The Dan Brown Enigma (4 page)

Around the time that
187 Men to Avoid
was published, Brown had lunch with his new literary agent, George Wieser, who had come across an article Brown had written for the school magazine at Phillips Exeter. It was entitled
Goodness and Knowledge on the Sunset Strip
and was about what it was like for Brown, describing himself as a preppie-geeky-nerdy kid, to live in the heart of the music industry, a fish completely out of water. ‘I wrote it just for kicks,’ he recalled, ‘and I got a call from a literary agent in New York.’ Wieser told Brown he thought his writing style was unique and that he loved his powerful use of observation. ‘I’ve been in the business a long time and I know a novelist when I see one,’ Wieser had told Brown. The budding novelist explained: ‘We talked about an hour, and I told him stories. He said, “You should write a novel.” I basically said, “I can’t imagine what I would ever write about.” This guy looked across the table and said, “You’re a storyteller. I can tell. There will come a day when you know what you want to write about, and then you will write a novel.” I sort of said, “OK, sure, nice to meet you… crazy old man.” And went home.’
[17]

Brown had not yet entirely given up music. Since his return to New Hampshire in 1993 he had been working on the second CD but this time he had none of the professional people who had been part of his debut album to help him. He was, essentially, on his own.

The new CD,
Angels & Demons,
was in stark contrast to his debut. It was almost entirely Brown himself, using synthesisers with friends backing him up on a variety of different instruments to fill out the sound. The only musical credit was Brown himself as writer, producer and arranger. Acknowledgements went to John Langdon, Macintosh Computers and a software company called Digidesign that produces ProTools, an advanced music sequencing software. Blythe, who added backing vocals, got a double acknowledgement.

On the first album the majority of songs had been love songs. On
Angels & Demons
the love songs were gone. Instead, the darker feel to the album reflected his disillusionment with Hollywood and the music industry.

Religious imagery runs through many of the songs on the album, as on ‘All I Believe’. The title track, especially, shows the struggle Brown had been having with religion and science and which would surface in his books. The lyrics reflect his difficulties reconciling these two disciplines, as well as good and evil, because in the song he is unable to tell the difference between angels and demons.

The liner notes also again credited his wife for her involvement. But perhaps more of note is the album’s artwork, an ambigram by artist John Langdon, which he later used for the novel
Angels & Demons
. Ambigrams are words that, written in a certain graphic way, can be read upside down or right way up. Langdon’s gothic style had caught Brown’s attention so he decided to use it for the cover.

The new CD was released in 1995. It was to be his last. Its sales were not as high as Brown had hoped, but Lisa Rogak states in her book that Brown maintains one of the tracks from this was performed at the 1996 Olympics. Although the track, called ‘Peace in Our Time’, doesn’t appear anywhere on the official Olympic collection of songs, there were many that were performed at Olympics events and ceremonies that were never officially recorded, so there is no reason to assume that Brown was not telling the truth. It may well be that his track was performed at a smaller event or two away from the cameras and crowds.

But whichever way it was considered, Dan Brown’s music career was over. As he continued teaching, he turned his efforts now solely to writing.

I was taught early on at Phillips Exeter that one must writewhat one knows. Like many aspects of my life, scenes from my childhood, my relationship with my parents and family, my student years, and my time in Spain all later emerged in my books.

D
AN
B
ROWN

T
he novels of Dan Brown are thrillers that skilfully blend fact and fiction and support this with technical and historical information. They are books that send the reader on a quest, but they are written to a formula.

On 20 April 2009 an article appeared in
The Guardian
newspaper in which British writers Matt Lynn (the author of
Death Force
, a military thriller), Alan Clements (a TV producer who penned
Rogue Nation
, a political thriller) and Martin Baker (the author of
Meltdown
, a financial thriller) railed against what they called ‘American production-line’ writing. The trio called themselves the Curzon Group and the authors they singled out for criticism were John Grisham, James Patterson and Dan Brown, with Lynn stating that ‘authors such as James Patterson – who writes, with the aid of a team of co-authors, up to eight books a year – have drained a lot of the life out of the market.’

