Da Vinci Code Series Order

• The Da Vinci Code Series Order
• Dan Brown Books In Order

The piano music is insistent, melodramatic. The scene begins under a vaulted ceiling and medieval candelabra reminiscent of the Great Hall in Game of Thrones. The camera pans across a vintage typewriter, intricately sculpted animals, antique bowl, statuette of a monk and relief carvings of knights. It roves around a dimly lit, dark wood library. Suddenly, unexpectedly, a bookshelf swivels on its axis to reveal a secret passage.

Out steps the master of the page turner in blue shirt and jeans, his sleeves rolled up. He settles into a chair, leans against a red cushion, crosses his legs and smiles. A screen caption says: “Dan Brown Teaches Writing Thrillers.” Brown, who has shifted 250m copies of his novels and seen them translated into 56 languages, is the latest big name to join MasterClass, the online celebrity tutorial company (he is donating his fee to charity).

Despite the distinctly old-fashioned format – middle-aged white man dispensing wisdom direct to camera – this is Brown’s love letter to the creative process. The 54-year-old can’t tell you what idea to have, he says, but hopes to provide a roadmap on how to turn it into a story. His class includes chapters on finding that idea, choosing a location, creating heroes and villains, doing research (but not so much that it’s an excuse to procrastinate), creating suspense, writing dialogue and editing and rewriting.

Dan brown — series reading order (series list) — in order: angels & demons, the da vinci code, the lost symbol, inferno, digital fortress & the deception point! Mar 12, 2016 by BOOK CITY. The film series has a different chronological order than the novels, and consists of The Da Vinci Code (2006), Angels & Demons (2009) and Inferno (2016). Aug 16, 2011 - The Robert Langdon book series by Dan Brown consists of: Angels & Demons (2000) The Da Vinci Code (2003) The Lost Symbol (2009) Inferno (2013) Origin (2017).

The good news, Brown assures writers staring at a blank page, is that your idea does not have to be startlingly original. Ian Fleming’s James Bond, for example, always defuses the bomb and gets the girl. The key question is how he does it. “Every single idea has been done over and over and over,” Brown explains in the film. “You don’t need a big idea. You need big hows.”

Like parts of a car engine, the key elements of a thriller include a hero, a goal, obstacles that seem to make it impossible and, of course, a moment when the hero conquers the villain. Don’t get overcomplicated, Brown urges. “Build the foundation of your novel with a single brick: make it simple, make it easy to follow. Will Robert Langdon find the virus and save the world? Will Ahab catch the whale? Will the Jackal shoot his target?”

Among his first lessons are the three Cs: the contract, the clock, the crucible. “These are the elements that not just thrillers have but all stories have,” he explains at his publisher’s offices in New York. The contract is the promises made to the reader that have to be kept, so earn readers’ trust.

“The idea of a ticking clock: you go back to even something as gentle as The Bridges of Madison County. Her husband’s coming back in a few days and these two people have got to figure out if they’re going to be together. If they met in a town and there’s no husband coming back, and there’s no ticking clock, it’s not an interesting book.”

And the crucible? “That’s one of my favourites: this idea of constraining your characters and forcing them to act. If you look at the end of Jaws, you’ve got these people sinking on a boat and a shark’s coming toward them. The ocean’s their crucible: they can’t go anywhere, they have to deal with the problem. If they had a perfectly healthy boat and some big engines, they could just outrun the shark and the book’s over. But they’ve got the crucible.”

Teaching is in the Brown DNA. His parents were both in education: his father even went to the White House to pick up an award from George HW Bush. Teaching was one of Brown’s first jobs; he still looks the part in blue jacket, sweater and open-collared shirt. Writing fiction was a hobby and a hinterland.

He found that the classic lessons for budding authors – write with passion, keep your focus, show don’t tell – are all true but not especially helpful. A teacher told him: “Write what you know” when he was 16 and didn’t know much. So he came up with a solution: “Write what I want to know. I wrote a book called Deception Point about glaciology and Nasa. I didn’t know anything. I took a year and educated myself, which was part of the fun.”

His early books made little impact and he began to question whether he could make a career of it. But then he came up with The Da Vinci Code – in which Harvard code specialist Robert Langdon discovers a series of cryptic clues in the works of Leonardo – and thought it the exact book he would like to read; millions agreed. Published in 2003, it became one of the bestselling novels of all time and was turned into a film directed by Ron Howard and starring Tom Hanks.

Does success like that become a burden? “I definitely had a number of weeks when I became self-aware. You type a sentence and say: ‘Wait a minute, how many millions of people are going to read that?’ And you read it again and see the word ‘there’. You suddenly say: ‘I didn’t even spell that right.’ You become the guy trying to swing the baseball bat who’s thinking of how to move the muscles and you’re crippled.

