Matthew Pearl, The Dante Club

The Dante Club is a great story of murder and intrigue set in Boston and Cambridge at the close of the Civil War. It features literary greats Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, James Russell Lowell, and Oliver Wendell Holmes, among others, and creates a fascinating world in which the world of Dante's Divine Comedy comes alive.

Dante's classic work of poetry has gone largely unnoticed in the United States, and the legendary poet Longfellow sets out to change that by completing a translation of Dante's poem into English. For this task, he gathers a group of scholars and Dante lovers around him, "the Dante club," which includes Lowell, Holmes, publisher J. T. Fields, and George Washington Green. As they methodically work through the cantos of Dante's journey through hell, first one murder, then two more pop up with some very odd features. And only the Dante club members can recognize the common links. Each murder enacts a punishment from Dante's hell: a judge is eaten with maggots, a priest is buried alive with his feet set on fire, a businessman is splayed alive. So the club must try to figure out who would know about Dante and be strategically choosing these people for their punishments. Meanwhile, the Harvard Corporation has given increasing attention to the new interest in Dante, and August Manning, the head of the board, is concerned about giving attention to foreign poetry instead of American literature. So the Corporation is focusing attention on discouraging the publication of Dante's work and the study of it in classes. And the Dante Club members come to realize that the killer, whom they have labeled "Lucifer," has been committing the murders at the same pace as their work on the various cantos of Dante's work, and they begin to realize that the murders are being committed to defend Dante, and thus also to defend their work.

The men discover that Dan Teal, an assistant at the publishing house and also a janitor at Harvard, has just the right information and opportunity, and that this Civil War vet is the one behind the murders. With the help of Detective Nicholas Rey, the Club is set on a chase through Boston and Cambridge, trying to prevent more murders, and also to save themselves from falling victim to his plot. In a chase that goes from the underground slave tunnels to the frozen lake, Longfellow, Lowell, and Holmes track down Lucifer and prevent any more punishments.

Pearl has written a great piece of fiction. But he is also a Dante expert, and it is there that the book gains depth. He helps illumine Dante and his work by setting this great mystery in the Civil War era, helping to illumine the parallels between nineteenth-century America and thirteenth-century Italy, with Dante disillusioned by civil war and pervasive death in the world around him. Pearl also helps give a sense of how Dante not only peopled hell with classical figures from past literature and myth but also with his own countrymen, on both sides of the conflict, to show the futility of the battles and the pervasiveness of wrongdoing. I was many times driven back to Dante to look over his colorful journey, all the while enjoying a good murder mystery with some colorful and interesting characters. Well worth reading.