‘There haven’t been any new writers coming through. It might be because there aren’t any very good writers, or maybe it’s because publishers and booksellers have been neglecting it – they’ve become obsessed with the big names, and because they’ve got a new James Patterson or John Grisham four to five times a year to put at the front of the bookshop, it crowds out all the new British authors who are coming through.’
[18]

Authors such as Grisham, the Curzon Group claimed, produced excellent thrillers in their first few novels but as their popularity grew, Grisham’s output had become ‘very, very formulaic’. Tom Clancy and James Patterson were included in this criticism. ‘Good writing should be done well, with passion and originality, but [the thriller genre is] becoming very cynical, which is what we’re protesting about,’ said Lynn.

What makes the Curzon Group particularly interesting is that they came up with five principles of good thriller writing. These are that the book must first entertain the reader; it should also reflect the world around it; that for popular fiction to be thrilling it doesn’t need to follow formulas; that at the heart of every thriller should be an adventure both for the writer and the reader, and finally an edge-of-your-seat thriller can be written in an insightful, witty and stylish way.

At the heart of every Dan Brown novel is what he calls ‘a big idea’. The inspiration for his first novel came from an unexpected source: while teaching at Phillips Exeter he heard of a student who’d been in trouble for writing an email jokingly threatening the President. ‘The US Secret Service came to the campus and detained one of the students claiming he was a threat to national security,’ Brown said. ‘As it turned out, the student had sent a private email to a friend saying how much he hated President Clinton and how he thought the President should be shot. The Secret Service came to campus to make sure the boy wasn’t serious. After some interrogation the agents decided the student was harmless and not much came of it.’
[19]

The incident stuck with Brown. How could the Secret Service have known what the student had written in his email? How would they have known where that person was, where he lived, and that he was a student if they hadn’t been monitoring all traffic on the web? ‘Email was brand new on the scene, and like most people, I assumed email was private,’ he said. ‘I couldn’t figure out how the secret service knew what these students were saying in their email.’

Intrigued by the story, Brown began digging and discovered that the National Security Agency (NSA) was able to read people’s email. The more research he did on the NSA and the moral issues surrounding civilian privacy and national security, the more Brown realised he had the basis of a brilliant thriller. ‘I remember Blythe commenting that life seemed to be trying to tell me something,’ Brown said. ‘The music industry was clearly rejecting me, and the publishing industry seemed to be beckoning. The thrill of being a published author (
187 Men To Avoid
), combined with George Wieser’s words of encouragement, my newfound fascination with NSA, and the vacation reading of Sidney Sheldon’s
The Doomsday Conspiracy
, all had begun to give me confidence that I could indeed write a novel.’
[20]

And so he began writing his first novel
Digital Fortress
even though he had no firm commitment from any publisher. ‘I literally woke up one day, sat up on the end of the bed, and said, “It’s time to write a novel.” My wife sort of just patted me on the head and said, “You go ahead. That’s nice, dear. Have fun.” I was working two jobs at the time. I would get up at four o’clock, write until eight, bike 12 miles to a junior high school, teach Spanish, bike 12 miles home, shower, race over and teach two afternoon classes at Phillips Exeter and then get up and do it all over again.’
[21]

However, writing a book on spec is extremely difficult. Not knowing if anyone will ever be interested in it or if it will ever get sold can sap an author’s spirit and many would-be writers have lost their way because they didn’t have the motivation to keep going. Brown did and he had Blythe’s support and encouragement. After more than a year of researching and writing the manuscript was as ready as it would ever be, but he had also decided that this was the last time he would write anything without having a publisher.

