The Dan Brown Enigma

by Graham A Thomas

  Baldwin then attacked Leigh’s assertion that the crucifixion was a fraud – the central theme of The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail – was also a central theme in The Da Vinci Code. As Baldwin pointed out, this idea didn’t appear anywhere in Brown’s novel.[203]

  Baldwin then pointed out that the section in The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail on the Knights Templar being formed as an administrative arm of the Priory of Sion and their destruction in the Middle Ages, Leigh had used the same wording of the facts as in other texts. Leigh replied, ‘The facts are common historical knowledge being expressed in straightforward language and could well look the same.’ He continued by telling the court, ‘Much of the wording is my own but there are certain turns of phrase that are in common use. If some phrases are not mine, it is something I liked sufficiently to hijack it.’

  Across the pond in America, the National Public Radio network were reporting on the case during their All Things Considered programme. They interviewed Katherine Rushton, a reporter for Bookseller magazine, who was covering the trial in London.[204]

  Rushton painted an interesting picture of the scene when Brown came to give his evidence. The courtroom was crammed, she told programme host Robert Siegel. Journalists from around the world were attending, along with conspiracy theorists and authors hoping to speak to the publishers, and with people fighting over the seats, the scene resembled a circus rather than a courtroom. Rushton said the conspiracy theorists would shake their heads whenever specific details from The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail were discussed by the judge as if they believed the truth was something different. ‘The judge, a large guy with this sort of big black walrus moustache, speaks very gently and inserts his own jokes, and he knows the subject as well,’ she said. ‘He’ll correct all the authors, on dates if he thinks they’ve got them wrong.’[205]

  When Siegel asked Rushton about the publicity aspects for both books, she said it had ‘gone through the roof.’ Rushton reported that the sales for The Da Vinci Code had gone up over the three-week trial by 54 per cent but the more amazing was that the sales of the non-fiction The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail had soared by 750 per cent. ‘It was registering before, now it’s right near the top of the charts,’ she said. ‘And The Da Vinci Code has just pushed past the four million mark here, which is huge.’[206]

  When asked by Siegel how the defence had dealt with the plaintiffs during cross-examination, Rushton replied that they regarded Baigent ‘as a disaster in the witness box, and either a fool, or he was deceiving the court.’

  On 13 March, the BBC News site reported on Brown’s testimony that day. Brown said the idea that he’d copied Baigent and Leigh’s work was ‘completely fanciful’. ‘I would like to restate that I remain astounded by the claimants’ choice to file this plagiarism suit,’ Brown continued. ‘For them to suggest, as I understand they do, that I have hijacked and exploited their work is simply untrue.’[207]

  Brown then stated that Blythe had done most of the research because of her passion for the Sacred Feminine and that it was difficult to know exactly which sources of information they used for the novel. ‘On the way, we met with historians and other academics and extended our travels from the Vatican and France to England and Scotland in order to investigate the historical underpinnings of the novel,’ he said.[208]

  According to the BBC News article Brown appeared to be nervous when he was on the witness stand. Instead of his normal tweed jacket and black polo neck shirts, he had gone for a suit and tie. ‘But he was playful with the courtroom and at times he was laughing and even cracking mild jokes.’[209]

  The same day another piece on the trial, by David Sillito, appeared on the BBC News web pages, written from the perspective of a journalist expecting dramatic revelations from Brown on the witness stand. ‘This was a day of high expectations dashed by legal reality,’ Sillito wrote. Court 61 was packed to the rafters and he could not get in for the first 15 minutes of testimony but as the case got bogged down in the legal reality it began to thin out.[210]

  The journalists were out for a dramatic story but Brown, Sillito claimed, had been jostled by reporters on his first day in court and this time he came in via the side entrance looking ‘far from the “jostled” and “harassed” author of his witness statement. Tanned, smiling and confident, he appeared just how a multi-millionaire author should,’ Sillito wrote.

  But once the cross-examination began it became clear that there would be little drama in the courtroom that day. ‘It began with an interchange about his computers and then carried on with the details of how his wife, Blythe, would pass on information to him and how he would disagree with her over what was included in the book.’[211]

  There was then a long debate over margins and how each piece of information researched by Brown appeared in The Da Vinci Code. While it was not the gripping courtroom drama the journalists were looking for, it was very important for the court to hear when Brown got to know about information that appeared in the book, The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail.

  Sillito’s piece called Brown’s witness statement a ‘masterclass for anyone who might want to write a blockbuster.’ He continued by saying that Brown ‘often wrote his final chapter first and that he then tries to get his characters to reach that end point within the 24 hours within which he sets his books.’

  In his statement Brown explained that it was Blythe who came up with many of the ideas for the novel and passed them on to him to include in his writing. Brown then claimed that while the Baigent and Leigh book had been important for research purposes, he hadn’t gotten the ideas from it. ‘He said he hadn’t even finished the book which he said was “hard to read”,’ Sillito wrote. ‘However, he had acknowledged the book’s importance by mentioning it in The Da Vinci Code.’

