Codes and Codas

by Steven Zeitchik. PW Daily -- Publishers Weekly, 9/16/2005

Codes and Codas

Publishing piggyback on a bestseller became a book-industry obsession after The Da Vinci Code, as dozens of books broke, cracked and otherwise deciphered Dan Brown.

But now the bestselling author is inspiring a more unusual subgenre—an analysis of the books Brown has yet to publish.

It sounds like an Onion headline, but two books now look not to Brown's past but to his future—or, rather, they look to his past so they can look to his future.

Secrets of the Widow's Son: The Mysteries Surrounding the Sequel to the Da Vinci Code by David Shugarts (with a foreword by leading Brownologist Dan Burstein), out from Sterling this week, is the more ambitious effort.It's a parsing of fansites and Brown interviews as well as of the themes that seem to preoccupy the author in earlier books. Brown himself gets a treatment normally reserved for late, great thinkers ("It appears Brown has read and studied a variety of occult theories of Western cultural history") while material in previous books is "reverse-engineered" to determine where he's going, both with the Freemasons in The Solomon Key and beyond.

It's essentially a fansite in book form, albeit a scholarly one. (The title, by the way, is based on a popular fan morsel of reading bolded letters in his blurbs to spell out "Is there no help for the Widows Son?")

Earlier this year, the little-known Daily Grail Press brought out Da Vinci in America: Unlocking the Secrets of Dan Brown's The Solomon Key, another speculative effort. Like the Sterling title, it also looks at Brown's research and takes a tour through the Freemasons. It comes with the chronologically jolting pitch "Read this book before you buy the Solomon Key."

The actual publication date of that book, meanwhile, remains a mystery. Given Sterling's corporate ownership one might be tempted to read a juicy clue of a different sort into the fall pub of what is essentially a Solomon Key tie-in. But anyone looking for clues inside Burstein/Shugarts title will be disappointed (though Burstein notes, oddly, that there is a"remote possibility" that all the delays mean the book won’t come out at all). And Doubleday remains mum, despite continued reason to believe that the book will come out this year—before the Da Vinci Code movie and presumed paperback hits in the spring.

On a less mysterious note, this is the last issue of PW Daily we'll be writing/editing, at least as a full-time staffer, before heading to Reed sister pub Variety. We've been, um, helming this newsletter for a while now—in fact, we're just a week shy of the newsletter's fourth anniversary (which is also, incidentally, the fourth anniversary of the first-ever in-print reference to J-Franz).

Back when it started, a scant two weeks after 9/11, the newsletter had a text-only incarnation (using m-dashes to create art?) and was called PW NewsLine; today it lives a slicker life as the mostly HTML PW Daily. Of course the format is sort of beside the point. What's most important is how great these past four years have been. Not just because they've offered the chance to cover a complicated and wonderful industry--or the ability to slip in Paris Hilton references unfettered—but because of the tremendous feedback it's brought from the publishing industry.

It would be too easy to describe the newsletter as a community, but the fact remains that the chance to hear all sorts of readers opine, joke, chide and otherwise engage with this little corner of the online world have made it a fantastic experience, and forgive us for feeling a little choked up about leaving it. As we write this last issue, we can only look back at the past four years and hope we’ve been a fraction as informative and entertaining to you as you've been to us. And to remember, of course, that we'll always have Paris.—Steven Zeitchik