The Common Plot and Characters

A Murder Victim

A civil servant named Jacques requested a meeting with the hero but is murdered in Paris before he can make the meeting.

A Hero

Aged 48 (DVC: 45) is a history graduate of Oxford (DVC: Harvard). He is disturbed by a phone call in the middle of the night. Interpreting clues in art in the chapel of a ruined castle (MM: Rennes, DVC: Rosslyn) he discovered a secret guarded by an ancient society: the messianic bloodline has survived into the 20th century.

Having entered into these events as a detached professional he finds himself pursued as a suspect by international police.

A Heroine

Aged 32/33, Sara/Sophie in DVC, was born and raised in France. She believes her parents and her brother were killed in a car accident when she was aged 4/5. The French police maintain that it was an accident. After 27/28 years an informer discloses that it was no accident.

In both novels Sara/Sophie is fluent in English because her schooling was completed in Britain. She was sexually traumatized by a religious man in loco parentis. She ran away from home. She knew that she was being watched but she had no idea of the reason (her identity). Her family name had been changed from Plantard or St. Clair (an inconsistency in both novels).

A fictional innovation of both works: i) a woman is descended from the Holy bloodline in the absence of her brother. This has no historical basis and is in no way expressed or implied in any of the Grail/ Templar literature preceding MM and DVC; ii) she is more ethical and practical than the older and authoritative male.

In both novels hero and heroine join forces to discover the truth. The search is conducted on her terms: he must first inform her of what he knows.

Leonard/ Langdon is her senior and well-educated but she emerges as smarter and stronger for a reason expressing a core theme of both novels: the male domination of the Church. This is expressed in a keynote paragraph in DVC apparently transcribed from MM. There are other language similarities: as stated, the hero and heroine search for a “documented genealogy” which is coded in a cryptex (a wholly fictional article invented in MM); it is a metal cylindrical device described by the same seven words in both novels.

Sara/Sophie’s identity is known to the Priory of Sion which is split on whether she should be revealed to the world at the Millennium, wholly fictional and, to the best of my knowledge, not derived from the pseudo-history sources.

A twist in the plot (in both novels) with no historical source or basis

A Villain.

A fourth fictional character emerged in MM to drive the plot. He has spun an elaborate conspiracy against the Priory to use their secret to his own ends. He is a high-ranking and erudite man with identical personalities in MM and DVC.

In both novels the villain has the same appearance and he is compared to a celebrity (MM: Robert Hardy, DVC: Elton John). He has the same role in the plot and the same personality in both works: an overbearing, theatrical demeanour. The villain is fastidious, intense, intellectual, well-spoken and high status.

He has the same back story: in his youth he trained as an actor and emerged traumatised with a grievance. He is driven by a religious obsession to hi-jack the guardians’ knowledge. In both novels he uses a religious sect as cover for his plan. Uncannily, he seems to know everything. He works from a grandiose study described in both novels as being a library and a laboratory. In both novels it emerges that the villain has organized and gathered information by radio devices described (in both works) as concealed flat foil and roof antennae.

The Teacher.

A fifth and, again, wholly fictional character drives the plot — an alter ego called “The Teacher.” In DVC this may indicate copying because the title exists in the Essenes in MM but not in DVC’s Opus Dei sect.

Nobody ever sees The Teacher face-to face (in both novels). He manifests remotely by radio (in DVC by cell-phone).

A Brother

Both novels describe the return to the heroine’s childhood home with a long-lost brother. The accident of the car had been faked: he survived but was separated from his sister by the secret society. The home is described as a stone house which she had remembered correctly.

The Legal Position

In a letter dated 14 June 2005, the IP specialist Orchard Brayton wrote:

“The creation by you of MM preceded the creation by Mr Brown of DVC (by some considerable time) and on that basis the integrity of your copyright of MM appears to be intact.”

In other words, Dan Brown cannot sue me!

After meeting Counsel (Andrew Norris) Orchard’s Paul Sutton wrote to me on 12 August 2005:

“… there clearly are multiple similarities of language, theme and names between MM and ‘The Da Vinci Code’ … and it is unlikely in our view that a Court would form any different opinion… You will … have to convince the Court with some evidence that (on the balance of probabilities) Dan Brown had access to MM at some point. If we can prove that, we have an extremely strong case to take forward.”

It is in the public domain that in 2002 Dan Brown worked with Transworld, London. He names staff collaborators in his Acknowledgements (UK editions only).

The details are fully documented as sworn witness statements. It may be verified by Mrs Nicola Solomon, CEO of the Society of Authors, London, who represented me legally in 2005. She advised me against incurring the prohibitive costs and risks of confronting premium American lawyers in Court.

It may be that Mr Brown’s publishers were entitled to adapt my ideas or it was a series of coincidences and common clichés. But I think no one would believe me if I claimed to have independently written such a similar novel after Dan Brown published his.