What do Dante, Poe and Dickens have in common? Well, not much, except that author Matthew Pearl used the three classic authors at the focal points of three of his mysteries, "The Dante Club", "The Poe Shadow", and "The Last Dickens". Pearl’s novels are wonderful feats of literary fiction/mystery and are written in a style reminiscent of the earlier authors. Not only are the writing styles a throw back, but Pearl’s extensive research and factual accuracy makes the reader feel as if these are actual 19^th Century novels. All three novels blend fact and fiction, using real historical/literary figures.

Pearl wrote "The Dante Club" while attending Yale Law School. This in itself amazes me. I attended graduate school, and how he managed to do that and write a novel at the same time is beyond my comprehension. "The Dante Club" is an adaptation of Pearl’s 367-page undergraduate thesis from Harvard University. (Hmm, Harvard and Yale, clearly, Pearl has an exceptional intellect.)

In "The Dante Club" literary giants, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Oliver Wendell Holmes, James Russell and J. T. Fields gather in Boston for the purpose of translating Dante’s "The Divine Comedy". When a series of murders in Boston and Cambridge bear a striking resemblance to Hell’s punishments in Dante’s "Inferno", the Dante Club sets out to solve the murders. The concept for this novel alone made me want to read it.

In "The Poe Shadow" Pearl takes a historical mystery, which is what led to the death of Edgar Allan Poe, and uses fictitious characters to set about solving the mystery. The book is set in Baltimore and Paris circa 1849-1851. A young lawyer and fan of Poe, Quentin Clark becomes fixated on Poe’s death. In particular he attempts to fill in the missing five days of Poe’s life that ended in his death. The assumption by the public was that Poe died a disgraced drunkard. To salvage Poe’s reputation and discover what led to his death, Clark must find the real-life model for Poe’s fictional detective C. Auguste Dupin. This quest takes Clark to Paris and back to Baltimore as he becomes enmeshed with foreign agents, a female assassin, the slave trade and Poe’s final days. Pearl also suggests a probable explanation for Poe’s death and writes a rollicking good story.

Pearl focuses on the mystery of the ending to Charles Dickens’s unfinished novel "The Mystery of Edwin Drood" in "The Last Dickens". It is 1870 and Charles Dickens died of a stroke before he could complete "The Mystery of Edwin Drood". Dickens’s American publisher James Osgood awaits the final manuscript, which is arriving by ship from England. Before he can lay hands upon them, an omnibus at the Boston wharf tragically runs down his clerk and the pages are stolen. Osgood travels to London in an attempt to discover the ending of the novel. He becomes entangled in a number of real-life mysteries that range from Boston to London to India. "The Last Dickens" includes enough plot twists and turns and bizarre characters to make Dickens proud. In the end Pearl ties all the threads together and comes up with a possible ending to "The Mystery of Edwin Drood".

If you enjoy quality writing that evokes a sense of time and place as well as fun intellectual exercise, I urge you to read all three Matthew Pearl novels. Pearl is an exceptional writing talent.

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