  The following day the BBC posted another story as Brown took the stand again. The lawyer for Baigent and Leigh, Jonathan Rayner James, accused Brown of having purchased a copy of The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail before he stated he had in his witness statement. Brown denied this, saying that he had not included it in the biography of the synopsis for The Da Vinci Code. ‘That is the clear piece of evidence to me that The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail was not around when I wrote the synopsis.’ If he’d had the book when he was writing the synopsis, the author continued, he would have included it in the bibliography ‘as it would have impressed his publishers.’

  Rayner James countered by pointing out that Brown had listed it as ‘essential reading in another book he’d written before the synopsis for The Da Vinci Code.’[212]

  ‘I had everything I needed for that synopsis,’ Brown replied. ‘I’m looking at the big picture, not the details.’

  Though Brown said the book had not been used while preparing his synopsis for the novel, he did admit he used the book while writing The Da Vinci Code but added that ‘it was used as one of several sources and I did not use its central themes.’

  ‘I have never been shy about saying The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail is part of this,’ Brown continued. ‘The whole Teabing section of the book – those are the sorts of snippets of information that The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail is very good on.’[213]

  The following day, The Washington Post ran a lengthy story by Kevin Sullivan, who added the detail that a court clerk had approached the author while he was still in the witness box just as the court was recessing for lunch, to get him to sign her copy of The Da Vinci Code.[214]

  ‘Hour after hour,’ Sullivan wrote, ‘Brown seemed to struggle to answer the questions of the claimants’ attorney, Jonathan Rayner James, who, like the judge and the other attorneys, wore an august black robe and a white wig with Shirley Temple curls.’

  Being as helpful and polite as he could, Brown told Rayner James he was having difficulty understanding his line of questioning. ‘I’m not quite sure what the point is here – what I’m being asked,’ Brown said. ‘It is as if you have asked me to go back five years or 10 years and asked me not only what I got f
or Christmas, but what order I opened the presents.’

  Sullivan reported that Brown seemed ‘utterly stumped by one question about his research’ for the novel. ‘I couldn’t possibly tell you the exact date I learned that Mary Magdalene was not a prostitute,’ Brown said.[215]

  Most of the questioning by Rayner James was based on Brown’s witness statement, in which the author asserted that he’d never heard of The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail until he had already established the major themes of The Da Vinci Code from numerous other books and extensive research by himself and his wife, Blythe Brown. He added that he didn’t write in books in the same way that Blythe did, and that she had frequently marked up texts for him to read.

  Rayner James then asked Brown to look through some of the marked-up research books and identify which marks had been made by him and which ones had been made by Blythe. Drawing Brown’s attention to a particular section where a star had been drawn, Rayner James asked the author, ‘is this the kind of star your wife might make, or would she draw some other kind of star and if so, what kind of star might that be?’

  Wearily, Brown replied, ‘It’s a star like anybody else would draw.’

  For Katherine Rushton of Bookseller magazine, the trial’s high point came when Rayner James attacked Brown because Blythe wasn’t at the court. ‘She conducted a lot of the research for The Da Vinci Code,’ Rushton commented to NPR, ‘and they say – and in fact the judge agreed – she would have been a very useful witness to have in the trial.’

  As the case drew to its conclusion, BBC News posted another story on 17 March 2006 quoting Mr Baldwin QC as saying that the claims against Brown were a ‘travesty’ and that there was no evidence to support them. In his summing up, Baldwin told the court that the ideas contained in The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail were not original and too general for them to be covered by copyright. He said that Brown had shown that the book, The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail didn’t have ‘anything like the importance to Mr Brown’s book that the authors had claimed.’[216]

  Baldwin went on to say Brown had written his synopsis before he’d read The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail and that the claimants’ case was now in tatters. ‘It is true that Mr Brown cannot recollect exactly which source or sources he used for any particular point. But since his clear evidence was that he did consult the sources he referred to and this evidence was not challenged, the court cannot conclude that he copied The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail.’[217]

  Baldwin then told the court that even if Brown had lifted the ideas from Baigent and Leigh, they would still have lost the case because the themes and ideas were too general to be protected under copyright. ‘Many of the ideas complained of were not original to The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail. They were merely copied from others.’ The claimants, he said, had done the same thing they were accusing Brown of.

  On 8 April 2006 Cahal Milmo reported in The Independent that Mr Justice Peter Smith had thrown out Baigent and Leigh’s claim that Brown had plagiarised The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail. After reading both books and the subsequent legal arguments, he had decided that there was no evidence to support these claims, and that they had pulled out ‘a number of facts and ideas from the book for the purpose of the court case.’

  The judge did find that Brown had copied some of the text from Baigent and Leigh’s non-fiction book. Brown had ‘insisted his attention had only been brought to The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail by his wife and researcher, Blythe, in the closing stages of writing The Da Vinci Code’, but the judge said that his claim not to have used ‘his well-thumbed copy of the book’ early on in the process of writing The Da Vinci Code was ‘untenable’. [218] But the authors of The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail were told that there was ‘no evidence that Mr Brown had infringed their copyright, and thus dented their bank balances, by appropriating the central theme of their book for his unashamedly populist potboiler, which has sold 40 million copies worldwide.’[219]

  The judge added that it wasn’t for him to judge the two books’ literary merit and the truth of the facts they presented. However, he supposed that in the case of The Da Vinci Code, ‘40 million buyers cannot be wrong.’

