Dan Brown in a London courtroom acknowledged "reworking" passages from an earlier book for his best-selling novel "The Da Vinci Code," but he firmly rejected charges that he ripped off key ideas for his conspiracy thriller. The author spent a third day defending his work against a copyright infringement suit brought by Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh, authors of a 1982 nonfiction book, "The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail."
The suit is not against Brown, but his publisher Random House, which also published "The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail." Random House denies the claims, and Brown says the assertion that he copied is "completely fanciful." "I'm not crazy about the word 'copied,'" Brown testified. "Copying implies it is identical. It's not identical." Brown said "The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail" was "one of the books in the mix" when he and his wife, Blythe Brown, were researching the novel.He acknowledged "reworking" passages from the earlier book. "That's how you incorporate research into a novel," Brown said.
Both books explore theories — dismissed by theologians — that Jesus married Mary Magdalene, the couple had a child and the bloodline survives. The lawyer for the plaintiffs, Jonathan Rayner James, spent the morning citing passages from "The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail" that he said had near equivalents in "The Da Vinci Code." "I'm sorry, again, I have to disagree," said Brown, who appeared frustrated at the attorney's painstaking and sometimes repetitive questioning. "These are points of history that were available in a lot of other books we were using."
If Baigent and Leigh succeed in securing an injunction to bar the use of their material, they could hold up the scheduled May 19 film release of "The Da Vinci Code," starring Tom Hanks.
"The Da Vinci Code" has sold more than 40 million copies since its release three years ago, and has turned Brown, 41, into a literary superstar. Brown testified Tuesday that he was certain he and his wife, who conducts much of his research, had read "The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail" only after he had submitted his synopsis for the novel that would become "The Da Vinci Code" to his agent in January 2001. "I think it would be very unlikely that Blythe would be reading it without my knowledge," Brown said. "I'm very doubtful that she would buy it and I wouldn't know."
Brown has acknowledged that they read "The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail" while researching "The Da Vinci Code," but said they also used 38 other books and hundreds of documents, and that the British authors' book was not crucial to their work. But in cross-examination and his 69-page witness statement, he dropped a few handy hints on how to become a successful author of code-based thrillers.
You have to have a mathematically minded father, who, instead of leaving your childhood Christmas presents under the tree, makes you solve puzzles and anagrams to find them. You need a wife sufficiently enthused to undertake mountains of research, annotate her findings and put them on your computer. Blythe Brown, who is not in court, is that woman.
Then you have to find the right location. Brown once considered setting a thriller in Canada but found Nova Scotia lacking in mystery. He had been far more enthused, during a holiday in Rome, by a tour of the Vatican and by finding a secret exit through which a pope could escape from his enemies. The secrets of the Eternal City inspired his next novel Angels and and Demons. “Location is a character. After that trip I decided the Vatican would make a great character, ” Brown said.
After that, you have to have the Big Idea. In "The Da Vinci Code" , Brown said, that was the Sacred Feminine, or goddess worship, a notion he claims he first came across in a book called The Woman with the Alabaster Jar, and not "The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail" . Having had the Big Idea, Brown began to construct a framework for a plot. “The ideas are the easy part; ideas are everywhere. The hard part is getting the ideas to work as a novel,” he said. He sent a synopsis to his agent and suggested two more thrillers on the same theme, provisionally called The Botticelli Code and The Nostradamus Code.
Unwilling to give a precise order in which he consulted his sources, Brown explained that an author was likely to refer backwards and forwards between sources. Sometimes material emerged which set the plot in a new direction. Brown said that one of the themes of DVC was “secret history”, those parts of the past lost or twisted by historical revision or subversion. “I like to write in grey areas; I don’t like the idea of black and white, right and wrong.”
At first he had been unwilling to introduce the idea of Jesus’s bloodline into "The Da Vinci Code" because he found it “too incredible and too inaccessible”. But his wife persuaded him to adopt the theme, which he had read about in many sources before "The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail" . His statement added: “I remain astounded by the claimants’ choice to file this plagiarism suit. For them to suggest . . . that I have ‘hijacked and exploited’ their work is simply untrue.”
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