Just to clear up a few stray points; I don’t believe B&L’s case had any merit — and what merit it might have had they managed to completely obscure by their halfwitted filing — but being named in a lawsuit by the deranged doesn’t make Dan Brown retroactively a good writer. He is inarguably a successful writer, but that’s a horse of another color. By his own admission, he’s a hack — so, as you point out, are other, much better writers. F. Scott Fitzgerald is my favorite hack writer, for example, but the list goes on and on. (On the specific example you cite, I’m pretty sure Will Durant knew the titles and authors of the books Ariel was excerpting. He also put her name on the cover.)

Baigent & Leigh did sell something like 2 million copies of HBHG, which is impressive next to almost anyone — except Dan Brown. And for my money, they’re much better fiction writers than he will ever be.

Tom: The portrait on my journal is of the Italian-English archaeologist-circus strongman-hydrologist-impresario Giovanni Battista Belzoni.

Some years after this, I read Nautilus 90 North, the story of the first passage by the USS Nautilus under the polar ice.

Guess where MacLean learned everything I he knew about submarines? You could pretty much track the two books together.

When you take a history book and write a story around the history, with your own characters and such, it’s called “research.” The Brits recognized this.

“Beginning artists borrow. Mature artists steal.” — T.S. Eliot

“Always steal from the best.” — David Drake

Mohammed? Nope, it’s some historical figure I’ve never learned the name of. You can ask Ken about it.

Ken has a long and abiding interest in “High Weirdness”. Conspiracy theories, cabals, hidden society, scientific anomalies, that sort of thing. One of the best works on cabals and conspiracies I’ve read is his GURPS Cabal (Steve Jackson Games), and he’s had a long running column (Suppressed Transmission) in Pyramid (an online roleplaying game magazine also from Steve Jackson Games). For a taste of the column get copies of the compilations Suppressed Transmission and Suppressed Transmission II (yep, Steve Jackson Games). BTW, all three books are available through the website.