Thriller instinct

Little more than a year since it began, the phenomenon of "The Da Vinci Code" shows no sign of abating. The theological thriller by New Hampshire's Dan Brown is still selling an astonishing 80,000 to 90,000 hard-cover copies per week. Last week, the book went into its 56th printing, bringing the number of copies in print to 7.35 million.

Where "The Da Vinci Code" will ultimately rank in sales is unknown, but its publisher believes there's never been a bigger adult seller over such a short time. "The only thing we can find that has come near was `The Bridges of Madison County' in 1992, which sold 6 million in two years," says Stephen Rubin, president and publisher of Doubleday.

"The Da Vinci Code" has been at or near the top of The New York Times hard-cover bestseller list for 58 weeks -- it is No. 1 tomorrow. Last week, it was No. 2 on Amazon.com and No. 1 on the Publisher's Weekly list. Brown's 2001 novel, "Angels and Demons," has been on the Times hard-cover fiction list for 17 weeks (No. 6 tomorrow), and his two other novels are on the paperback fiction list.

But not everybody is happy about the success of "The Da Vinci Code." As sales have soared, several books by Christian writers have appeared, disputing the book's picture of early and recent Christianity, and its revisionist view of Christian doctrines. Some historians find it disquieting that many readers apparently have taken the novel's historical motifs as facts.

Brown is writing a sequel to "The Da Vinci Code," tentatively due

next year, and declined to be interviewed. But the portrait that emerges from published accounts, his website, and friends and editors, is one of a fairly shy writer, a married, 38-year-old former high school teacher from southern New Hampshire who wrote three modestly received novels, then stumbled into superstardom with the fourth. "He's an extremely charming, very smart, preppy guy," says Rubin, "like the college professor you never had. He's impossible not to like."

Jason Kaufman, his longtime editor and close friend, says Brown has managed to keep his sanity, and continue writing in the midst of his fantastic success. "He is the same person he was two years ago," Kaufman says. "It's harder for him to walk down the street, but he is remarkably levelheaded about his life."

Written in standard thriller style, with exotic settings, breathless chases, amazing escapes, and sudden plot reversals, "The Da Vinci Code" is as much fun as a James Bond movie and about as believable.

It begins with the murder of the curator of the Louvre in Paris. The Harvard code specialist called into the case pursues the culprit, and in so doing discovers an array of clues hidden in the works of Leonardo da Vinci. Thick with puzzles, symbols, cliff-hanging chapter endings, and machinations by evil figures and secret societies, the novel "reveals" that Jesus was not divine, that he married the Mary Magdalene of the New Testament, had a child with her, that the bloodline survived in France, and that the church conspired for millennia to hide the truth. A key character announces, among other things, that the idea of the divinity of Jesus was hatched by the Roman emperor Constantine as a political power play.

Musician-turned-author Brown was born in New Hampshire, son of a mathematician father and a musician mother. He graduated from Phillips Exeter Academy, where his father taught, and Amherst College. After college, he moved to California to pursue a career as songwriter, pianist, and singer. He produced four CDs, none apparently still available.

"It was his own brand of pop, real accessible mainstream," says Los Angeles music producer Barry Fasman, who worked with Brown. One of his songs, "Peace in Our Time," was performed at the 1996 Summer Olympics. As pianist and vocalist, he performed in the United States and Europe, and also studied art history in Spain. He was a member of Mensa International, the organization of brainy people, but let his membership lapse. He's also mad about tennis and the New England Patriots.

In 1993, he came back to New Hampshire, and took a job teaching English at Phillips Exeter. (Doubleday says Brown lives "in the Exeter area.") His first book, written in 1995 with his wife, Blythe, a painter and art historian, was a lark: "187 Men to Avoid: A Guide for the Romantically Frustrated Woman." In 1998 he published his first thriller, "Digital Fortress," centered on codebreaking and international intrigue.

That book and the two that followed, "Angels and Demons" (2000), and "Deception Point" (2001), were published by Pocket Books, a division of Simon & Schuster, with Kaufman as editor. Kaufman says the three books together sold perhaps 20,000 copies, most of that accounted for by "Angels and Demons."

Kaufman left Pocket in 2001 and took a job at Doubleday, where he's now executive editor. "The first thing Jason did when he came here," says Rubin, "was say, `I want to bring in a writer named Dan Brown.' We said, `Who's Dan Brown?' He had a proposal for a new book, we loved it, went back and read `Angels & Demons,' and made an offer." The proposal would become "The Da Vinci Code."