“I think that’s very common across many disciplines when you have success. I was fortunate pretty quickly to be able to say: ‘Wait a minute, you just need to do what you did the last four times, which is to write the book that you’d want to read and if you read this paragraph and you’d like to read it, you’re done.’ I was able to move on from that and write The Lost Symbol, which I was thrilled with and did great and a lot of people like it better than Da Vinci Code.”

Brown cites Joseph Campbell as a literary influence and adores Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing. He hopes his class will help not only aspiring thriller writers but all storytellers. That is likely to produce a sceptical scoff from literary critics who regard him as a low-to-middle-brow merchant of the ludicrous. In a Guardian review, Mark Lawson described The Da Vinci Code as “450 pages of irritatingly gripping tosh” that is “preposterous and sloppy” but succeeds because it “offers terrified and vengeful Americans a hidden pattern in the world’s confusions”.

Brown is philosophical about the backlash. “Of course we’re all supposed to pretend we don’t read the reviews, or at least we don’t care. The reality is you want everybody to love what you do and, when it doesn’t happen, when you read a review – and certainly, especially, in your country there have been some pretty vicious reviews – you have to just sort of laugh and say well, OK, clearly this person doesn’t share my taste. You get past it at some point and you have to put the blinders on.

“I got great advice early on: if you read your reviews, the good ones will make you lazy, the bad ones will make you insecure, so just do what you do, you’ve proven that you know what you’re doing. There’s a portion of the population who will wait for my novels and say: ‘Oh my god, I love that.’ And there’s a portion that will just go: ‘Oh my god, not again, not that guy, I hate that guy.’ That’s OK, you write for the people who love you and the great thing about books is if you don’t like mine, there’s a million others published every year and you can find one you do like.”

It was not just its literary merits that caused controversy. Some complained that The Da Vinci Code was offensive to Christianity because of its depiction of Jesus marrying Mary Magdalene and fathering a child. It is another example of Brown’s tendency to run towards, rather than away from, the big questions. “The wonderful thing about controversy is that it creates dialogue and, as writers, I think that’s our job to say: ‘Here’s one way you can think about this, but here’s the other way you can think about it.’

“In the class I just try to say: ‘Look, you’ve got to write something that you’re passionate about, that really excites you.’ For me, personally, it’s good people doing the wrong thing for the right reasons, or bad people doing good things for the wrong reason. I like that moral grey area.”

Last year Brown published his eighth novel, Origin, about artificial intelligence. Does he think it is going to take over the world? “The answer’s yes and that’s something that scientists agree on. It is going to be enormously influential and where they disagree is whether or not we can control it, whether it will be used for good or evil, whether it is going to destroy us. I tend to be an optimist and the end of the novel is very optimistic about where we’re going with technology.”

Brown is often accused of being anti-religion, but prefers to describe himself as “definitely agnostic”. As he explains: “I don’t think I know enough to be an atheist. If you said: ‘Right now and you can’t get this wrong: is there a God?’, I’d say: ‘I don’t think so.’ But I’m also wide open to being proved wrong.

“There are enormous parts of the human experience and science that make no logical sense, no rational sense, and certainly imply that something else is going on. I would not be surprised to find that there is some good big thing. I would be very surprised to find that he’s a white male with a long beard who had a son named Jesus. The religions of the world have come up with some pretty interesting tales about where we came from and why we’re here. I don’t think any of them are true, but I’m open.

“People have asked me: ‘How does technology affect religion?’ I say enormously because when I was a little kid and they said this is what happened with Adam and Eve, you said OK. Now kids go, actually 97% of the world said that’s ridiculous. So the church has this challenge in getting its message out because there’s so much counter information that is accessible to young people.”

But technology has its downsides and Brown has had to become an expert in blocking it out, starting his day at 4am. “I try to get from the sleep state – the dream state – to my desk as fast as possible,” he explains. “The great thing about writing at 4am is really there’s nobody else writing you emails.

“I’ll sprint to the kitchen, grab a spinach smoothie and some coffee and get straight to my office and I’ll work for between six to nine hours depending on how much energy I have. A lot of it is editing what I wrote the day before, to see if it’s holding up. I might be outlining, I might be writing. It just sort of depends what that day requires.”

Brown uses an app that makes his computer screen go dark for one minute an hour, compelling him to take a break and do push-ups and sit-ups or hang upside-down, although he has had to give up wearing gravity boots. “My wife was very concerned that I would pull myself up into these gravity boots and not have the strength some day to get back and I’d just be hanging there for ever. So I now use an inversion table. I just find that it refreshes me so well: enormous amount of blood flow to the brain, spread your spine.”

Does he ever suffer from writer’s block? “The cure to writer’s block is to write. Write something bad that nobody will ever see. But that process will show you the way back to what’s good. I throw out about 10 pages for every one that I keep.”

What constitutes good might be less certain than ever. In the era when Donald Trump is the president of the United States, it is hard for fiction to keep up with reality. Trump is arguably more outlandish than any cartoon villain and it is not only Brown’s plots that are being called preposterous.

