From The Times
August 15, 2009
The key to Dan Brown’s success
Critics hate him, readers devour him, publishers are in awe of his Midas touch. As the clock ticks down to Dan Brown’s latest opus, we unlock the mystery of how an Elton John wannabe became the defining author of our time
Story by Andrew Collins

The famous man looked at the wooden lectern. On May 7, 2005, the horror author Stephen King gave the commencement address to graduates at the University of Maine, his home state. In it, he half-joked: “If I show up at your house in ten years from now ... and find nothing on your bedroom night table but the newest Dan Brown novel ... I’ll chase you to the end of your driveway, screaming, ‘Where are your books? Why are you living on the intellectual equivalent of Kraft Macaroni & Cheese?’ ”
An interesting analogy from a writer who endured a long critical ice age, during which his own books would sell by the million but pass unnoticed in the posh papers’ book sections. In 1982, in an afterword to the anthology Different Seasons, King referred to his own work as “the literary equivalent of a Big Mac and large fries”, which makes this a unique case of the burger calling the macaroni cheese junk.

As I write, we are 35 days, 12 hours, 20 minutes and 11 seconds away from the internationally synchronised publication on September 15 of Dan Brown’s next helping of processed slop, The Lost Symbol. (The title is, according to one source, as “opaque as possible” to deter pre-emptive companions, guides and rip-offs.

When it was initially announced as The Solomon Key in 2006, several publishers rushed out books about King Solomon’s book of magic.) The book’s official website provides a continuous countdown, while designated Twitter and Facebook pages drip-feed clues about its content to the faithful (a photograph of a Greek monastery, a Google Map of Waterloo Bridge in London, and riddles such as, “12in across and 5ft high, bound in silver and fallen from the sky, that a pilgrim should kiss once in his life”).

It is six years since Brown’s career-making fourth novel The Da Vinci Code , which changed the face of fiction publishing, spent 68 weeks at No 1 in The Sunday Times bestseller lists, 120 in the Top Ten, and was crowned the UK’s biggest-selling paperback novel yet, with its predecessors slotting neatly in at 2, 3 and 4. The Lost Symbol will have a global first print run of 6.5 million copies, the largest in the history of Random House. Anticipation and speculation are running at Harry Potter levels.

In The Da Vinci Code, the Harvard “symbologist” Robert Langdon (now universally imprinted as Tom Hanks after two hit movies, despite being described as “Harrison Ford in Harris tweed” in the book) chases around Paris and London on a quest to decode a series of art-historical and numerical riddles before a dirty, centuries-old Roman Catholic secret about Mary Magdalene is deleted for ever. Despite its huge success — 81 million copies now in print — critics, commentators and contemporaries have fallen over themselves to damn Brown with not-even-faint praise.
Viewed through the prism of the media, his record-breakingly popular novels are universally condemned as dishonest tat. John Humphrys, denizen of the Today programme, called The Da Vinci Code “the literary equivalent of painting by numbers, by an artist who can’t even stay within the lines”. Mark Lawson, who at least gave it house room in The Guardian, spoke of “450 pages of irritatingly gripping tosh”. Salman Rushdie told those attending a lecture in Kansas in 2005 that The Da Vinci Code is “a novel so bad that it gives bad novels a bad name”. On an edition of QI, BBC Two’s comedy-panel quiz show, Stephen Fry pooh-poohed it as “loose-stool water”.

Read the rest of Andrew Collins story at The Times online.