Blythe Brown: The Missing Witness

Dan Brown took the stand today and this morning's testimony was mainly designed to establish how he did research (in collaboration with Blythe Brown) and a timeline of his research.

Baigent and Leigh's barrister appears to be trying to place the order of the books that Dan Brown/Blythe Brown read and the timeframe in which that occurred. As the judge had earlier indicated that the order of the research might be of great importance, this would appear to be the core of the complaintants' case.

They are presumably going to try and put HBHG into a certain slot that will indicate that the central idea (or "Big Idea" as Dan Brown calls it) came from HBHG.

There are some documents that are missing, including the original short proposal for DVC that was sent to Dan Brown's agent -- it was the first of what was a three part proposal for three book, the other two being "The Botticelli Code" (the outline of which survives) and one possibly called "The Nostradamus Code" (one where the outline does not survive. The longer synopsis has survived, although it was created at a later stage than the original proposal.

A few other documents are missing, mainly due to flooding in March 2004 of Dan Brown's Rye, NH, basement. However, a large number of electronic documents (with dates) exist -- these are referred to as research documents and there are about 304 of them.

They mainly consist of notes from Blythe Brown, excerpts of things Dan Brown typed, printouts of things Dan Brown typed or got off internet, photocopies of articles/books and handwritten notes. The other items sent by the defence include Dan Brown's "library" which evidently consisted of 39 books -- Dan Brown: " I'm without a library, its all over here somewhere".

Some of Blythe Brown's research notes are not included because the defence did not ask for them -- the consensus view appears to be that they were unaware of the extent of her role as researcher when they made their requests.

The questioning was pretty tame, although Baigent and Leigh's barrister was able to push back the time that Dan Brown got Knights Templar from when he was doing a book tour for Deception Point (late 2001) as he claimed back to when he was doing one from Angels&Demons (mid-2000). There were some hints that they might even be able to establish that he bought it/ordered it from his hometown bookstore.

Dan Brown's longer synopsis of DVC has a series of redactions for "commercial reasons" -- these appear to be because it was initially proposed as part of a multi-book deal and he wants to keep the possibilities on future books confidential.

The contents though are known to all the attorneys involved in the case and in general they agree they are not relevant to this case, they just won't be released publicly. They might have been overly rigorous on redacting as H&L's barrister wants to ask questions about 2 redacted portions and Mr. Baldwin (Random House's barrister) has no objections.