Ali Pasha: Celebrated Crimes book 13

Alexandre Dumas

Mar 2015 · Celebrated Crimes Book 13 · Freshwater Seas · Narrated by Robert Bethune

About this audiobook

To paraphrase the note from the translator, The Celebrated Crimes of Alexandre Dumas père was not written for children. The novelist has spared no language—has minced no words—to describe violent scenes of violent times.

In this, the thirteenth of the series, Dumas, the novelist-historian, finds ample scope for his favorite approach. His subject is a well-documented historical figure: Ali Tepelini, most often known as Ali Pasha, and known even in his own day as The Lion of Tepelen. Dumas presents us with an extraordinary character, a man of tremendous courage, unstoppable tenacity, matchless duplicity, extreme debauchery, disgusting cruelty, and amazing ingenuity. Ali Pasha rose from a homeless teenage brigand robbing travelers on the roads of his native Albania to one of the most powerful and wealthy viziers of the Ottoman empire, the sole absolute ruler of much of what is now Greece, Albania, and other parts of the Balkans. Although he never intended to do so, he helped trigger the revolt that freed Greece from Turkish rule, a process that put the Ottoman Empire on the road to its final collapse. Ali traces his life from his earliest days throughout his career of crime until his violent death and its aftermath.

Of course, Dumas, the dramatist and novelist, cannot help embellishing the work of Dumas, the historian. He gives us words and actions that cannot possibly be part of the historical record from scenes that are as effectively histrionic as they are undocumented. However, all his melodrama is well based on his history, and he certainly makes a wonderful tale out of his materials.

Dumas may have collaborated on this, as he frequently did in his works, with other writers. Nevertheless, it is clearly Dumas who has the final say on this work, as with all the other works in this series.

Enjoy!

About the author

After an idle youth, Alexandre Dumas went to Paris and spent some years writing. A volume of short stories and some farces were his only productions until 1927, when his play Henri III (1829) became a success and made him famous. It was as a storyteller rather than a playwright, however, that Dumas gained enduring success. Perhaps the most broadly popular of French romantic novelists, Dumas published some 1,200 volumes during his lifetime. These were not all written by him, however, but were the works of a body of collaborators known as "Dumas & Co." Some of his best works were plagiarized. For example, The Three Musketeers (1844) was taken from the Memoirs of Artagnan by an eighteenth-century writer, and The Count of Monte Cristo (1845) from Penchet's A Diamond and a Vengeance. At the end of his life, drained of money and sapped by his work, Dumas left Paris and went to live at his son's villa, where he remained until his death.