Why You Should Read Arturo Pérez-Reverte

Nick Lloyd - nlloyd.substack - 16/06/2026

This Substack is about history and historians. It has never discussed novelists or those who write fiction. The exception to this rule is the Spanish bestselling author and novelist, Arturo Pérez-Reverte. I have read most of his books (at least those which have been translated into English), and several have been read and re-read multiple times, and my favourites, well-thumbed, creased and worn, are stationed in several different rooms in my house, ensuring that I am never too far from them.

Born in Cartagena in 1951, Pérez-Reverte was a journalist and war correspondent before turning to writing full time. His first novel, 'El húsar', was published in 1986, and he has since written a string of critically acclaimed works, including 'The Fencing Master', 'The Flanders Panel', 'The Club Dumas' (usually published in the English as 'The Dumas Club'), 'The Seville Communion' and 'The Nautical Chart'. He is also the author of the swashbuckling 'Captain Alatriste' series, which was turned into a feature film in 2006, starring Viggo Mortensen as the eponymous hero. Pérez-Reverte was elected to the Royal Spanish Academy in 2003.

Pérez-Reverte’s writing is characterized by a strong sense of story-telling and narrative flow, with main characters that are both elusive and mysterious, often with a world-weariness that gives them a greater insight into the problems they encounter, such as the alcoholic book detective, Lucas Corso, in 'The Club Dumas', or Father Lorenzo Quart of 'The Seville Communion'. Both characters are brilliantly constructed. As isolated and solitary loners, they epitomize a kind of defeated masculinity; out of step with the modern world and holding onto mementos of a past that will never come again. Corso is haunted by an old relationship and gloomily toasts his ancestor that fought at Waterloo, while Quart is a reliable Vatican enforcer who clings to a strict set of monastic rules of behaviour that so many of his contemporaries, including those fellow prelates in the Catholic Church, have long since abandoned.

For Pérez-Reverte the past is everything. His interest in history (he has recently written a history of Spain), and his obvious love for classic adventure serials, infuses his work, as does his own sense of alienation from contemporary western mores. In an interview with Elena Cué in 2019, he complained that the modern world lacked ‘virtue in the Roman sense’, which he described as ‘nobility of spirit and an elegant attitude towards life, of personal dignity and courage’, which was unwanted today. ‘What’s more, when the people of today come face to face with virtue, they mock it. Up against noble people who can’t be matched, they ridicule them.’ This is why Pérez-Reverte’s characters often keep to obscure sets of codes or ways of being, old-fashioned and out-of-step, but stubbornly holding onto them because they provide a constant in an ever-changing world.

I first came across Pérez-Reverte when I watched 'The Ninth Gate' on a flight to New York. 'The Ninth Gate' was Roman Polanski’s interpretation of 'The Club Dumas', which has now become something of a cult classic and stars Johnny Depp as the main character. Polanski kept the central core of Pérez-Reverte’s novel and removed some of the supplementary plots, streamlining the narrative for the movie, which works extremely well. I stumbled upon it after getting bored on a long flight, and not quite being sure what it was, decided to give it a watch. It was a strange kind of film. It wasn’t an action movie. It wasn’t horror. It was a slow-moving thriller, not particularly violent or explicit, but with enough dark elements of witchcraft, the supernatural and devil worship, to be both unsettling and profoundly interesting.

It was only several years later that I stumbled upon 'The Club Dumas' and immediately recognized it as the book of the movie. When I started reading it, I was astounded by how good it was, how easy to was to slip into the story and the strange world of antique books that the author had created. The detail and pace, control and depth of character (brilliantly translated into English by Sonia Soto), was superior to most literary fiction I’d read, and I was hooked. Pérez-Reverte has a wonderful ability to distil down the essence of a place and its mood very quickly and effectively, with a movie-like quality that is incredibly rare. For example, Chapter 14 of 'The Club Dumas' opens with the following five sentences:

“It was a dismal night. The Loire was flowing turbulently and rising, threatening to flood the old dykes in the small town of Meung. The storm had been raging since late afternoon. Occasionally a flash of lightning lit up the black mass of the castle, and bright zigzags cracked like whips on the deserted wet pavements of the medieval town. Across the river, in the distance, amidst the wind, the rain and the leaves torn from the trees, as if the gale drew a line between the recent past and a distant present, the headlights of cars could be seen moving silently along the motorway from Tours to Orleans.”

Pérez-Reverte should be better known in both Britain and America. His writing is worth learning Spanish so that you can read him in his original language.

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