‘You can hate my books. But don’t call me a liar or a cheat’
He’s been called the devil, roasted by critics and endured a hellish battle to clear his name of plagiarism. But, The Da Vinci Code creator tells More, he may have been burned – but he’s damned if he’ll renounce the magic spells and bells formula that has shifted 200m books
Sitting outside the shopping mall, the table in front of him stacked with copies of his novel Digital Fortress, author Dan Brown was excitedly preparing for his first book signing. ‘I had my coat and tie on,’ he says, ‘and five pens at the ready, just to be sure.’ Three hours later, he had yet to sign a single book. ‘Finally a man walked towards me, looking me right in the eye, so I took the cap off my pen and was quivering with excitement. Then he said: “Can you tell me where this restaurant is?”’ Brown laughs. ‘That was the only question I got all day.’
Fast forward some 20 years and how things have changed. Now one of the world’s best-known authors, Brown’s 2003 novel The Da Vinci Code was an instant smash, spending 144 weeks on The New York Times bestseller list and shifting 82 million copies worldwide. His novels, featuring an unlikely hero, Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon, have subsequently been turned into movies starring Tom Hanks and together with his books have grossed over $2.7bn. Brown himself is said to be worth around $170m, having sold 200 million of his books worldwide. ‘I’ll never forget those early days when nobody cared about what I wrote,’ he says, ‘whatever criticism I get now.’
Criticism has become de rigueur for the beleaguered Brown, which might explain why the American author rarely gives interviews. After sparkling early reviews of The Da Vinci Code, ‘all of a sudden it just turned’, he admits. Critics were queuing up to insult his prose (one described it as ‘almost ingeniously bad’) and controversy dogged him at every turn. The Da Vinci Code, a thriller that speculates that Jesus and Mary Magdalene were married and had a child together, so riled the Vatican that they appointed an archbishop to specifically rebut the novel’s ideas. ‘Cardinal Bertone has made quite a career of saying I was the devil,’ says Brown.
The novel even became the subject of a court case when, in 2006, authors Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh accused him of plagiarising their 1982 non-fiction book, The Holy Blood And The Holy Grail.
‘My attorney called and said, “We’ve just heard from Baigent and Leigh – they’ve sent you something.” I said: “Is it chocolates or flowers?” and he said: “It’s a lawsuit.” I didn’t understand – I mentioned their book [in The Da Vinci Code], I credited them and I named a character after them. They were shaking the tree, wanting to see if any money fell out.’ Though Brown won the case, ‘It took two years of my life.’
Afterwards it was suggested that the trial was a collaborative attempt to maximise publicity for the books (sales of both books soared during the trial; both were published by Random House) but Brown shakes his head. ‘I know how hard my publisher tried to quickly settle this case but I would not settle. We’ve had a lot of these sorts of claims that have all turned out to be absolutely false and I have never settled, because if you do then they all line up.
‘You can say you hate my book but don’t say I’m a liar or a cheater.’
Sitting in his New Hampshire home, it’s hard to believe that the affable and earnest man in front of me has managed to provoke so much ire. Tall, slim and neatly attired in a grey jumper and dark jeans, the 53-year-old resembles an enthusiastic English teacher (his former profession) more than a scourge of the Catholic Church. He lives here
‘I would have the human race born sterile. If you want a baby, you take a pill’
with his wife of 20 years Blythe Newlon, 12 years his senior. The couple don’t have children. ‘That’s by design,’ he says. ‘We decided that we wanted to be creative – that’s really where our joy comes from. Blythe loves painting and sculpting and I like writing and playing the piano. We’ve also got seven books – those are the kids.’
Brown’s last ‘kid’, Inferno, examined the world’s impending overpopulation and he has some intriguing beliefs. ‘I do believe that’s a huge problem. Someone said to me: “If you could do anything to stem population, what would you do?” I said I would basically have the human race born sterile and when you want a baby, you take a pill. So the baby is a choice.’ Does he really believe that? ‘I believe that some day that’s the way it will be, because we’re going to start living so long that we cannot afford to have 10 children, especially in undeveloped countries. It’s a very effective way to make sure every child in this world is wanted.’
His latest book, Origin, looks set to spark more debate. It sees the return of Robert Langdon, who finds himself at Spain’s Guggenheim Museum awaiting a talk by billionaire futurist Edmond Kirsch. Kirsch promises to answer two of mankind’s most fundamental questions: Where do we come from? Where are we going? But in doing so he also aims to prove the one thing that all religions have in common: that they are all wrong. The talk ends in tragedy and it’s up to Langdon and the museum’s glamorous director Ambra Vidal to solve the mystery. It’s a trademark Brown page-turner, ‘and the spark for the novel was a piece of music – Missa Charles Darwin – which is church music combined with scientific lyrics,’ explains Brown. ‘It was actually composed by my brother Gregory and it got me thinking about Darwin, evolution and creationism. I’m always looking for big ideas that knock against each other.’
