Tuesday, October 23, 2012

First Sign of Murder #8: The Club Dumas


"The flash projected the outline of the hanged man onto the wall. He hung motionless from a light fixture in the center of the room, and as the photographer moved around him, taking pictures, the flashes threw the silhouette onto a succession of paintings, glass cabinets full of porcelain, shelves of books, open curtains framing great windows beyond which the rain was falling.

The examining magistrate was a young man. His thinning hair was untidy and still damp, as was the raincoat he wore while he dictated to a clerk who sat on a sofa as he typed, his typewriter on a chair. The tapping punctuated the monotonous voice of the magistrate and the whispered comments of the policemen who were moving about the room."

--- opening lines, The Club Dumas, Arturo PĂ©rez-Reverte, 1993

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