Famous figures make cameos in Pearl's debut novel

'The Dante Club' captures avid readers with 'investigative skills, engaging plot'

Almost a century before the Fantastic Four and the Justice League of America, when trouble brewed along the gaslight lit streets in 1865 Boston, hope was in the hands of an intellectual fellowship of poets, doctors, publishers and professors known as the Dante Club.

Such is the conceit of Matthew Pearl's debut novel "The Dante Club," recently released in paperback. Real-life poets Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and James Russell Lowell, writer and doctor Oliver Wendell Holmes and publisher J.T. Fields combine powers to usher in the first American translation of Dante Alighieri's "Inferno." Until then, the Italian poet and his famous epic poem about a journey of spiritual absolution through hell were unknown to the American masses.

So we have the historical aspect of the novel. And the fictional aspect, you ask? It turns out that Pearl casts the brains of these four thinkers against the merciless brawn of a mysterious serial killer prowling the metropolis of post-Civil War Boston. What catches the attention of this group is that the murders are meticulously based on those punishments that Dante doles out for the sinners in his poem.

Fitting with a poem based on a journey through the circles of hell, the murders are executed with the kind of gruesomeness reserved for the cinema of Hollywood or the fiction of Stephen King. A judge who refused to cast a vote on the Fugitive Slave Act is punished in the same way Dante punishes the neutrals in his fictive hell: his corpse is found on sandy ground next to a blank banner, suppurating wounds engorged with maggots, flies and wasps.

Like most good whodunit murder mysteries, there are many potential suspects who would use Dante's poetry to exact violence upon Boston. Irate Italian professors jealous of their national treasure, scholastically suffering students, Boston detectives, suppressive university department heads and mischievous thieves — all are suspect. Ralph Waldo Emerson and Nathaniel Hawthorne make brief appearances as well, though thankfully not as murder suspects or victims.

However, for all the leniencies Pearl takes with history, "The Dante Club" is an engrossing and thoroughly entertaining read. There's something both awkward and awesome as you read the investigative skills of the Dante Club (who call it upon themselves to find the murderer). You'll know what I mean when you come across a passage where a famous poet fires a gun at a fleeting suspect and gives chase. Who knew men of letters could be so damn cool?

Perhaps the greatest effect of reading "The Dante Club" is not the engaging plot, the gruesome Dante-esque murders or the complex effect of reading about intellectuals following in the footsteps of Sherlock Holmes, but rather the novel's appreciation for the source work on which it is inspired.

While I feel there will be no sequel to this work — unless a killer pops up modeling punishments on Dante's "Purgatorio" or blessings in his "Paradiso" (and really, where's the fun in that?) — at least Pearl sends us on our way with a curiosity for, or at least a better appreciation of, Dante's poetry..