The Abbreviated Monte Cristo

The Hand of the Dead by Alfredo Hogan (1854) La Mano del Muerto (Spanish) A Mão do Finado (Portuguese) La main du défunt by F. LePrince (French) How and when did all these 19th century rip-offs/wretched sequels get their start? Somewhere around 1854, a mysterious "new" book appeared, first in Portuguese, called A Mão do Finado , which roughly translates to The Hand of the Dead/Deceased/Dead Man. It confused a lot of people, claiming to be The Count of Monte Cristo, Part 2: The Hand of the Dead , with no author attributed. The unfortunates who read the book vented their outrage by writing to Alexandre Dumas who was still alive at the time!!! Dumas repudiated and denounced it, calling it "repulsive" and "a bad book". Eventually, the true author's name was revealed: Portuguese postal worker Alfredo Hogan, who moonlighted as a novelist and playwright. But later editions, even to the current day, credit the book as written by "...

Monte Cristo's Daughter by Edmund Flagg (1886) And... continuing the story of Zuleika and the Monte Cristo clan, we have Edmund Flagg's book, Monte Cristo's Daughter. On its own title page, the book untruthfully hypes itself as: "a wonderfully brilliant, original, exciting and absorbing novel."🤣 Read review of Book I (Flagg) To be fair, it is an improvement over Flagg's first book of the set, Edmond Dantes. The 1848 Revolution is over, and all those ho-hum Revolutionary figures are gone, and so are their political monologues. Now Flagg can get around to the Monte Cristo Family Drama, soap-opera-ish tidbits that he dropped in the last few chapters of Edmond Dantes without properly setting the scene. What's all this about a broken friendship? Scandal? A crime? An oath to silence? How did this all start? To do this, the story needs to rewind to one year prior , when Zuleika was 15, which might be 1847 (it can't be! Zuleika wo...

Edmond Dantes by Edmund Flagg (1884) There's never been any shortage of Monte-Cristo related books by other authors, popping up like mushrooms quickly in the wake of Dumas' massive success. Most of these spinoff books went out of print a century ago, but thanks to their status as "public domain" and digitizing services, and Internet sites like Gutenberg.Org, Archive.Org, the Library of Congress and the Hathi Trust, these books now have a second life, available for free to anyone willing to go deeper into the rabbit-hole. For those searching for more of the magic of Monte Cristo: prepare to be disappointed. Very disappointed. And... further scraping to the bottom of the barrel, we have American author Edmund Flagg's book, Edmond Dantes . It is Book I of Flagg's Monte Cristo sequels. It rather conceitedly declares itself as: " Edmond Dantes , one of the greatest novels ever written"; "the plot is phenomenal in its strength, meri...