Dan Brown Reveals the Secrets of Inferno

In Dan Browns new thriller, Inferno, Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon is, once again, in a jam. He wakes up in Florence suffering from amnesia after getting shot in the head. Hes being hunted by armed attackers that appear to have been sent by his own government. And he has less than a day to stop a madmans plot to kill billions of people. So he calls his editor in New York, Jonas Faukman, and asks if he might possibly make use of the publishing houses corporate jet account to complete his mission. His editor is curt: We dont have access to private jets for authors of tomes about religious history. If you want to write Fifty Shades of Iconography, we can talk. Its a cheeky reference that must have amused Mr. Browns real editor at Doubleday, Jason Kaufman. Doubleday also publishes E.L. James, author of the best-selling erotica trilogy, Fifty Shades, which has sold more than 70 million copies. But Brown retains his mantle as the imprints top selling author. His books, which include other Robert Langdon thrillers such as The Da Vinci Code and Angels and Demons, have sold more than 200 million copies in more than 50 languages. Doubleday has high expectations for Inferno, a dense, puzzle packed exploration of Dantes vision of hell, genetic engineering, transhumanism and Malthusian doomsday scenarios. The narrative unfolds in Browns trademark breathless, italic-heavy prose as Langdon has to solve a code based on Dantes life and work in order to stop a madman from unleashing a lethal virus. Doubleday is preparing for blowout sales and ordered a first print run of four million copies. During an interview at his publishers office in Manhattan, Mr. Brown spoke about how he keeps his plots secret, why he never made it as a musician and why hanging upside down helps him come up with unexpected plot twists. This is your darkest book to date. It deals with some very grim themes, like the imminent collapse of the human species. You cant write about Dante without writing about darkness. Inferno is the most fascinating of the three canticles. As a thriller writer, it was the one I was immediately drawn to. Ive written about fine arts but never about literary arts, so Dante called to me as something new, but its also safe solid ground for Langdon. Its such a masterpiece. Its like the Mona Lisa of the literary world. You and your publisher have gone to great lengths to make sure the plot remained secret until publication day. How did you research the locations in Florence, like the Palazzo Vecchio and the Baptistery of San Giovanni, without giving away what you were working on? Its a double edge sword. On the good side, I now have access to people and locations that I have never had in the past. On the challenging side, if Im trying to keep things secret, its impossible to talk to these specialists without them saying, Oh my God, you wouldnt believe who was here today and what he was asking. So these trips usually take longer than they should, because out of ten things I see, five of them have nothing to do with the book. Five questions I ask have nothing to do with the book. Im constantly trying to keep people guessing as to what Im doing and I will spend enormous amounts of time looking at manuscripts and asking questions and people will say, I know what his next book is about.

What were some of the decoys you used this time? I spent a lot of time at the (statue of) David. I spent a lot of time in the Uffizi (gallery), looking at floor plans of the Uffizi. The Uffizi is just a passing mention. A lot of people thought I was going to write about Dante as being critical of the church, so I asked a lot of questions about Dantes views of the church. There are some people who are in the process of writing books already that are guides to this book who havent read it yet. Its not going to be a happy day when they read this because it really has nothing to do with what they thought it did. Youre a famously disciplined writer who spends a lot of time planning and outlining. Can you tell me about your process? I wake up around four oclock, eager to get going. I believe theres a close parallel between the dream state, when your minds creating something out of nothing, and the writing state, so I try to move from the state of waking up to the state of writing very quickly. So I write early in the morning in a room that has no email, no phone, no Internet. I dont have access to the outside world, and more importantly, they dont have access to me. I write until noon. Its a long writing day. I write slowly. I actually write quickly, but I throw out so much material. I often will write a scene from three different points of view to find out which has the most tension and which way Im able to conceal the information Im trying to conceal. And that is, at the end of the day, what writing suspense is all about. Its not about what you tell the reader, its about what you conceal. Do you start with the big revelation at the end and then reverse engineer the plot? I dont start writing until I have a very solid outline. Or else Id get to the end and find out there is no ending, and that I just wasted three years of my life. The Da Vinci Code outline was a hundred pages. This one was probably about the same. I read that as a cure for writers block, you hang upside down from the ceiling in gravity boots. Somehow its become known as this cure for writers block. I dont get writers block. I have the other problem, where I have too many ideas. Its more a way to solve plot twists. I often try to paint Langdon into the corner and try to find some clever way to get him out that the reader wont see coming, and strangely, thats just something that helps you look at the world in a different way. I dont know whether youre getting so much oxygen to your brain that youre getting better ideas, or whether the world feels different. Ive had a lot of good ideas hanging upside down. I realize it makes me sound very strange. I had a reporter come to the house once who asked to be put in the gravity boots. I said, You cant write about this, but Ill put you in them. And I had this guy upside down and I said, If youre going to do this, its got to be at least 60 seconds. So I had him upside down and hes immediately like, Let me up let me up. I dont like this! It was pretty funny. Did it give him any brilliant ideas? It didnt seem to. He just seemed pretty nauseated and upset.

