Death Comes For The Poets by Matthew Sweeney and John Hartley Williams – review

Death Comes For The Poets is an unliterary book with a highly literary subject. It’s usually done the other way around: exquisite quodrilogies about American car salesmen; towering works about bored wives in French villages. Here we have a thriller, but one written by two eminent contemporary poets in which poets are murdered in correspondent ways to their work. A man who wrote a collection called Stray gets torn apart by dogs. A womaniser who writes about oceans gets lured to his watery death by a beautiful woman. Is the murderer jealous of these poets’ reputations? or is somebody trying to create much needed publicity for the art? Luckily, there is a suitably well-read sleuth on hand – Victor Priest: celebrity art detective, expert on literary forgeries and poet manqué. While investigating these murders he also finds the time to acquire lost Kafka manuscripts and a translation of Dante by T.S.