He reflects: “I was at the Frankfurt book fair and somebody asked me if I’d thought about writing about Trump. I said: ‘If I wrote The Trump Code, nobody would believe it.’ Reality has surpassed fiction. In my masterclass, if I said: ‘Hey, you know what, how’s this idea for a character?’, we would have to cut it out because it would make no sense. You would say: ‘Nobody acts like that, certainly nobody who could reach this station.’”

He insists he is not a political person but admits he is “pretty horrified” by the 45th president. He adds: “I think he’s a profound threat – less of a threat to the republic than he is to the honour of the presidency. The republic will survive: there are enough smart, levelheaded people on both sides of the aisle to keep the ship afloat. But he’s certainly damaged the reputation of the presidency and, to some degree, the country.”

Given Brown’s vast following, I suggest, he must have Trump voters among his readers? “I do,” he says. “It’s fascinating. You realise you really can’t be political. For me to say I’m not a fan of Trump to you publicly is probably professionally not that smart. But at some point you just say, ‘Well, that’s how I feel.’”

Dan Brown’s class is available at www.masterclass.com/DBr. Enrolment for the class is £85/$90 for lifetime access, or you can pay £170/$180for a year’s all-access pass, which grants unlimited access to all new and existing classes.

The Da Vinci Code is a 2003 mysterythriller novel by Dan Brown. It is Brown's second novel to include the character Robert Langdon: the first was his 2000 novel Angels & Demons. The Da Vinci Code follows 'symbologist' Robert Langdon and cryptologistSophie Neveu after a murder in the Louvre Museum in Paris causes them to become involved in a battle between the Priory of Sion and Opus Dei over the possibility of Jesus Christ having been a companion to Mary Magdalene.

The novel explores an alternative religious history, whose central plot point is that the Merovingiankings of France were descended from the bloodline of Jesus Christ and Mary Magdalene, ideas derived from Clive Prince's The Templar Revelation (1997) and books by Margaret Starbird. The book also refers to The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail (1982) though Dan Brown has stated that it was not used as research material.

The Da Vinci Code provoked a popular interest in speculation concerning the Holy Grail legend and Mary Magdalene's role in the history of Christianity. The book has, however, been extensively denounced by many Christian denominations as an attack on the Roman Catholic Church, and consistently criticized for its historical and scientific inaccuracies. The novel nonetheless became a worldwide bestseller^[1] that sold 80 million copies as of 2009^[2] and has been translated into 44 languages. In November 2004, Random House published a Special Illustrated Edition with 160 illustrations. In 2006, a film adaptation was released by Columbia Pictures.

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Plot[edit]

Louvre curator and Priory of Sion grand master Jacques Saunière is fatally shot one night at the museum by an albino Catholic monk named Silas, who is working on behalf of someone he knows only as the Teacher, who wishes to discover the location of the 'keystone,' an item crucial in the search for the Holy Grail.

After Saunière's body is discovered in the pose of the Vitruvian Man, the police summon Harvard professor Robert Langdon, who is in town on business. Police captain Bezu Fache tells him that he was summoned to help the police decode the cryptic message Saunière left during the final minutes of his life. The message includes a Fibonacci sequence out of order.

Langdon explains to Fache that Saunière was a leading authority on the subject of goddess artwork and that the pentacle Saunière drew on his chest in his own blood represents an allusion to the goddess and not devil worship, as Fache believes.

Sophie Neveu, a police cryptographer, secretly explains to Langdon that she is Saunière's estranged granddaughter, and that Fache thinks Langdon is the murderer because the last line in her grandfather's message, which was meant for Neveu, said 'P.S. Find Robert Langdon,' which Fache had erased prior to Langdon's arrival. However, 'P.S.' actually refers to Sophie, as the nickname given to her by her grandfather is 'Princess Sophie'. It does not refer to PostScript. Neveu is troubled by memories of her grandfather's involvement in a secret pagan group. However, she understands that her grandfather intended Langdon to decipher the code, which leads them to a safe deposit box at the Paris branch of the Depository Bank of Zurich.

Neveu and Langdon escape from the police and visit the bank. In the safe deposit box they find a box containing the keystone: a cryptex, a cylindrical, hand-held vault with five concentric, rotating dials labeled with letters. When these are lined up correctly, they unlock the device. If the cryptex is forced open, an enclosed vial of vinegar breaks and dissolves the message inside the cryptex, which was written on papyrus. The box containing the cryptex contains clues to its password.

Langdon and Neveu take the keystone to the home of Langdon's friend, Sir Leigh Teabing, an expert on the Holy Grail, the legend of which is heavily connected to the Priory. There, Teabing explains that the Grail is not a cup, but a tomb containing the bones of Mary Magdalene.

The trio then flees the country on Teabing's private plane, on which they conclude that the proper combination of letters spell out Neveu's given name, Sofia. Opening the cryptex, they discover a smaller cryptex inside it, along with another riddle that ultimately leads the group to the tomb of Isaac Newton in Westminster Abbey.

