A nice profile of competitor, colleage, and fellow prequel visionary David Shugarts. I thought his SECRETS OF THE CODE was excellent. Hard to escape the feeling, reading below, that, like me, Shugarts must struggle sometimes with the inclination to consider Dan Brown a factadaisical scam artist.
One thing leads to another in research, says Mr Shugarts, and it was research for the latter two books, which attempt to separate fact from fiction for readers of the wildly successful Dan Brown novels The Da Vinci Code and Angels and Demons, that have led him to author a book unusual in that it is actually a prequel to a sequel.Secrets of the Widow’s Son, published in September, is a guide to Dan Brown’s yet unpublished novel tentatively titled The Solomon Key. In it, Mr Shugarts delves into the mysterious world of Freemasonry and the lives of our country’s founding fathers, both of which Mr Brown has indicated will be prominent themes in his next novel.
The point of Mr Shugart’s novel is not to spoil the plot of The Solomon Key, but to engage the reader ahead of time, so that they are better able to discern for themselves how much of the novel is fact and how much of it is fiction. With the publication of The Da Vinci Code, says Mr Shugarts, “Dan Brown has triggered a lot of wonder in people’s heads.”
Mr Shugarts, a resident of Newtown, where he lives with his wife, Judith DeLuca and son, Andrew Shugarts (The couple has two other sons. Jonathan Shugarts is a senior at University of Connecticut, and Nicholas DeLuca is involved in international trade and finance in Washington, D.C.).
He is a 36-year veteran of journalism. He is also the owner of Azimuth Communications, a business that aides in all aspects of publishing. It is his experience as an aviation journalist, though, that has led him into the secret world of Dan Brown.
In 2004, Mr Shugarts, like millions of other readers around the world, sat down and began to read The Da Vinci Code. He found the theories set forth by Mr Brown in the novel compelling, but his eyebrows raised when he came to a section describing a particular turbo plane with which he was familiar. It was incorrectly identified in the novel.
Further on, he came across yet another glaring aviation error.
“In the novel, [Mr Brown] has the jet turned in the hanger. That could never happen with that jet,” he exclaims. He realized that the average reader with no aviation background might not catch those inconsistencies, yet he began to wonder if the other information put forth in the book was as factual as it was presented.
Mr Shugarts mentioned the aviation errors to associates of his in the publishing business. Dan Burstein just happened to be editing a book entitled Secrets of the Code, and he invited Mr Shugarts to contribute to the book through research into plot flaws. What Mr Shugarts found after a page by page, painstaking review of the many facts and theories set forth in the novel, was that “In all details, [Mr Brown] seemed to adopt a philosophy of small details not counting. For example, the characters go down roads the wrong direction in Paris. Or the GPS dot he hides in the soap and tosses into the back of the truck - it is not pill size. It is a transmitter about the size of an invisible fence transmitter. It wouldn’t fit in a bar of soap.”
These, again, he admits are somewhat trivial errors, but what bothers him is that many of the errors and plot flaws he came up with (and which are revealed in Secrets of the Code in the subchapter The Plotholes and Intriguing Details of The Da Vinci Code) are facts that could easily have been checked, if the author had cared to do so. “In every field, he makes these little inaccuracies,” Mr Shugarts asserts.
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Tags: Dan Brown, Law, SF, The Solomon Key and Beyond
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