Not that I want to turn this blog into Atomic Books or the recently discovered Margaret Fisk, but lately I’ve been quite deliberately making progress through Matthew Pearl’s The Dante Club.

The title refers to an actual group of 19th-century Bostonians who gathered to translate Dante’s Inferno for an American audience. Among the members of this exclusive “club” were poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, physician Oliver Wendell Holmes, and poet James Russell Lowell. While poring over the poem, the men find themselves on the trail of a serial killer who tortures his victims in ways that seem to be taken straight out of the pages of Inferno. The police are at a loss and must rely on the club members’ unique knowledge of Dante’s work to help catch the killer. Pearl, a recognized Dante scholar, uses his expertise to create an absorbing and dramatic period piece. Using historical figures in a mystery setting is not a new idea (e.g., Sir Isaac Newton plays detective in Philip Kerr’s Dark Matter), but Pearl has proven himself a master.

It’s a quite engaging novel, and I’m about at the midway point. This was an impulse purchase during my Barnes & Noble run on Saturday, and I picked it up despite the prominent endorsement from Dan Brown on the front cover. In any case, good book that most current or former English majors would almost certainly likely enjoy.