On His 54th Birthday, Why Dan Brown Matters

Dan Brown’s success has indisputably rejuvenated the thriller genre in the Indian market, writes Satyarth Nayak.

Collection of Dan Brown’s books. (Photo Courtesy: Wikimedia Commons)

As I turned the last page of Brown’s Angels and Demons one warm June evening, I was suddenly possessed by this extraordinary curiosity to know if we have something similar tucked away in our own civilisation.

‘Angels and Demons’ by Dan Brown. (Photo Courtesy: Wikimedia Commons)

An esoteric artefact or a royal secret that might have slipped through the cracks of our history awaiting deliverance.

My search yielded a fascinating Indian conspiracy theory and the next thing I was doing was erecting my first thriller around it.

The above autobiographical prologue is simply another example of how Dan Brown has created a generation of mystery mongers across the globe.

You might call his books pure fluff riddled with clichés and inaccuracies. Salman Rushdie might have called The Da Vinci Code a novel ‘so bad that it gives bad novels a bad name.’

Salman Rushdie, author of ‘Midnight’s Children’ who has a fatwa demanding execution against him. (Photo Courtesy: Wikimedia Commons) 

And yet you cannot question that Brown’s work has spawned a cottage industry of thriller touting me-toos, who have struck gold following his trail.

The recent wave of desi mystery writers claiming an increasing shelf-space within the Indian publishing industry owes massively to Brown’s codes and anagrams.

His success has indisputably rejuvenated the thriller genre in the Indian market dominated so far by maudlin love sagas, self-help manuals and classics.

He has also ushered in a new set of readers looking for a light exhilarating read. Indian publishers are now embracing home grown mystery writers who can chalk up similar mammoth sale figures within a conservative book-mart and even challenge international bestselling authors.

Dan Brown has also deftly stretched the commercial thriller genre to make place for religion, art and mythology. The Da Vinci Code brought Jesus down from the mount to install him within conspiracy theories and dinner conversations.

Luminaries like Da Vinci, Bernini, Galileo and Dante have been transformed into willing dramatis personae for his modern day mazes opening an entirely new avenue for authors to explore.

An avenue where lofty themes and figures could fit inside a mainstream paperback mystery. No wonder then that the new breed of Indian thriller writers are now revisiting our own gods and kings to spin similar esoteric yarns.

Packaging the sublime in an accessible commercial genre for lay readers will perhaps remain his most enduring legacy. Absurd yoking of fact and fiction at times indeed but supremely entertaining nevertheless.

Today there is a palpable danger that Dan Brown might be reaching a saturation point.

His last two offerings The Lost Symbol and Inferno were hardly as much fun as his previous books. Malicious voices are even whispering that he has perhaps sacrificed Robert Langdon at the altar of Tom Hanks.

(L-R) Dan Brown, Tom Hanks and Ayelet Zurer at the premiere of ‘Angels and Demons’. (Photo Courtesy: Wikimedia Commons)

Here’s hoping that Brown astonishes us with his next one. That will be one hell of a twist.

Happy Birthday DB.

(Satyarth Nayak is the author of the bestselling mystery thriller ‘The Emperor’s Riddles’. His short stories have also appeared in anthologies by Penguin and Westland.)

(This article is being republished from The Quint’s archives on the occasion of Dan Brown’s birthday. It was first published on 22 June 2015.)