During the flight to Britain, Neveu reveals the source of her estrangement from her grandfather ten years earlier. Arriving home unexpectedly from university, Neveu secretly witnesses a spring fertility rite conducted in the secret basement of her grandfather's country estate. From her hiding place, she is shocked to see her grandfather with a woman at the center of a ritual attended by men and women who are wearing masks and chanting praise to the goddess. She flees the house and breaks off all contact with Saunière. Langdon explains that what she witnessed was an ancient ceremony known as hieros gamos or 'sacred marriage.'

By the time they arrive at Westminster Abbey, Teabing is revealed to be the Teacher for whom Silas is working. Teabing wishes to use the Holy Grail, which he believes is a series of documents establishing that Jesus Christ married Mary Magdalene and bore children, in order to ruin the Vatican. He compels Langdon at gunpoint to solve the second cryptex's password, which Langdon realizes is 'apple.' Langdon secretly opens the cryptex and removes its contents before tossing the empty cryptex in the air.

Teabing is arrested by Fache, who by now realizes that Langdon is innocent. Bishop Aringarosa, head of religious sect Opus Dei and Silas' mentor, realizing that Silas has been used to murder innocent people, rushes to help the police find him. When the police find Silas hiding in an Opus Dei Center, he assumes that they are there to kill him and he rushes out, accidentally shooting Bishop Aringarosa. Bishop Aringarosa survives but is informed that Silas was found dead later from a gunshot wound.

The final message inside the second keystone leads Neveu and Langdon to Rosslyn Chapel, whose docent turns out to be Neveu's long-lost brother, whom Neveu had been told died as a child in the car accident that killed her parents. The guardian of Rosslyn Chapel, Marie Chauvel Saint Clair, is Neveu's long-lost grandmother. It is revealed that Neveu and her brother are descendants of Jesus Christ and Mary Magdalene. The Priory of Sion hid her identity to protect her from possible threats to her life.

The real meaning of the last message is that the Grail is buried beneath the small pyramid directly below the La Pyramide Inversée, the inverted glass pyramid of the Louvre. It also lies beneath the 'Rose Line,' an allusion to 'Rosslyn.' Langdon figures out this final piece to the puzzle; he follows the Rose Line to La Pyramide Inversée, where he kneels to pray before the hidden sarcophagus of Mary Magdalene, as the Templar knights did before him.

Characters[edit]

Reaction[edit]

Sales[edit]

The Da Vinci Code was a major success in 2003 and was outsold only by J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix.^[3]

Historical inaccuracies[edit]

The book generated criticism when it was first published for inaccurate description of core aspects of Christianity and descriptions of European art, history, and architecture. The book has received mostly negative reviews from Catholic and other Christian communities.

Many critics took issue with the level of research Brown did when writing the story. The New York Times writer Laura Miller characterized the novel as 'based on a notorious hoax', 'rank nonsense', and 'bogus', saying the book is heavily based on the fabrications of Pierre Plantard, who is asserted to have created the Priory of Sion in 1956.

Critics accuse Brown of distorting and fabricating history. For example, Marcia Ford wrote:

Regardless of whether you agree with Brown's conclusions, it's clear that his history is largely fanciful, which means he and his publisher have violated a long-held if unspoken agreement with the reader: Fiction that purports to present historical facts should be researched as carefully as a nonfiction book would be.^[4]

Richard Abanes wrote:

The most flagrant aspect... is not that Dan Brown disagrees with Christianity but that he utterly warps it in order to disagree with it... to the point of completely rewriting a vast number of historical events. And making the matter worse has been Brown's willingness to pass off his distortions as ‘facts' with which innumerable scholars and historians agree.^[4]

The book opens with the claim by Dan Brown that 'The Priory of Sion—a French secret society founded in 1099—is a real organization'. This assertion is broadly disputed; the Priory of Sion is generally regarded as a hoax created in 1956 by Pierre Plantard. The author also claims that 'all descriptions of artwork, architecture, documents… and secret rituals in this novel are accurate', but this claim is disputed by numerous academic scholars expert in numerous areas.^[5]

Dan Brown himself addresses the idea of some of the more controversial aspects being fact on his web site, stating that the 'FACT' page at the beginning of the novel mentions only 'documents, rituals, organization, artwork and architecture', but not any of the ancient theories discussed by fictional characters, stating that 'Interpreting those ideas is left to the reader'. Brown also says, 'It is my belief that some of the theories discussed by these characters may have merit' and 'the secret behind The Da Vinci Code was too well documented and significant for me to dismiss.'^[6]

In 2003, while promoting the novel, Brown was asked in interviews what parts of the history in his novel actually happened. He replied 'Absolutely all of it.' In a 2003 interview with CNN's Martin Savidge he was again asked how much of the historical background was true. He replied, '99% is true… the background is all true'.

