Alexandre DumasWriting Style

Twelve diamond studs leave a queen's jewel case, and the plot of The Three Musketeers turns on who is holding two of them. That is the whole method. Dumas builds his plots out of things a hand can carry, so suspense stops being a question of whether the hero survives and becomes a question of who is holding the paper. The studs travel from Anne of Austria to Buckingham to Milady's scissors and back. In The Count of Monte Cristo the object is a denunciation that Danglars writes left-handed, crumples, and drops in a corner of an inn, where Fernand picks it up off the floor. The plot is a chain of custody.

He learned that in the theatre, and the scenes still show it. Dumas made his name as a dramatist years before the novels, and his best scenes are still built like stage scenes, with someone coming through a door wanting something specific. The entrance carries information, and the information belongs to a person who wants to be paid for it. Set that against Hugo halting Les Misérables to walk the reader across the field of Waterloo and down into the sewers, and you see the trade Dumas made to keep the clock running. He pays for it in reflective weight.

Accident is his standing problem, and he fixes it the same way each time. Fernand finding that letter on the floor is a coincidence, and Dumas covers it by giving the page three owners who each want Dantès gone for reasons of their own. Then he stages the audit. Abbé Faria, walled up in the Château d'If, makes Dantès tell the story of his arrest twice, then names the three men from the single question of who stood to gain. He reasons it out from motive alone.

The ending is bookkeeping. Dantès does not kill the three men who ruined him. He takes each one apart through the medium of the original crime, so Villefort, who buried a man under the law, breaks in open court, in front of the whole bench, when the prisoner he is prosecuting names him as his father. Danglars, who wrote the letter and kept the books, loses everything to paper and a false dispatch off a telegraph line. Fernand, who sold a pasha for a title, loses the title in front of the peers who granted it. Each punishment matches the medium of the crime. That symmetry is what holds a revenge plot of that size together, and it is the reason to read him with a pen in hand.

Attrition on the road

Send a party of allies toward a goal. Then take them away one at a time, each for a reason that belongs to the man who leaves rather than to the plot. Porthos cannot walk away from an insult, so he stays at Chantilly to fight about a toast. Aramis takes a wound. Athos gets accused of counterfeiting. By the time d'Artagnan boards the boat at Calais, the reader has lost three friends and gained a clock, and the journey has characterised four men without spending one passage on description. The tool is harder than it looks, because each departure has to be caused by the character and not by the plot's wish to be alone with the hero for a chapter.

The oath with a due date

He plants the future as a spoken promise. All for one is the famous one, and the working examples are smaller and nastier: Milady undertakes to Richelieu that she will deal with Buckingham, and Dantès leaves Faria's cell having sworn to settle with three named men. A vow tells the reader what the book has to settle, which is cheaper and clearer than a symbol he may not catch. It also puts the character on a hook. When a promise breaks in Dumas, the reader feels it as a debt going bad rather than as a change of heart, and the plot can collect on it chapters later.

Danger as a private room

Athos bets an officer that the four of them can eat breakfast inside a ruined bastion under enemy fire, and the wager is a pretext, because what they need is somewhere to discuss Milady where no servant and no spy can follow them in. The gunfire is the door. The trick is worth stealing. When characters must say something the plot cannot let others overhear, put the conversation somewhere hostile instead of somewhere quiet. The scene then runs two tracks, exposition and physical risk, and neither has to slow down for the other. A locked study would have cost the same words and paid for half as much.

The recruited guard

Milady is a prisoner with one visitor, and she turns him into her weapon in a handful of interviews. She reads Felton first, finds the Puritan in him, and tells a story in which she is a persecuted Protestant and Buckingham is the man who ruined and branded her. Each element is true of somebody. The tool travels well past captivity, because a character who controls another's access to the outside world can be flipped by a version of events in which helping is righteous. Note what Dumas withholds. He keeps the reader out of her calculations while she talks, so her persuasion has to be judged the way Felton judges it.

The restored room

The Count of Monte Cristo buys a house at Auteuil, has one room put back the way it was, and then gives a dinner party for the two guests with reason to recognise it. Nothing is said outright. A staircase, a garden, a closed door. Those do the accusing, and the guests spend the rest of the evening behaving like people blackmailed by wallpaper. Setting used this way is an argument, not a backdrop. The requirement is that the reader met the room earlier, in a scene that appeared to be about something else, so the tool has to be built long before it is spent.

