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**In a court filing, the best-selling author of The Da Vinci Code reveals all the secrets of a pulp novelist.
By Bryan Curtis
Dan Brown, author of the mega-selling The Da Vinci Code, has brought forth his most thrilling piece of writing to date: a court document. Brown, who is being sued for copyright infringement in London by the authors of Holy Blood, Holy Grail, filed a 69-page witness statement with the British courts back in December. The London Times, the Associated Press,and other media gleefully unearthed it last week. In its textures—it is at turns snotty, contemplative, and disarmingly personal—it is clear Brown intended the brief less as a legal defense than as a literary memoir. Like the hidden ciphers the heroes of *The Da Vinci Code *pursue, this is the Dan Brown Code—the key to understanding the secrets of a pulp novelist.
At first glance, the document bears the giddy signatures of a Dan Brown novel. It’s chopped into staccato chapters; the language is awkward (“I quite literally woke up one morning and decided to write a thriller that delved into NSA”); and its hero is a simple man who is being pursued by evil forces he doesn’t quite understand. Educated at AmherstandPhillips Exeter Academy, Brown had an unusual literary awakening. He did not go the usual route, wandering into a library, bumping into Hemingway and Flaubert, and resolving right there in the stacks to become a writer. Brown resolved to become a writer when he read Sidney Sheldon’s The Doomsday Conspiracy while vacationing in Tahiti. “Up until this point,” he writes, “almost all of my reading had been dictated by my schooling (primarily classics like Faulkner, Steinbeck, Dostoyevsky, Shakespeare, etc.) and I’d read almost no commercial fiction at all since the Hardy Boys as a child.” The Sheldon book was a revelation, swift and merciless where Shakespeare, etc., had been slow and cumbersome. “[L]ife seemed to be trying to tell me something,” Brown notes, adding, “I began to suspect that maybe I could write a ‘thriller’ of this type one day.”
Brown has done a lot of thinking about what makes a successful Dan Brown thriller. He has found that it requires a few essential elements: some kind of shadowy force, like a secret society or government agency; a “big idea” that contains a moral “grey area”; and a treasure. The treasures in Brown’s four novels have been a meteorite, anti-matter, a gold ring, and the Holy Grail. The shadowy forces have included the Priory of Sion, Opus Dei, and the National Security Agency. The big idea, if I’m reading him correctly, goes something like this: Is the Vatican good … or is it evil? Is the National Security Agency for us … or is it against us? When all of Brown’s elements come together, doled out over cliffhanging chapters, with characters that exist to “move the plot along,” it is like mixing the ingredients to make a cake. For example, Deception Point, Brown’s third novel, is “a thriller about a meteorite discovered in the Arctic—a discovery that turns out to have profound political ramifications for an impending presidential election.”
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By Bryan Curtis
Dan Brown, author of the mega-selling The Da Vinci Code, has brought forth his most thrilling piece of writing to date: a court document. Brown, who is being sued for copyright infringement in London by the authors of Holy Blood, Holy Grail, filed a 69-page witness statement with the British courts back in December. The London Times, the Associated Press,and other media gleefully unearthed it last week. In its textures—it is at turns snotty, contemplative, and disarmingly personal—it is clear Brown intended the brief less as a legal defense than as a literary memoir. Like the hidden ciphers the heroes of *The Da Vinci Code *pursue, this is the Dan Brown Code—the key to understanding the secrets of a pulp novelist.
At first glance, the document bears the giddy signatures of a Dan Brown novel. It’s chopped into staccato chapters; the language is awkward (“I quite literally woke up one morning and decided to write a thriller that delved into NSA”); and its hero is a simple man who is being pursued by evil forces he doesn’t quite understand. Educated at AmherstandPhillips Exeter Academy, Brown had an unusual literary awakening. He did not go the usual route, wandering into a library, bumping into Hemingway and Flaubert, and resolving right there in the stacks to become a writer. Brown resolved to become a writer when he read Sidney Sheldon’s The Doomsday Conspiracy while vacationing in Tahiti. “Up until this point,” he writes, “almost all of my reading had been dictated by my schooling (primarily classics like Faulkner, Steinbeck, Dostoyevsky, Shakespeare, etc.) and I’d read almost no commercial fiction at all since the Hardy Boys as a child.” The Sheldon book was a revelation, swift and merciless where Shakespeare, etc., had been slow and cumbersome. “[L]ife seemed to be trying to tell me something,” Brown notes, adding, “I began to suspect that maybe I could write a ‘thriller’ of this type one day.”
Brown has done a lot of thinking about what makes a successful Dan Brown thriller. He has found that it requires a few essential elements: some kind of shadowy force, like a secret society or government agency; a “big idea” that contains a moral “grey area”; and a treasure. The treasures in Brown’s four novels have been a meteorite, anti-matter, a gold ring, and the Holy Grail. The shadowy forces have included the Priory of Sion, Opus Dei, and the National Security Agency. The big idea, if I’m reading him correctly, goes something like this: Is the Vatican good … or is it evil? Is the National Security Agency for us … or is it against us? When all of Brown’s elements come together, doled out over cliffhanging chapters, with characters that exist to “move the plot along,” it is like mixing the ingredients to make a cake. For example, Deception Point, Brown’s third novel, is “a thriller about a meteorite discovered in the Arctic—a discovery that turns out to have profound political ramifications for an impending presidential election.”
Read the rest