Asked by Elizabeth Vargas in an ABC News special if the book would have been different if he had written it as non-fiction he replied, 'I don't think it would have.'^[7]

In 2005, UK TV personality Tony Robinson edited and narrated a detailed rebuttal of the main arguments of Dan Brown and those of Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh and Henry Lincoln, who authored the book Holy Blood, Holy Grail, in the program The Real Da Vinci Code, shown on British TVChannel 4. The program featured lengthy interviews with many of the main protagonists cited by Brown as 'absolute fact' in The Da Vinci Code.

Arnaud de Sède, son of Gérard de Sède, stated categorically that his father and Plantard had made up the existence of the Prieuré de Sion, the cornerstone of the Jesus bloodline theory: 'frankly, it was piffle', noting that the concept of a descendant of Jesus was also an element of the 1999 Kevin Smith film, Dogma.

The earliest appearance of this theory is due to the 13th-century Cistercian monk and chronicler Peter of Vaux de Cernay who reported that Cathars believed that the 'evil' and 'earthly' Jesus Christ had a relationship with Mary Magdalene, described as his concubine (and that the 'good Christ' was incorporeal and existed spiritually in the body of Paul).^[8] The program The Real Da Vinci Code also cast doubt on the Rosslyn Chapel association with the Grail and on other related stories, such as the alleged landing of Mary Magdalene in France.

According to The Da Vinci Code, the Roman Emperor Constantine I suppressed Gnosticism because it portrayed Jesus as purely human. The novel's argument is as follows:^[9] Constantine wanted Christianity to act as a unifying religion for the Roman Empire. He thought Christianity would appeal to pagans only if it featured a demigod similar to pagan heroes. According to the Gnostic Gospels, Jesus was merely a human prophet, not a demigod. Therefore, to change Jesus' image, Constantine destroyed the Gnostic Gospels and promoted the gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, which portray Jesus as divine or semi-divine.

But Gnosticism did not portray Jesus as merely human.^[10] All Gnostic writings depict Christ as purely divine, his human body being a mere illusion (see Docetism).^[11] Gnostic sects saw Christ this way because they regarded matter as evil, and therefore believed that a divine spirit would never have taken on a material body.^[10]

Literacy criticism[edit]

The book received both positive and negative reviews from critics, and it has been the subject of negative appraisals concerning its portrayal of history. Its writing and historical accuracy were reviewed negatively by The New Yorker,^[12]Salon.com,^[13] and Maclean's.^[14]

Janet Maslin of The New York Times said that one word 'concisely conveys the kind of extreme enthusiasm with which this riddle-filled, code-breaking, exhilaratingly brainy thriller can be recommended. That word is wow. The author is Dan Brown (a name you will want to remember). In this gleefully erudite suspense novel, Mr. Brown takes the format he has been developing through three earlier novels and fine-tunes it to blockbuster perfection.'^[15]

David Lazarus of The San Francisco Chronicle said, 'This story has so many twists—all satisfying, most unexpected—that it would be a sin to reveal too much of the plot in advance. Let's just say that if this novel doesn't get your pulse racing, you need to check your meds.'^[16]

While interviewing Umberto Eco in a 2008 issue of The Paris Review, Lila Azam Zanganeh characterized The Da Vinci Code as 'a bizarre little offshoot' of Eco's novel, Foucault’s Pendulum. In response, Eco remarked, 'Dan Brown is a character from Foucault's Pendulum! I invented him. He shares my characters' fascinations—the world conspiracy of Rosicrucians, Masons, and Jesuits. The role of the Knights Templar. The hermetic secret. The principle that everything is connected. I suspect Dan Brown might not even exist.'^[17]

The Da Vinci Code Series Order

The book appeared on a 2010 list of 101 best books ever written, which was derived from a survey of more than 15,000 Australian readers.^[18]

Salman Rushdie said during a lecture, 'Do not start me on The Da Vinci Code. A novel so bad that it gives bad novels a bad name.'^[19]

Stephen Fry has referred to Brown's writings as 'complete loose stool-water' and 'arse gravy of the worst kind'.^[20] In a live chat on June 14, 2006, he clarified, 'I just loathe all those book[s] about the Holy Grail and Masons and Catholic conspiracies and all that botty-dribble. I mean, there's so much more that's interesting and exciting in art and in history. It plays to the worst and laziest in humanity, the desire to think the worst of the past and the desire to feel superior to it in some fatuous way.'^[21]

Stephen King likened Dan Brown's work to 'Jokes for the John', calling such literature the 'intellectual equivalent of Kraft Macaroni and Cheese'.^[22]The New York Times, while reviewing the movie based on the book, called the book 'Dan Brown's best-selling primer on how not to write an English sentence'.^[23]The New Yorker reviewer Anthony Lane refers to it as 'unmitigated junk' and decries 'the crumbling coarseness of the style'.^[12] Linguist Geoffrey Pullum and others posted several entries critical of Dan Brown's writing, at Language Log, calling Brown one of the 'worst prose stylists in the history of literature' and saying Brown's 'writing is not just bad; it is staggeringly, clumsily, thoughtlessly, almost ingeniously bad'.^[24]Roger Ebert described it as a 'potboiler written with little grace and style', although he said it did 'supply an intriguing plot'.^[25] In his review of the film National Treasure, whose plot also involves ancient conspiracies and treasure hunts, he wrote: 'I should read a potboiler like The Da Vinci Code every once in a while, just to remind myself that life is too short to read books like The Da Vinci Code.'^[25]