Settlement in kind

Each debt gets paid in the currency it was borrowed in. Villefort abused a court, so he is broken in a court. Danglars wrote a letter and kept a ledger, so he is destroyed by a false telegraph message and a run of paper losses. Fernand traded a pasha for a peerage, so the peerage is taken from him in the room where it was granted. The device gives a long book its rhyme, and it does the moral work without a paragraph of comment, because the reader can see the symmetry and draw the conclusion himself. The cost is patience. Each piece of the settlement has to be planted before the reader knows there is one.

The cut on a changed forecast

The device is a chapter ending that changes the reader's forecast without changing his information much. A messenger arrives. A name is spoken by the wrong person. An ally hesitates for one sentence longer than he should. Because the reader has to re-price what he already knows rather than wait for a fact he was not given, the pull works even when the scene it closes was quiet. That is how a daily serial stays alive without a fresh catastrophe each day. The alternative is to end on a bigger explosion each time, and that method burns through its material inside a month.

Reader-ahead placement

Dumas hands the reader something a character does not have, and then makes him watch. We know about the brand on Milady's shoulder before d'Artagnan does. We know who the Count of Monte Cristo used to be. Fernand is still shaking his hand at a party. The tension in these stretches comes from distance rather than outcome, because the reader has already worked out the outcome and is now measuring how far away it is and what it will cost. Withheld information would have bought him one jolt. Placed information keeps the dread running for chapters. He reads on to close a gap he can already see.

Documents in circulation

A document in Dumas has three properties: an owner, a location, and a risk of being intercepted. Those are what make it dramatic rather than convenient. The denunciation that puts Dantès in prison passes through three hands before it reaches a post office. The order Richelieu signs for Milady, absolving its bearer of whatever the bearer has done, changes sides twice and ends in the hand of the man who signed it, held out to him by a Gascon he had tried to buy. Haydée arrives at the Chamber of Peers carrying the deed of her own sale. Narration could have delivered the same facts in a paragraph. On paper and in somebody's pocket, a fact can be stolen, denied, forged or produced at the worst possible moment, and that is the whole distance between information and plot.

The retrospective audit

Somewhere in the middle of the story, a character sits down and reconstructs the plot from motive. Faria asks Dantès who gained by his arrest, hears the answer without being told it, and produces three names and a chain of events the boy lived through and did not understand. The scene does two jobs at once. It turns the reader's accumulated suspicion into evidence, and it re-reads the earlier chapters for free, which is why the second half of the novel can move at the speed it does. Detective fiction later made this its engine, and Conan Doyle built a career on the reasoning Faria performs in a hole in the ground. Dumas used it once, in the middle, where it pays for the most structure.

Stacking duels and escapes while nothing changes hands

Writers read Dumas as an action writer and stack the set pieces, and the pages get louder while the story stops moving, because a duel that changes nothing is scenery. In The Three Musketeers the first fight matters because it turns four enemies into a unit and puts them on the wrong side of the cardinal's guard for the rest of the book. Test each action scene by asking what somebody can now do that he could not do before it. If the answer is nothing, the scene is a stunt. Dumas uses action as punctuation on a sentence already written in obligations.

Copying the clear voice and losing the steering

His prose is easy to read, so it looks easy to write. The imitation usually comes out as a synopsis. Clarity in Dumas is a set of choices about emphasis: what to summarise, what to dramatise, when to withhold a name, how long to let a lie stand before the reader is shown the truth. The sentences are plain and the decisions behind them are not. Copy the plainness without the decisions and the result reads like a recap of a better book, with the events in order and nothing weighted. The repair is to take a flat page and mark, for each paragraph, which fact it has chosen to put last.

Springing a twist that was not planted

The twists get copied and the promises do not, so the surprises arrive with nothing behind them. Dumas earns his reversals by planting the commitment early and in public, in a vow, a threat, a signed order, or a debt acknowledged in front of witnesses who will be available later. When the reversal comes, the reader recognises a bill being presented rather than a rabbit being produced. Withholding is allowed and cheating is not, and the line between them is whether the reader could have got there on his own. Before writing a reveal, find the page where it was planted. If there is no such page, then the reveal is a note about an earlier chapter, and that is where the work belongs.

Writing repartee that leaves the board where it was

Banter is the easiest thing to lift from him and the least useful. Dumas can afford a long exchange because the talk is doing something: a promise is extracted, a delay is bought, a man is recruited, an insult is planted that will produce a duel two chapters later. Copy the wit alone and the dialogue becomes a pause button the reader learns to skim. Check the transcript. Write down in one line what a conversation changed, and if the line comes out empty, the repair is a clearer objective for one of the speakers rather than a better joke.