Second-guessing Dan Brown
Samanth Subramanian -
Thursday, February 26, 2009 5:17 PM
So reports have it that Dan Brown has finished his first book since The Da Vinci Code. The project had been named, tentatively, The Solomon Key, although that title will probably change. Whatever it's called, it's three years late -- but maybe selling 70 million-plus copies of your last book entitles you to take a year or three off.
Here's the puzzle, though. In September 2005, a writer named Greg Taylor published a book called The Guide to Dan Brown's The Solomon Key. How?! How do you write a guide to a book that hasn't even been released? Apparently by stalking the author online. The description of the book says: "[U]sing hints and clues left by Brown in interviews, on his website, and on the cover of The Da Vinci Code, Greg Taylor takes readers on an unprecedented tour of the new book before it is even released... The Guide to Dan Brown’s The Solomon Key explores the topics likely to be included in Brown’s upcoming bestseller... Maps of Washington, D.C. and a discussion of notable landmarks also acquaint the reader with the setting for the next Robert Langdon thriller."
If it's a little scary that an author and his publisher pre-empted a bestseller many years before its release, consider this: If you search for the words "solomon key" on Amazon, you'll find more than TEN books with those words in their title, all released after the working title of Brown's book was announced, all in some way hinting at vast Brownian conspiracy theories. This is, apparently, book-writing for our age -- not to actually write a book from scratch, but to write a book that can piggyback on somebody else's written-from-scratch book. Even if it hasn't yet been written.