Lawsuits[edit]

Author Lewis Perdue alleged that Brown plagiarized from two of his novels, The Da Vinci Legacy, originally published in 1983, and Daughter of God, originally published in 2000. He sought to block distribution of the book and film. However, Judge George Daniels of the US District Court in New York ruled against Perdue in 2005, saying that 'A reasonable average lay observer would not conclude that The Da Vinci Code is substantially similar to Daughter of God' and that 'Any slightly similar elements are on the level of generalized or otherwise unprotectable ideas.'^[26] Perdue appealed, the 2nd US Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the original decision, saying Mr. Perdue's arguments were 'without merit'.^[27]

In early 2006, Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh filed suit against Brown's publishers, Random House. They alleged that significant portions of The Da Vinci Code were plagiarized from Holy Blood, Holy Grail, violating their copyright.^[28] Brown confirmed during the court case that he named the principal Grail expert of his story Leigh Teabing, an anagram of 'Baigent Leigh', after the two plaintiffs. In reply to the suggestion that Henry Lincoln was also referred to in the book, since he has medical problems resulting in a severe limp, like the character of Leigh Teabing, Brown stated he was unaware of Lincoln's illness and the correspondence was a coincidence.^[29] Since Baigent and Leigh had presented their conclusions as historical research, not as fiction, Mr Justice Peter Smith, who presided over the trial, deemed that a novelist must be free to use these ideas in a fictional context, and ruled against Baigent and Leigh. Smith also hid his own secret code in his written judgement, in the form of seemingly random italicized letters in the 71-page document, which apparently spell out a message. Smith indicated he would confirm the code if someone broke it.^[30] After losing before the High Court on July 12, 2006, they then appealed, unsuccessfully, to the Court of Appeal.^[29][31]

In April 2006 Mikhail Anikin, a Russian scientist and art historian working as a senior researcher at the Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg, stated the intention to bring a lawsuit against Dan Brown, maintaining that he was the one who coined the phrase used as the book's title and one of the ideas regarding the Mona Lisa used in its plot. Anikin interprets the Mona Lisa to be a Christian allegory consisting of two images, one of Jesus Christ that comprises the image's right half, one of the Virgin Mary that forms its left half. According to Anikin, he expressed this idea to a group of experts from the Museum of Houston during a 1988 René Magritte exhibit at the Hermitage, and when one of the Americans requested permission to pass it along to a friend Anikin granted the request on condition that he be credited in any book using his interpretation. Anikin eventually compiled his research into Leonardo da Vinci or Theology on Canvas, a book published in 2000, but The Da Vinci Code, published three years later, makes no mention of Anikin and instead asserts that the idea in question is a 'well-known opinion of a number of scientists.'^[32][33]

Parodies[edit]

• The book was parodied by Adam Roberts and Toby Clements with the books The Va Dinci Cod, and The Asti Spumante Code, respectively, both in 2005.
• A 2005 telemovie spin-off of the Australian television series Kath & Kim parodied the film version as Da Kath and Kim Code in 2005.
• The 2006 BBC program Dead Ringers parodied The Da Vinci Code, calling it the 'Da Rolf Harris Code'.
• South African political cartoonistZapiro published a 2006 book collection of his strips entitled Da Zuma Code, which parodies the former deputy presidentJacob Zuma.
• A 2006 independent film named The Norman Rockwell Code parodied the book and film. Instead of that of a curator in the Louvre, the murder is that of a curator at the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Massachusetts.
• The DiCaprio Code, a 2006, seven-part animated series by Movies.com and Scrapmation.
• The book was parodied in the 2007 South Park episode 'Fantastic Easter Special' and Robert Rankin's novel The Da-da-de-da-da Code.
• The characters Lucy and Silas are parodied in the 2007 film Epic Movie, which begins with a scene similar to the opening of The Da Vinci Code, with Silas chasing the orphan Lucy.
• Szyfr Jana Matejki (Jan Matejko's Cipher) is a 2007 Polish parody by Dariusz Rekosz. A sequel, Ko(s)miczna futryna: Szyfr Jana Matejki II (Co[s]mic Door-frame: Jan Matejko's Cipher II), was released in 2008. The main character is inspector Józef Świenty, who tries to solve The Greatest Secret of Mankind (Największa Tajemnica Ludzkości) – parentage of Piast dynasty.
• The book was parodied in the 2008 American Dad! episode 'Black Mystery Month', in which Stan Smith searches for the controversial truth that Mary Todd Lincoln invented peanut butter.
• In 2008, it was parodied in the second series of That Mitchell and Webb Look as 'The Numberwang Code', a trailer for a fictional film based on a recurring sketch on the show.
• The book's plot is parodied in 'The Duh-Vinci Code', an episode of the animated TV series Futurama.
• The book was parodied in the Mad episode 'Da Grinchy Code / Duck', in which the greatest movie minds try to solve the mystery of the Grinch.
• The book's theme of conspiracy theories is parodied in the 2007 MC Solaar single 'Da Vinci Claude'.

