This is a sort of a short round-up of some
more bibliothrillers whose names I came across while doing a little bit of
investigation myself. This is the sort
of ‘research,’ which I call ‘pogo-jumping sniffing research’ on the Internet,
where you go from link-alley to link-alley and till you reach some
dead-end-page where you lose the scent.
I haven’t read any of these books, but would like to read at least some
of these. All these snippets about these
books are compiled from ‘here and there,’ so I wouldn’t call them
recommendations, just a descriptive list of some books that are available in what
I chose to call ‘bibliothrillers.’
Matthew Pearl, the author of The Poe Shadow (featured in Part 1
of this series!), is one writer who plays around a lot with this genre. He has written three more books – The Dante
Club, The Last Dickens, and The Bookaneers. From what I read on the Internet, The Dante
Club is Pearl’s first novel and here, we have a group of eminent writers in
1885, led by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, that includes Oliver Wendell Holmes
and James Russell Lowell. This group is
attempting the first American translation of Dante’s Divine Comedy. A series of horrific murders of high profile
people take place around that time and each murder is modelled on one of the punishments
as described in Dante’s Inferno. This
Dante link persuades these writers to turn investigators and solve the
murders.
Charles Dickens is dead and this is
1870. In The Last Dickens, A struggling
publisher in the USA is waiting for the manuscript of The Mystery of Edwin Drood,
which turns out to be Dicken’s last novel.
The publisher sends his clerk to get the manuscript, which remains
unfinished, the publication of which would save the publishing house’s
finances. The clerk is found dead near
the docks and the manuscript is missing.
This prompts a search for the missing last part across continents and
all sorts of characters who do not want the last part to be revealed use all
methods to stop this search. Some kind
of evil puppet-master is behind all this pulling strings. In The Last Bookaneer, we see Robert
Louis Stevenson, very ill, but struggling to complete his new novel. The setting is somewhere in the island of
Samoa. The news of the soon-to-be-finished
novel reaches ‘the bookaneers,’ literary pirates who steal manuscripts of well-known
writers. Two such literary pirates,
adversaries too, fuelled by dreams of making a fortune, embark on a journey and
a race to reach the island.
Louis Bayard, who wrote The Pale Blue Eye (in Part 2), too travels around a bit in
these parts. Among the historical
fiction that he has written, The School of Night is the one that
can be called a bibliothriller. The plot
involves the ‘retrieval’ of a letter by Sir Walter Raleigh in present times
that is linked to events that took place in Elizabethan England, almost four hundred
years ago. There is an elite secret group
called ‘The School of Night,’ which includes Raleigh, Marlowe, George Chapman,
and Thomas Harriot. This group meets in
secret and discusses issues that could not be discussed openly. I haven’t read any of Bayard’s novels, but
after reading about his books, I am definitely intrigued and want to pick up
one soon, maybe both.
And a few days ago, I came across the
name of Charlie Lovett. Lovett has written two novels – The Bookman’s Tale and First
Impressions. The Bookman’s Tale is about an American antiquarian bookseller,
who leaves his country and settles down in the English countryside after the
death of his wife. While looking at an
18th century book on Shakespeare, he is intrigued to find a portrait
of a woman, who looks remarkably like his wife and he goes digging and reaches
the 18th century and unearths a book that reveals some truths. First Impressions is about a Jane
Austen enthusiast who works in an antiquarian bookshop in London. An obscure publication, which suddenly
interests two different buyers, raises questions about the ‘true authorship’ of
Pride
and Prejudice.
And so, here endeth, tentatively and
temporarily, this series on bibliothrillers … and in case you, discerning
readers of this enchanting blog of mine, have come across, or read, or seen, or
heard, about more of the same kind of books, please do leave names of novels and
authors at the bottom of this page in the comments section if you please …
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