Does Brown worry about upsetting yet more religious leaders, particularly given the current threat of religious terrorism? ‘I’m not worried, no, but then maybe I’m being naive,’ he says. ‘When The Da Vinci Code came out, I was surprised there was so much controversy as both my parents were teachers and I was brought up to believe that asking questions was the foundation of everything – I didn’t know I wasn’t allowed to do that! I’m respectful of the enormous amount of good religion does in the world but I just feel that the banner of religion should not be waved as immunity from having to endure rational scrutiny.’
As well as having to outfox shadowy villains, Langdon also has to deal with the baffling concerns of modern art and, more interestingly, artificial intelligence. ‘My personal fear of AI,’ says Brown, ‘is that when I look at history, it seems pretty obvious that we have never created a technology that we haven’t weaponised. Fire could heat your cave but you could also run to the neighbouring village, burn down everyone’s house and take them over. So I think it would be naive to think that AI would not be used to kill people. I was fascinated by the subject.’
But while the novel deals with the big themes that infuse all of Brown’s work, it also poignantly hints at circumstances in his own life. One of the characters is terminally ill and it transpires that his own mother Constance died two months ago, aged 79. ‘Unfortunately, she never got to read the new book, which kind of breaks my heart, so I dedicated it to her. She was an enormous influence
in my life, a very strong woman and a religious woman who, a few years before The Da Vinci Code came out, moved away from the Church and found her own spirituality. Some of her friends would say: “You need to stop your son from saying all this stuff,” and she’d just laugh and say: “If my son’s thriller can shake your faith, you may want to have a look at that.”’
His father, Richard, now 81, had a big hand in his son’s future career. Every Christmas he would place envelopes containing clues under the tree rather than presents. The young Dan, his brother Gregory and sister Valerie then had to solve the mystery in order to find their gifts. ‘My dad still does these treasure hunts for my two nephews in our house because it has secret passages everywhere. Come and have a look!’ he says, jumping up. He pushes against one of the bookcases and it opens, leading to a secret garden outside. It also reveals a compartment filled with Dan Brown memorabilia, including the watch worn by Tom Hanks in The Da Vinci Code and Brown’s first ever novel, The Giraffe, The Pig And The Pants On Fire, written when he was five.
Growing up in New Hampshire, the Brown children had no TV in the house, he says. ‘I spent a lot of time alone, wrote stories, played music and played with my dog and had imaginary friends.’
As a young boy he admits to a burgeoning curiosity about secret societies. ‘There was a Masonic temple downtown which always fascinated me. Also, I had a good friend who was inducted into Skull and Bones [Yale University’s secret society]. The fact that he refused to speak to me about what happened inside really intrigued me.’
After graduating from Amherst College, Massachusetts, Brown was torn between pursuing a career in music or writing. Initially, he plumped for music and pitched up in LA, working as a teacher to pay the rent. He ended up cutting a record. One of the songs, 976 Love, was about phone sex and looking at the clean-cut Brown now, one can almost hear his toes curl as he explains: ‘There was a lot of sexual content in songs around then – I was just trying to get published. The album sold about nine copies. I’m pretty sure my mum bought all of them.’
If Brown’s music career was stalling, his romantic life was looking up. He and Blythe started dating and they married four years later, in 1997. It was while on holiday with Blythe that Brown had his eureka moment – reading Sidney Sheldon’s thriller The Doomsday Conspiracy, he decided he could do better and he wrote his first novel, Digital Fortress, in 1998. It sold poorly, as did his next two, ‘and then I wrote The Da Vinci Code. I thought: if this doesn’t work, then I’m going to have to do something else. I was writing about the Louvre and the Grail but it was Blythe who said I should write about Mary Magdalene too. I probably wouldn’t have written the book without her. She’s a great researcher.’
Brown is funny, sociable and thoroughly engaging company. He has his quirks, rising at 4am to write and occasionally strapping himself onto an inversion table to get the creative juices flowing. He also wears a disguise of baseball cap and sunglasses while researching his novels.
He admits that Robert Langdon ‘is a much better version of me. He’s much more daring and interesting and he’s smarter too’.
Like the myths Langdon explores however, there are some that Brown would like to dispel. ‘People think I’m a conspiracy theorist but I’m not – I’m just trying to raise intellectual curiosity. I believe 9/11 happened exactly the way it was reported, that Apollo 11 landed on the Moon and that Roswell, New Mexico, doesn’t have aliens.’ Nor is he an atheist.
‘I started as a devout Christian and I think I’m in my agnostic period; I readily admit that I’m confused. But when I lie underneath a star-filled sky, I just have the sense there’s something there that’s bigger than I am.’
After his Da Vinci Code experience, Brown is braced for more criticism with Origin.
‘We all have a bias against anything that becomes popular, so I understand the criticism. But I can’t lie – it hurt. I know I’m supposed to say I didn’t feel anything but it’s not true. I would have liked to have written a book everyone loved but that’s not the way the world works.’
He smiles. ‘I took it personally for a short time but it’s fine,’ he says. ‘I’m used to getting beat up.’
‘Every Christmas dad put clues under the tree leading to the presents