Release details[edit]

The book has been translated into over 40 languages, primarily hardcover.^[34] Major English-language (hardcover) editions include:

• The Da Vinci Code (1st ed.), US: Doubleday, April 2003, ISBN0-385-50420-9.
• The Da Vinci Code (spec illustr ed.), Doubleday, November 2, 2004, ISBN0-385-51375-5 (as of January 2006, has sold 576,000 copies).
• The Da Vinci Code, UK: Corgi Adult, April 2004, ISBN0-552-14951-9.
• The Da Vinci Code (illustr ed.), UK: Bantam, October 2, 2004, ISBN0-593-05425-3.
• The Da Vinci Code (trade paperback), US/CA: Anchor, March 2006.
• The da Vinci code (paperback), Anchor, March 28, 2006, 5 million copies.
• The da Vinci code (paperback) (special illustrated ed.), Broadway, March 28, 2006, released 200,000 copies.
• Goldsman, Akiva (May 19, 2006), The Da Vinci Code Illustrated Screenplay: Behind the Scenes of the Major Motion Picture, Howard, Ron; Brown, Dan introd, Doubleday, Broadway, the day of the film's release. Including film stills, behind-the-scenes photos and the full script. 25,000 copies of the hardcover, and 200,000 of the paperback version.^[35]

Film[edit]

Columbia Pictures adapted the novel to film, with a screenplay written by Akiva Goldsman, and Academy Award winner Ron Howard directing. The film was released on May 19, 2006, and stars Tom Hanks as Robert Langdon, Audrey Tautou as Sophie Neveu, and Sir Ian McKellen as Sir Leigh Teabing. During its opening weekend, moviegoers spent an estimated $77 million in America, and $224 million worldwide.^[36]

The movie received mixed reviews. Roger Ebert in its review wrote that 'Ron Howard is a better filmmaker than Dan Brown is a novelist; he follows Brown's formula (exotic location, startling revelation, desperate chase scene, repeat as needed) and elevates it into a superior entertainment, with Tom Hanks as a theo-intellectual Indiana Jones.' 'it's involving, intriguing and constantly seems on the edge of startling revelations.'

The film received two sequels: Angels & Demons, released in 2009, and Inferno, released in 2016. Ron Howard returned to direct both sequels.

See also[edit]

References[edit]