The manuscript now needed to be sold but the publishing industry had changed and companies now only wanted submissions from unknown authors through literary agents. The Browns turned again to George Wieser, who had secured an offer for
187 Men to Avoid
. He been running a small literary agency (Wieser and Wieser) with his wife Olga since 1975 and their claim to fame was that George had bought the film rights to Mario Puzo’s
The Godfather
. They offered to send the
Digital Fortress
manuscript around to the publishers and three weeks later it was sold to St Martin’s Press for one of their imprints, Thomas Dunne Books. At Dunne, editor Melissa Jacobs took the manuscript and worked with Brown to get it into shape for publishing.

Sadly, George Wieser died of cancer in 1998, but
Digital Fortress
was published that same year. It sold only a few thousand copies but it was a step forward for Brown. He was sure his next would be better: now that his first novel had been picked up by publishers, he could leave teaching and concentrate on writing full time and so he dived into the research for the second thriller that would become
Angels & Demons
.

It was in
Digital Fortress
that Brown began blending fact with fiction, stretching the facts to suit the story and the situation. In each novel he has honed this ability and perhaps that’s the secret of his success: that he can tell a story in such a way that the reader is lost in a world that is, completely fictional on one hand but on the other still based in reality. ‘I write in a very specific intentional way to blend fact and fiction and that’s part of the fun,’ he explained.

Bond author Ian Fleming suggested that for writing good thrillers, some part of the story should be based on fact so that there is an authenticity to the work that rings true and carries the reader along. In his first book,
Casino Royale
, he said, ‘there are strong incidents in the book which are all based on fact. I extracted them from my wartime memories of the Naval Intelligence Division of the Admiralty, dolled them up, attached a hero, a villain and a heroine, and there was the book.’
[22]

For Fleming the line between fact and fiction is a narrow one. ‘I think I could trace most of the central incidents in my books to some real happenings,’ he said. He also suggested that the author should know ‘thrilling things’. ‘Imagination alone isn’t enough, but stories you hear from friends or read in the papers can be built up by a fertile imagination and a certain amount of research and documentation into incidents that will also ring true in fiction.’

Almost all Fleming’s books were written when he went to Jamaica every year, and he pointed out, ‘Your lack of friends and distractions will create a vacuum which should force you into a writing mood and, if your pocket is shallow, into a mood which will also make you write fast and with application.’ Having a hideaway, as Fleming called it, is essential for creating this vacuum. While some may not be able to go to Jamaica every year to write, there are other alternatives: ‘I can recommend hotel bedrooms as far removed from your usual life as possible.’

Fleming also said that a routine of writing is essential. He wrote for three hours in the morning and then another hour in the evening. ‘The whole of this four hours of daily work is devoted to writing narrative. At the end of this I reward myself by numbering the pages and putting them away in a spring-back folder.’
[23]

Fleming wrote his novels in a very short space of time without correction or looking back or checking anything. That came later, as he explained: ‘If you interrupt the writing of fast narrative with too much introspection and self-criticism, you will be lucky if you write 500 words a day and you will be disgusted with them into the bargain. By following my formula, you write 2,000 words a day and you aren’t disgusted with them until the book is finished, which will be in about six weeks.’

However, Brown takes a very long time to work on his novels, which is why he’s turned out only five in 12 years. Because the research is so intensive, the subject matter has to hold his attention. Usually, there is a moral argument to each of his stories that he presents in such a way that the reader has to decide what is right and what is wrong, and Brown hopes they will go on a quest to discover the truths for themselves. Indeed, many books have been written since the success of
The Da Vinci Code
, trying to debunk the claims he makes in his books, or trying to explain and expand on some of the ancient myths, legends and mysteries that permeate each Dan Brown novel. The internet is full of people either searching for the facts that Brown includes in his novel or debunking them.

But back when he had just started writing
Digital Fortress
, Brown was juggling his writing time with teaching at Phillips Exeter. He had no choice but to set up a writing routine and it’s interesting that that he still sticks to it today. That routine means he gets up at 4am every day and walks to his writing cottage which, he says, ‘is not in the house – I have to walk to it. But there are times when I’m so excited I’ll get up and go out in my pyjama bottoms and sweatshirt, because it is pitch black outside and no one is around.’
[24]