Free The Dan Brown Enigma by Graham A Thomas

totally unsuitable for the silent film genre. When talkies arrived Hollywood hired novelists and playwrights to write the scripts. As film makers began to understand more about editing techniques, pacing and dramatisation, they found that dialogue-heavy plays didn’t quite work. So they turned to the pulp fiction magazines that offered themes that connected more with people – love stories, murder, betrayal, jealousy and so on. These magazines told short stories and serials in an easy, straightforward narrative.
    As selling unsolicited manuscripts to Hollywood producers became more and more difficult writers turned to agents and the two would work together to get stories to producers. To get agents and producers on side, writers would first create a film idea of roughly 50 pages, known as a treatment or proposal, and then expand it into a novel. The key was to find agents who specialised in writers and screenwriters for the film and the publishing industries. Brown wrote a 60-page proposal for The Da Vinci Code which could almost be looked upon as film treatment with short, cross-cutting chapters with minimal description, use of dialogue to push the plot forward and each ending with a cliffhanger. One could argue that it looks a lot like a lengthy screenplay.
    Another reason why Brown’s novel is so popular could be because he has refined the standard procedural plot line that is so popular in film, television and popular fiction today. It is most prevalent in television police dramas that follow a team of investigators, as this allows cross-cutting between scenes, situations and characters – much the same way as Brown has done with The Da Vinci Code .
    The 1970s saw the police procedural combining with the conspiracy thriller, as with Fredrick Forsyth’s Day of the Jackal . Forsythe wrote from his own experiences and from his extensive research into secret Anglo-French organisations. It was a mix of fact and fiction that left the reader wondering how much of what they’d read was the truth.
    The procedural then took a different turn with non-fiction books that investigated some of the dirtier aspects of late 20th-century history, such as Watergate, JFK and so on. This kind of investigative journalism took off after Watergate when many people no longer took the authorities on their word. It also brought forth speculative alternative histories such as Erich von Däniken’s Chariots of the Gods , which questioned the established theories of science and religion, as did The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail .
    Many of these books ask a big question – what if? – and the authors write them as personal journeys that take the reader on a road of discovery. Often no real proof is found at the end but the authors have used the procedural framework so the book reads more like a thriller. These books usually have a puzzle that needs to be solved, or a series of mysteries where the goal is to uncover the truth of the myth or the legend.
    In his books Brown uses ancient manuscripts, paintings and other treasures to provide clues to solve mysteries long forgotten or held secret. He claims that almost all the material is real. Indeed, at the very beginning of The Da Vinci Code , Brown says the places and organisations described are real. By doing this he is providing the readers with authority and the inspiration to go and find out more information for themselves – a guidebook for their own treasure hunt or spiritual enlightenment.
    The story of the Sacred Feminine running throughout the book has attracted women to the thriller genre. The story about the key role of Mary Magdalene as the wife of Jesus and being written out of history by a male-dominated church has resonated with women across the world. Brown’s success with The Da Vinci Code is his ability to converge the various elements of popular writing with a central aspirational theme, culminating at the point where fact and fiction meet and blur.
    The plot of The Da Vinci