1. ^Wyat, Edward (November 4, 2005). 'Da Vinci Code' Losing Best-Seller Status'Archived October 12, 2013, at the Wayback Machine. The New York Times.
2. ^'New novel from Dan Brown due this fall'. San Jose Mercury News. Archived from the original on June 4, 2011. Retrieved January 4, 2011.
3. ^Minzesheimer, Bob (December 11, 2003). ''Code' deciphers interest in religious history'. USA Today. Archived from the original on January 10, 2010. Retrieved May 25, 2010.
4. ^ ^abFord, Marcia. 'Da Vinci Debunkers: Spawns of Dan Brown's Bestseller'. FaithfulReader. Archived from the original on May 27, 2004. Retrieved April 29, 2015.
5. ^'History vs The Da Vinci Code'. Retrieved February 3, 2009.
6. ^Kelleher, Ken; Kelleher, Carolyn (April 24, 2006). 'The Da Vinci Code' (FAQs). Dan Brown. Archived from the original on March 25, 2008. Retrieved February 3, 2009.
7. ^'Fiction'. History vs The Da Vinci Code. Retrieved February 3, 2009.
8. ^Sibly, WA; Sibly, MD (1998), The History of the Albigensian Crusade: Peter of les Vaux-de-Cernay's 'Historia Albigensis', Boydell, ISBN0-85115-658-4, Further, in their secret meetings they said that the Christ who was born in the earthly and visible Bethlehem and crucified at Jerusalem was 'evil', and that Mary Magdalene was his concubine – and that she was the woman taken in adultery who is referred to in the Scriptures; the 'good' Christ, they said, neither ate nor drank nor assumed the true flesh and was never in this world, except spiritually in the body of Paul. I have used the term 'the earthly and visible Bethlehem' because the heretics believed there is a different and invisible earth in which – according to some of them – the 'good' Christ was born and crucified.
9. ^O'Neill, Tim (2006), '55. Early Christianity and Political Power', History versus the Da Vinci Code, archived from the original on May 15, 2009, retrieved February 16, 2009.
10. ^ ^abO'Neill, Tim (2006), '55. Nag Hammadi and the Dead Sea Scrolls', History versus the Da Vinci Code, archived from the original on May 15, 2009, retrieved February 16, 2009.
11. ^Arendzen, John Peter (1913), 'Docetae', Catholic Encyclopedia, 5, New York: Robert Appleton, The idea of the unreality of Christ's human nature was held by the oldest Gnostic sects [...] Docetism, as far as at present known, [was] always an accompaniment of Gnosticism or later of Manichaeism.
12. ^ ^abLane, Anthony (May 29, 2006). 'Heaven Can Wait'Archived October 12, 2013, at the Wayback Machine. The New Yorker.
13. ^Miller, Laura (December 29, 2004). 'The Da Vinci crock'Archived September 18, 2011, at the Wayback Machine. Salon.com. Retrieved 2009-05-15.
14. ^Steyn, Mark (May 10, 2006) 'The Da Vinci Code: bad writing for Biblical illiterates'Archived June 11, 2013, at the Wayback Machine. Maclean's.
15. ^Maslin, Janet (March 17, 2003). 'Spinning a Thriller From a Gallery at the Louvre'Archived April 8, 2016, at the Wayback Machine.
16. ^Lazarus, David (April 6, 2003). ''Da Vinci Code' a heart-racing thriller'. San Francisco Chronicle.
17. ^Zanganeh, Lila Azam. 'Umberto Eco, The Art of Fiction No. 197'Archived October 6, 2016, at the Wayback Machine. The Paris Review. Summer 2008, Number 185. Retrieved 2012-04-27.
18. ^Yeoman, William (June 30, 2010), 'Vampires trump wizards as readers pick their best'(PDF), The West Australian, archived from the original(PDF) on August 4, 2011, retrieved March 24, 2011.
19. ^'Famed author takes on Kansas'. LJWorld. October 7, 2005. Archived from the original on August 30, 2009. Retrieved January 4, 2011.
20. ^'3x12', QI (episode transcript).
21. ^'Interview with Douglas Adams Continuum'. SE: Douglas Adams. Archived from the original on May 19, 2011. Retrieved January 4, 2011.
22. ^'Stephen King address, University of Maine'. Archive. Archived from the original on October 13, 2007. Retrieved January 4, 2011.
23. ^Sorkin, Aaron (December 30, 2010). 'Movie Review: The Da Vinci Code (2006)'. The New York Times. Retrieved January 4, 2011.
24. ^'The Dan Brown code', Language Log, University of Pennsylvania (also follow other links at the bottom of that page)
25. ^ ^abEbert, Roger. 'Roger Ebert's review'. Sun times. Archived from the original on October 10, 2012. Retrieved January 4, 2011.
26. ^'Author Brown 'did not plagiarise'Archived November 28, 2016, at the Wayback Machine, BBC News, August 6, 2005
27. ^'Delays to latest Dan Brown novel'Archived April 6, 2016, at the Wayback Machine, BBC News, April 21, 2006
28. ^'Judge creates own Da Vinci code'. BBC News. April 27, 2006. Archived from the original on September 5, 2007. Retrieved September 13, 2009.
29. ^ ^ab'Authors who lost 'Da Vinci Code' copying case to mount legal appeal'. Retrieved July 12, 2006.
30. ^'Judge rejects claims in 'Da Vinci' suit'. MSNBC. MSN. April 7, 2006. Archived from the original on July 6, 2006. Retrieved February 3, 2009.
31. ^'Judge rejects claims in 'Da Vinci' suit'. MSNBC. MSN. April 7, 2006. Archived from the original on July 6, 2006. Retrieved February 3, 2009.
32. ^Page, Jeremy. 'Now Russian sues Brown over his Da Vinski Code', The Sunday Times, April 12, 2006
33. ^Grachev, Guerman (April 13, 2006), 'Russian scientist to sue best-selling author Dan Brown over 'Da Vinci Code' plagiarism', Pravda, RU, archived from the original on October 7, 2012, retrieved May 13, 2011.
34. ^'World editions of The Da Vinci Code', Secrets (official site), Dan Brown, archived from the original on January 27, 2006.
35. ^'Harry Potter still magic for book sales', Arts, CBC, January 9, 2006, archived from the original on October 13, 2007.
36. ^'The Da Vinci Code (2006)'. Box Office Mojo. Archived from the original on May 13, 2013. Retrieved December 16, 2006.

Further reading[edit]

• Pullum, Geoffrey K. 'The Dan Brown code.'
• Schneider-Mayerson, Matthew.

External links[edit]

• The Da Vinci Code (official website), Dan Brown
• The Da Vinci Code (official website), UK: Dan Brown
• Mysteries of Rennes-le-Château
• The Da Vinci Code and Textual Criticism: A Video Response to the Novel, Rochester Bible, archived from the original on December 12, 2010
• Walsh, David (May 2006), 'The Da Vinci Code, novel and film, and 'countercultural' myth', WSWS (review)

Dan Brown Books In Order