A Study in Understatement

I had never read [Dante] at all until my second year at university. But there was a course called Dante's inferno and it sounded kind of cool--and I'm Jewish and we don't believe in hell so I suppose that was intriguing. As soon as I started reading it I just wanted to know more. I was hooked."

That's Matthew Pearl, talking about The Dante Club, his debut thriller from last year. It's set in 1865, when a group of Harvard intelligentsia are polishing Longfellow's translation of the Divine Comedy and find themselves confronted by a series of murders ripped out of the pages of the Inferno.

Me, I'm sorta curious, given that the investigating policeman is named Nicholas Rey, if Pearl's a film buff as well...