Crime Beat

The Dan Brown phenomenon is, well, just that, a phenomenon. There is no way of understanding it: he simply sells millions of books. Opinions about Dan Brown’s work differ widely but here are two responses from international thriller writers Joe Moore and John Ramsey Miller which originally appeared on their blog, The Kill Zone. And following them is a short extract from a piece Adam Gopnik wrote in The New Yorker. But before any of that here are two devastating sentences from Brown’s The Lost Symbol.

In the heat of the moment, Capitol police officer Nunez had seen no option but to help the Capitol Architect and Robert Langdon escape. Now, however, back in the basement police headquarters, Nunez could see the storm clouds gathering fast. Don’t you just love ‘heat of the moment’ and the gathering of storm clouds!

Take 1: Joe Moore on Dan Brown:
So what does this publication mean for us thriller authors? The way I see it, if all of us are ships in a naval battle group, The Lost Symbol is the admiral’s flagship aircraft carrier pulling us in its wake, setting the course, and identifying the potential destination. When TDC came along, it created a whole new cottage industry of thrillers that contained secret societies, lost treasures, relics, scientific and religious conflicts, and other like-minded themes. I know that for me, it helped build interest in four of my novels. But in the bigger picture, it created a hunger. Just like Indiana Jones movies renewed an interest in the dark side of the 1930s-1950s, the Nazi, religious antiquity, and archaeology, Dan Brown and his books have continued to feed that hunger. A hunger that will potentially spill over to other books and writers. Because, once readers finish The Lost Symbol, hopefully they’ll be hungry for more. The void must be filled.

I’m excited not only for Dan Brown, but for all thriller authors. This guy is shooting full-court 3-pointers, but the thriller team is ultimately the winner.

Take 2: John Ramsey Miller on Dan Brown:
I am happy for Dan Brown, I’m happy for his publisher, Random House, and I’m happy for his broker. I think he deserves his success, even if I do not fully understand it. None of us knows what readers will hit on, but I do know that chasing a wildly successful book by taking the elements you feel are what struck the chord with the audience is usually a waste of good keystrokes. I don’t think most people can write what they don’t feel and hit home runs with an audience. You know what sells? Entertainment. I can break that down. Readers want to feel good, to know their dreams can be realized, that they can escape reality by getting involved, that good kicks evil’s wide ass, and that hope exists despite a great deal of evidence to the contrary.

The thing about Dan Brown is that his work isn’t a fluke. About anytime a writer is successful, critics pick at his style, impugn his accuracy, and generally rain poo-poo on his ability. Dan Brown is into his story, cares about his characters, and likes slaying giants. Brown is a great writer, and his financial rewards are well deserved because it is a gift to Mr. Brown for what he is offering them in exchange. Maybe Dan Brown won’t win an Edgar, or the ITW for best novel, or any other rewards his contemporaries can bestow. Like so many great commercially successful artists jealousy keeps those prizes away. But authors like Dan Brown, Tom Clancy, JK Rowling, John Grisham, James Patterson, Stephen King, Stephanie Meyer, and Dan Brown, the people are voting, and they are voting yes, yes, yes. When millions of people think you are a great writer, the Nobel, Pulitzer committee, and the critics are irrelevant and should be. Would you rather have a line of awards on your bookshelves, or some producer from the Today show begging you for the fifteenth time to make an appearance, or a Gulfstream V taking you and your family to Europe so you can watch your book being filmed. For most authors I know, it isn’t even close. Of course, all of the above would be heaven.

Take 3: Adam Gopnik on Dan Brown:
It’s easy to pastiche Brown’s prose with its infectious italics (’What the hell is going on?!’ [not to mention question mark, exclamation mark – ed]) and its action-prodding, single-sentence paragraphs. (‘Langdon stared in horror.’ [Okay, we’re all guilty of that, goes with the territory - ed.]) The clichés line up outside the dust jacket and are whisked in pairs to a table down front. [See the above example.] Add Brown’s habit of inventing where no invention is needed – there are no departments of ‘symbology’, but there are departments of semiotics, where Langdon would fit right in – and you have a surface less commercially calculated than genuinely eccentric.

And well meaning. The Lost Symbol with all its ritual murders and fearsome amputations and ‘My God!’s around every margin – is an amazingly nice book. The text regularly lurches to a stop, with the generosity of a third-grade teacher on a class museum outing, offering bits of research and history. Much of it bogus, to be sure – though modern Masonry borrowed some oogah-boogah from the Egyptian past… But Brown is having fun.