It takes nerve to claim in public you originally extruded the pseudohistorical baloney that was the meat in one of the worst-written bestsellers of all time, but if Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh win their case against Dan Brown it could be the beginning of a long haul. On the “3 for the price of 2” tables alone in Brighton Waterstone’s yesterday I found the following books for sale:
Codex by Lev Grossman:
A long-lost library. A priceless manuscript. A deadly secret.
The Magdalene Cipher by Jim Hougan:
co-author of The Genesis Code
The Secret Supper: A Novel by Javier Sierra (and illustrated with a print of Leonardo’s “The Last Supper”):
Mystery. Intrigue. Death. Can You Crack The Code?
Leonardo Da Vinci: The Flights Of The Mind by Javier Sierra:
If you read one book with Da Vinci in its title this year, make it this one
—The Observer
I really don’t get it. I saw “Holy Blood Holy Grail” being read by a friend about 18 years ago – he said how it was this great expose of how the Catholic church had covered up stuff about Jesus blah blah blah. Never read it myself, but it’s clear that the thing was supposed to be fact. Are they claiming Brown stole a fact?
Does that mean that anyone who writes a book about a President sending people to set wiretaps on his opposition can be sued by Woodward & Bernstein?
Dali’s Car – A hot Barcelona afternoon, a Mondeo melts down the sidewalk, and in a barbershop someone’s shaved off half a moustache…
Shamefully I have read HBHG, but I was 14 when I did so. If memory serves it’s mostly conjecture, with precious little actual evidence, i.e it will set the general scene of the age with general history, and then come up with nothing to support the specifics – i.e what the book’s actually about. If I noticed that age 14 it must have been pretty shameless.
At no point did it claim to be made up though, which kind of screws their case. I heard that they’ve sold an extra couple of million copies of the book on the back of the Da Vinci Code anyway, which should be more than enough reward for their ‘scholarship’.
What’s the big deal? Liar vs Liar in the courts – happens all the time (Fayed vs Hamilton, Archer vs NOTW)
Funny thing: there was a fiction book by Liz Greene, The Dreamer of the Vine, based on the same general concept (Merovingian blodlines, the House of Lorraine, yadda yadda…) with Nostradamus as the main character.
(Not as bad as it sounds, actually. Certainly better than Dan Brown’s prize turkey.)
IIRC it was published in 1980 i.e. before HBHG came out.
Maybe Ms. Greene can sue the lot of ’em?
Liz Greene (www.astro.com) is Richard Leigh’s sister. Funny thing, she was recently outed for lying (for the last 30 years) about a PhD she never had. She is now getting a real MA (didn’t ever have one of those either) at Bath Spa University. She started out there as a lecturer but got demoted to student when the truth came out.
Weird how these stories converge.
When you say “a real MA” would that be a studied for and assessed MA, as opposed to the MAs that some institutions give out 3 years after initial graduation as long as you are not divorced, not bankrupt or unable to afford the nominal fee.
I mean that she had a store-bought mail order PhD. She might’ve purchased a similar MA. She certainly never had a BA. In other words, she never earned an honest academic degree. Said differently, she lied.
See http://www.astroamerica.com/greenebio2.html
To thicken the plot only a little, her book “The Dreamer…” was written something like 2 years before “Holy Blood…” At that time, she and Michael Baigent were lovers (there are rumours of a marriage, but who knows?)