up on an estate on the Samoan island of Upolu, where Davenport and Belial ingratiate themselves, the former disguised as a travel writer and the latter as a missionary. Stevenson is fooled by their false identities, but he seems to be writing in fits and starts, raising questions about when — or if — he will complete his final masterpiece.

The legendary author is memorably portrayed here. Tall, lanky, alternately domineering and genteel, sickly but strong-willed, Stevenson reigns over his estate and its many Samoan servants, “a white genius making his life among island natives as a sort of king or chief.” Stevenson goes by the Samoan name Tusitala (Teller of Tales) and is so “entirely singular,” one character observes in The Last Bookaneer, “that learning more about him became a way of trying to prove to yourself he is of the same species.”

Stevenson did, in fact, buy land in Upolu in the late 19th century. He created an estate there, and dubbed himself Tusitala. As in Pearl’s novel, he became involved in local politics, advised Samoan leaders and became highly critical of the colonial powers that vied for control of Samoa. He died there in 1894, at 44, and is buried on the island.

Pearl builds suspense around the bookaneers’ dueling efforts to obtain Stevenson’s last manuscript. Although much of the plot meanders amid subplots and diversions, Pearl ultimately offers up a rollicking tale that veers off in surprising directions, until the reader finally realizes that Pearl is a delightfully deceptive storyteller. Let’s just say that, in the end, much is not what it appeared to be.

I found it difficult to come to terms with Davenport and his assistant, Edgar Fergins, at least initially. Fergins, in particular, is a very likable fellow, yet he and Davenport enjoy Stevenson’s generosity under false pretenses, with the intention of robbing the author and profiting from the sale of Stevenson’s stolen work.  Only later does one of these frauds undergo an epiphany that forces the reader to reevaluate him.

The term “bookaneer” is not in use nowadays; it's not in the online version of the Merriam-Webster dictionary. But Pearl did not make it up. In an 1837 letter that a literary magazine published under the headline "Copyright and Copywrong," British poet, author and humorist Thomas Hood wrote: “If a work be of temporary interest it shall virtually be free for any Bookaneer to avail himself of its pages and its popularity with impunity.”

Although Pearl’s bookaneers are criminals at heart, Davenport and Belial view themselves in a different light. In an impressive display of rationalization, the bookaneers convince themselves that they are disseminating works of literature to the reading public as quickly and cheaply as possible, by outsmarting selfish authors who fail to see that their writings (supposedly) belong to the masses.

The Last Bookaneer is a novel for readers intrigued by Davenport’s assessment of the power of the printed word, at least as it existed in a bygone era. “Books inspire a man to embrace the world or flee it," Davenport says. "They start wars and end them. They make the men and women who write and publish them vast fortunes, and nearly as quickly can drive them into madness and despair.”