Before writing novels you tried to be a pop singer, in a style that some people compared to Barry Manilow. If you had been more successful, would you have pursued music? I wrote a lot in college and played a lot of music. I got out of college and knew I wanted to do something creative, and at that point music seemed cooler and more fun. I went and did that, and was a starving musician for a long time. Why do you think it didnt work out? It could be lack of talent. It had a lot to do with timing. I was in Hollywood, and I got a production deal with some very famous producers, and made a couple of records. It was at the dawn of the rap craze. No one wanted to hear a white guy singing love ballads. I was as uncool as I could be at that moment in time. When The Da Vinci Code came out ten years ago, it was your first best-seller and the sales were fueled by the controversial plot twist that many Christians found deeply offensive. Were you surprised at all by the scale of the blowback? Yeah, I was actually. In my mind, what I did was I wrote a novel where fictional characters debated some of the topics of religion, including, what it would mean to Christianity if Christ were not literally the son of God. To me, it was not a bad thing to say, maybe Christ was more like us. I was surprised that so many people found it so upsetting. Do you think people were especially upset by your claim at the beginning of the book that much of the plot, including the religious history, was based on fact? Possibly. Certainly I took a lot of heat for that. All I can tell you is this. In my mind, the story I told in The Da Vinci Code makes more sense, and from my research, feels far more factual than the story I learned in Sunday school. You make a similar claim at the start of Inferno, and say that the all the artwork and science and history and even this shadowy, vaguely criminal global organization called the Consortium are real. The Consortium is obviously not the real name. There are a number of organizations that function as the Consortium. They are fairly easy to research. I had not heard of them until I started writing this novel. But theyre out there and for hire and allow you to tell very convincing lies. Did you interview any members of the organization? Not as far as you know. And Ive never used their services. Your father was a mathematics teacher. Is that where you picked up your love of puzzles and codes?

My dad is a big puzzle guy. Treasure hunts where a big part of our childhood. Birthdays and Christmas, there were always treasure hunts to find your presents. We still do it. My dad still writes them for the nephews.

Its been reported that you mostly avoid reading reviews of your books, is that true? The tricky thing about reading your own press is, its a lose lose proposition for an author. If you believe the people who love you, then youve got to believe the people who hate you. And if you believe the people who love you, you will get lazy complacent and your work will suffer. If you believe the people who dont like you, you can become self conscious, insecure and hesitant and your work suffers. Your work seems to be very polarizing people either love what you do or hate it. If The Da Vinci Code had sold 10,000 copies, nobody would have had any problem with it. The criticism came because it was so popular and on some level the criticism was of the readership, it was, How can people like something like this? That was offensive to me. Dont tell people what to like. Is it right that you have a dozen other ideas for Robert Langdon thrillers? I do. I dont think Ill have time to write them all. I know youre a Shakespeare fan and clearly there are a ton of dubious conspiracy theories about the authorship of the plays. Have you thought about a Shakespeare themed thriller? Shakespeare is in my idea file, and has been for a long long time. Clearly the identity of Shakespeare has been debated and thats a fascinating subject. One of the reasons I havent written about Shakespeare is that I havent found enough evidence to support either side of the debate as to who Shakespeare was, and I dont like to speculate. There are some sort of fringy theories and a few documents that make you scratch your head. I hinted at it in The Lost Symbol. Theres a paragraph or two about Shakespeare and who he might have been and the first folio, and it was my way of saying, Im thinking about this. I dont have full novel yet, but heres a little tidbit. I noticed that you dropped in an anagram of your editors name, Jason Kaufman, into Inferno. Are there other little clues and inside jokes in your books that you plant just for certain people? There are clues in these books people have never seen, little codes and ciphers and things that happen on certain pages. Its really for my own amusement, and for those really avid fans who like that sort of thing. It gives them an extra layer to the books and makes them fun. Whats an example of an inside joke you planted?

You mentioned Jonas Faukman. In Angels and Demons, the four cardinals are named after real people, and one of them was my Italian teacher in 12 th grade. Cardinal Baggia. Aldo Baggia was my Italian teacher. We read a watered down version of Dantes Inferno, so Dante was on my mind even back then. So Aldo Baggia was thrilled when he found out he was a cardinal, then he read the book and found out that Id drowned him in the Fountain of Four Rivers, and was a little less thrilled after that. He lived in the movie, though.