Will Dan Brown Even Be the Next Dan Brown?

How's life treating Dan Brown? Edward Wyatt (NYT) found out that the public attention has been daunting, but beyond that, "the publicity has only amplified the pressure on Mr. Brown to produce a spectacular follow-up." The financial stakes have increased as well; while The Da Vinci Code was originally just the first half of a two-book, $400K deal, after its runaway success Brown's agent was able to renegotiate the deal to include more novels and "compensation that is commensurate with the success of [DVC]," which the Times guesstimates at "undoubtedly in the millions of dollars."

Personally, though I still can't stand his prose, I gotta admire an author who says, "I'm just a guy that wrote a book." The difference being that when you write a book like that, your editor doesn't mind taking daily calls from you to go over plot points on the next novel. Of course, until Dan Brown can come up with the next Dan Brown, all the publishing houses are hoping to find the next Dan Brown first, as Carol Memmott (USA Today) discovers. Most of the candidates she highlights are fairly obvious--thrillers dealing with alchemy, hieroglyphs, and the bones of the Magi--but I think it's a little unfair to put those kinds of expectations on Improbable, Adam Fawer's novel about (as USAT put it) "a compulsive gambler [who] takes an experimental drug that induces visions of the past and future."

I mean, other than the fact that they're both thrillers with (wildly varying) elements of the fantastic, there's no real point of comparison between that and DVC. It's like trying to compare Dan Brown to Alan Furst because they both incorporate nonfictional history into their novels. And Fawer doesn't need the coattail ride, either; he's pretty interesting in his own right, as readers of Mumpsimus and Backstory have discovered recently.