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 "Alexandre Dumas" (⮜to get better sales, no doubt!)  

The book was translated into Spanish and French, but no English translation exists, so there is very little information about it, and the plot in the English language. I was able to locate a 200 page version, in Spanish (must be abridged?), and with the help of Google Translate, I can read it for myself!

Useless Trivia: The French version was spread over 6 volumes, at over 300 pages per volume! So how did this scheme work? With only 100 words per page, large margins and double-spaced lines! This word count is about 25-30% of what a normal printed page should contain! Such scammers! 😡

The year is 1837 [sic], one year after the 1838 🤣 events of The Count of Monte Cristo. Mrs. Danglars is still in Paris, hobnobbing with the rich and powerful, now including Beauchamp, the new King's Prosecutor, replacing Villefort.

Benedetto was able to spend some quality time (on parole?) taking care of his bio-dad, Villefort. Upon dying, Villefort tasked his son to avenge him and the family by going after the Count. Benedetto is eventually sent back to the La Force prison. Mrs. Danglars sends him 60 thousand francs and he uses that sum to feign bribing his jailer, only to slit the man's throat. Then he steals the guard's pass, cloak and cap and escapes. Now obsessed with revenge, Benedetto heads for the cemetery and picks the lock of the Saint-Meran/Villefort family tomb. He steals jewelry from the bodies and pauses at the body of his father, M. Villefort. We will find out later that he desecrated the remains by removing one of its hands 😡, to be used as a horrific talisman to represent and enable his retribution.

We move along to Rome, where Mr. and Mrs. Danglars, Luigi Vampa and Peppino separately ally themselves with Benedetto, each with their own motives. With a combination of impersonation, slander, and arson, Benedetto ruins the Count of Monte Cristo's reputation in all Italy, and even Pastrini despises him. Benedetto uses the dead, disembodied hand to intimidate people, claiming that he stole the Count's "relic" and it's the secret of his riches and power, and it now "points the way to destiny". Long story short, he fleeces and screws his allies over, Peppino excepted.

There's a lot of nonsense that I'll skim over- a love-struck Vampa carrying "fragile" Eugenie Danglars away to his hideout (she has his child 9 months later); Benedetto's ship being caught in a storm and inadvertently rescuing Albert de Morcerf from a shipwreck and they become friends; Mercedes, back in Marseilles, dying of starvation but she's saved by her just-arrived son; both Albert and Mercedes hating the Count and blaming him for their misfortunes; bit-part players Max and Val watching as their grotto at Monte Cristo island is looted (by Benedetto) and blown up. (⮜all horrible stuff! 😡)

3/4 of this book is over, and finally, the Count and Haydee appear. They're in Venice, constantly accosted/harassed by an unknown man at a masked ball, on a gondola, and as a Gypsy. He whispers ominous predictions/threats, hinting that the Count is cursed by the dead man's hand and by God. The Gypsy foresees "misfortune" for the Count's son, which can only be mitigated if they attend a charity banquet for the poor and if their son is kissed and held by three poor persons. Being truly dumb and gullible, the Count and Haydee follow these demands to the letter, resulting in the abduction of their child, and later, Haydee.

It's all Benedetto's work, as if we couldn't see that a mile away. He returns only Haydee in exchange for everything that the Count owns. But he keeps the child, which plunges Haydee into depression, and she begs her husband to help her end it all...and the Count complies by providing the poison for her!!!😡 Benedetto palms off the Count's kidnapped son to Valentine. The accompanying note only says that the child's name is "Edmund", and he's an "orphan" and his past is "a secret". BTW, Eugenie had also deposited her newborn with the Morrels.

His quest complete, Benedetto returns to the mausoleum, opens Villefort's coffin, kisses the hand (yuck!) and places it back on the body, telling his father that "the debt is satisfied". He can't leave- the groundskeeper slamed the crypt door shut and called the police. Benedetto is taken away by soldiers. But he's OK with that, feeling that he has fulfilled his life's purpose, conflating a personal/family grudge with "God's judgement against [the Count's] arrogance and vanity".