  To make matters worse, Mr Justice Peter Smith savaged Baigent and Leigh in his judgement. He called Baigent a ‘poor witness’ stating that the evidence he brought against Brown had been completely destroyed.

  Baigent and Leigh claimed afterwards that although they hadn’t won the case, the moral victory was theirs. Leigh stated that the case had been about the spirit and letter of the law. They had lost on the letter but won on the spirit ‘and to that extent we are vindicated.’[220]

  But in the end, all that Baigent and Leigh had to show for their experience in court was a legal bill for almost £2 million. For their first payment of £350,000 both authors had to start cashing in their assets. It was a terrible time for them both.

  In Kennedy’s article in The Guardian Baigent said he’d expected other authors to rally round them and provide support but all they got was silence. Perhaps it was because people perceived them as trying to get their hands on some of Brown’s millions, a claim that Baigent hotly denied. But then he would, wouldn’t he? As for doing it for extra publicity, he told Kennedy that they would need to sell upwards of nine million copies of The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail to pay the legal fees. ‘But what have writers got except the intellectual copyright in their work?’ Baigent asked. ‘We’ve done very well – not as well as Dan Brown, but very well – so we could afford to stand up to one of the biggest publishers in the world, and so we had to. I believe that the protection for all writers has been seriously weakened, in Britain at least, by this judgment.’[221]

  In fact Baigent and Leigh went on to launch an appeal against the decision Justice Smith had handed down. But on 29 March 2007 the Court of Appeal threw out their case, leaving the two authors with a combined legal bill of £3 million.[222]

  In an interesting footnote, during the trial the Associated Press agency ran a story on Stan Planton, the now retired head librarian at Ohio University-Chillicothe, who had helped Brown research The Da Vinci Code. Planton said that a mutual friend had put him in contact with the author in 1998. At that time Brown had been a struggling, unknown writer, and he had just been doing his job as a librarian helping an individual locate the information they needed. His contact had been limited to emails helping him ‘on the lineage of French kings and other minor details.’ He added that he hadn’t saved any of his emails and that he knew that Blythe did much of the research for the book.[223]

  But if Brown thought his legal troubles were over, he was mistaken. Just days after the Old Bailey trial had concluded, more bad news arrived. On 14 April 2006 BBC News reported that a Russian art historian had jumped on the ‘sue Dan Brown bandwagon’. Accusing the author of plagiarism, Mikhail Anikin from St Petersburg claimed that Brown had stolen his idea that Leonardo da Vinci was also a theologian and that he had painted the Mona Lisa as an allegory to the Christian Church. Anikin demanded an apology and compensation.[224]

  The basis of Anikin’s claim was that he, a Da Vinci expert, had told his colleagues at a museum in Houston Texas of his ideas about Da Vinci back in 1998. Brown’s book had been published in 2003. Anikin told the Agence France Presse that he had agreed only if the author in question acknowledged that the idea had come from him.

  Brown’s reaction to the case was reported in a piece published on the BBC News web pages on 24 April 2006, when he said that people ‘should let the biblical scholars and historians battle it out.’[225]

  The case was eventually dropped, so Brown was able to move on. After an arduous trial and many months of poring over the research sources he and Blythe had used, Brown had won the plagiarism case and now all of that was behind him. The controversy around The Da Vinci Code was dying down and at this stage he no longer needed to hit the promotion trail and do all the talk shows. Now he could get back to researching and writing his fifth novel. Destined for
release in 2007, it would not be finished for another two years.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  * * *

  THE DA VINCI CODE

  The mystery is: how on earth did this ever become the world’s top bestseller, making Dan Brown the world’s wealthiest author? This, to many, is the book’s great secret.[226]

  After looking at the controversy, the court cases and the anger surrounding The Da Vinci Code, let’s consider the book itself. What is it that has made this book the most popular novel of all time?

  The book has sold more than 80 million copies worldwide. It has been translated into 44 languages and, at the time of writing, is the bestselling English language novel of the 21st century. Perhaps it just comes down to the fact that it is a good story, well told.

  Essentially, the book is a detective-mystery thriller following the hero, symbologist Robert Langdon and his colleague Sophie Neveu as they investigate the murder of the curator of the Louvre museum in Paris. They discover two secret societies, Opus Dei and the Priory of Sion, locked in a life-and-death struggle over the possibility that Jesus of Nazareth had been married to Mary Magdalene and they’d had a child, whose descendants are with us today.

  The code of Brown’s novel centres on the way the murder victim died. He is found stripped naked in the Denon Wing of the Louvre, his body posed like that of the Leonardo da Vinci drawing The Vitruvian Man. On the floor beside the body, scrawled in special ink that can only be seen under a black or ultraviolet light, is a cryptic code and on the victim’s stomach is a pentacle drawn in his blood.