"We knew we had something exceptional," Rubin says. "This is a thriller for people who don't like thrillers. It's tremendously engaging as a reading experience, while at the same time, you are learning something."

Doubleday gambled to an almost unprecedented degree for an unknown novelist. "We had to find a way to get velocity on day one," Rubin says. The publisher sent out 10,000 advance copies to critics and booksellers -- a number larger than most complete first printings of novels. Bookseller response was so strong that Doubleday shipped 230,000 copies, timed to be released on March 18, 2003.

Then, in a completely unexpected bonus, Times book reviewer Janet Maslin broke the March 18 publication date by one day, with a breathless rave review on the arts section front page on March 17. "The word is wow," Maslin wrote.

"We were out of our minds on day one," Rubin says. "We had a terrific ad campaign, a hothouse review on the front of the Times arts section, and in-your-face distribution in bookstores across the country. The stores had taken such an outlandish number of books that they knew they couldn't depend on the publisher alone, so they did a tremendous amount of work on their side. I've never seen a sales force and bookselling community take ownership of a book like they did with `The Da Vinci Code.' "

The book sold 6,000 copies on the first day, and 23,578 by week's end. It was No. 1 on the Times hard-cover fiction bestseller list in its first week -- again, almost unheard of for an obscure author.

No drop-off in sales Normally, a bestseller begins to trail off after its early success. But "The Da Vinci Code" was like a rocket that leaves earth's orbit. Doubleday put a huge ad push on through the spring and summer, including a promotional contest with a trip to Paris as grand prize. In November came another bonus: ABC aired a primetime special called "Jesus, Mary, and Da Vinci," which seriously considered the historical ideas in the book. Brown appeared on ABC's "Good Morning America" in the morning, the special aired that night, and Rubin says the one-two punch drove sales through the roof, 34 weeks after publication day.

The backlash against the book by some Christian writers and leaders, first reported on Page 1 of The New York Times last week, seems to be coming most strongly from Protestant circles, although two Catholic publishers (Ignatius Press and Our Sunday Visitor Publishing) also have published rebuttals. Bible scholar Darrell L. Bock of Dallas Theological Seminary, author of "Breaking the Da Vinci Code," contends that Brown has a deeper agenda than mere fiction, and he cites the author's remark on "Good Morning America" that he might not change any of the historical material if the book were nonfiction.

"There is something he's doing under the cloak of fiction that needs to be brought to the conscious level," Bock said. "It is a concern to the degree that poor information never helps anyone. He has said he did it to create a discussion on the origins of Christianity. We are obliging him."

On his website and in interviews, Brown has not disavowed any of the history in the book. However, his foreword says, "All descriptions of artwork, architecture, documents, and secret rituals in this novel are accurate," which would seem to mean that everything else is freely invented.

Though the yarn's action mostly concerns Roman Catholic history, the church seems not greatly concerned. The Catholic organization Opus Dei, depicted as a sinister cult in the book, has a mild defensive essay, "The Da Vinci Code, the Catholic Church, and Opus Dei," on its website. However, the National Conference of Catholic Bishops, which published a critical review of Mel Gibson's film "The Passion of the Christ," has no position on "The Da Vinci Code."

Still, some Catholic historians are concerned. "I do think it matters," says Catherine Mooney, associate professor of church history at Weston Jesuit School of Theology in Cambridge. "It has been striking to me, in conversation with well-educated people, that they are predisposed to believe everything in the book. They ask me, `Is it true that Jesus was married?' That may reveal attitudes toward the church today -- that there is something not being revealed." Yet Mooney regards it as a teaching opportunity, too, and has been asked by a Boston-area parish to give a talk on the historical questions raised by the novel.

Others think the concern is overblown. The Rev. Andrew M. Greeley, a priest, sociologist, and novelist, said this by e-mail: "I can't understand why so many educated people are apparently unable to distinguish between fantasy fiction and history. If the book is a serious threat to Christianity, Christianity must be weaker than I thought it was. All the attention to refuting it is likely to sell more books."

That's Doubleday's view, too. "I think you have to take it as a compliment to the author," Kaufman says. "This is a novel based on an interesting idea. It's not a textbook."

David Mehegan can be reached at mehegan@globe.com.