The Count accepts "the justice of God" (⮜as Hogan says) and becomes a humble barefoot penitent, begging for alms as he wanders around Rome, unrecognized by people there. With no money, no family, no purpose and no respect, all that is left for Edmond Dantes is to become a monk and to serve as confessor to just about every remaining character left!

In the end, the body count is appallingly high: almost everybody dies within four years of the original book😡.

• Villefort: Dies of natural causes early in the book (Chapter 2).
  
• Danglars: Returns to his original job as a sailor, and is beaten to death by a rival seaman.
• Haydee: Commits suicide by taking poison, because her kidnapped son will never be returned.
• Luigi Vampa: Executed in Rome via mazzolato (aka head bashed-in with a mace).
• Bertuccio: Dies after becoming very ill from shock, seeing what's become of the Count.  
• Benedetto: Executed by guillotine for his crimes, now including a fresh murder, several robberies and 2 kidnappings.
  
• Mrs. Danglars: Robbed of everything by her son. Joins a nunnery. Dies of grief a few days after his execution.
• Mercedes: Dies in Marseilles of illness.
• The Count/Edmond Dantes: Dies of apoplexy, triggered by grief after Mercedes dies.
• Max and Val, their 2 foster children and Albert de Morcerf: All die in a steamer ship explosion. 

✅	1-SequelTrope: Benedetto returns to wreak havoc?
✅	2-SequelTrope: Eugenie straightwashed?
✅	3-SequelTrope: Haydee dies young?
✅	4-SequelTrope: The Count's son killed?

The Verdict: This is foul. The worst yet. I don't get Hogan's heavy-handed moralizing and his need to destroy Alexandre Dumas' finest work by tearing down the house (of Dantes) that Dumas had so meticulously built. It's offensive to see Hogan flip Monte Cristo on its head and turn Benedetto (of all people) into "an inverse Edmond Dantes", plotting and executing revenge on the Count and his family for "injustices" against the Villeforts. Benedetto is unqualified as an avenger of justice, cosmic or otherwise. He's a murderer in his own right but Hogan uses him as a tool to bring Edmond Dantes down to nothing. Which isn't very difficult, since this Count is clueless, weak-willed, passive and totally emasculated!

It's almost sadistic and it's no wonder that readers were aghast! The tone of the book is unnecessarily cruel, with an overpowered villain and a bunch of dim-witted victims that he demolishes with the flick of a finger (Wuthering Heights, anyone?). The book should have been titled The Fall of Monte Cristo, or The Ruin of Monte Cristo, but there wouldn't have been any money in that, right? Hopefully Alfredo Hogan did all right on his postal worker's salary, because his book didn't deserve to bring him any profits by leeching off Dumas.

Unfortunately, Hogan's work seems to have influenced Jules Lermina's Son of Monte Cristo. It's not hard to see the similarities... the way that both authors brought back Benedetto to ruin the Count's life; took away the Count's riches, his wife (Haydee) and child; punished him and made him into a pauper and religious nutjob; and killed off all his friends, leaving Eugenie Danglars as the main survivor. And both authors had unintentionally implied that the Count could have avoided such reprisals if he simply killed off Benedetto!

Hypothetical modern cover

 

As I had mentioned, since there is no English language version, The Hand of the Dead is rightfully obscure and a non-entity in the English-speaking world. It takes a LOT of searching and work to obtain it, reformat it for consistent font size, remove excess blank lines, and massage it into English, and trying to interpret a sometimes iffy translation. All this for an exercise in masochism.

Would you read...this? Just for fun, I made a mock-up of how this book can be marketed today, without paying anyone any money to do a proper translation! 🤣And, I even included some mock disclaimers, since we do require truth in advertising these days!