Dan Brown stars in High Court tale of treachery
Dan Brown would have struggled to come up with a tale more filled with pseudo-historical intrigue and claims of treachery than the one revealed in Court 61 of the High Court yesterday.
In the ornate setting of the Royal Courts of Justice in central London, the author of The Da Vinci Code, who made £45m in 2004 alone, finds himself being sued for allegedly ripping off the work of two biblical sleuths bent on rewriting Christian history, in order to provide the basis for his bestseller.
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The Da Vinci Code cover (U.K.)
 and , who jointly wrote together with a third author, a 1982 Non-Fiction book '''' have taken '''' publisher , to court claiming that The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail storyline has been stolen by .

The third author of ''The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail'' , is not involved in the case.

Random House is the of publisher of both ''The Da Vinci Code'' and ''The Holy Blood and The Holy Grail''.

The central theme of the two books is that the bloodline from a marriage between  and  survives today. 

Random House has denied the claim and, Random House chief executive Gail Rebuck says in a statement that she believed the lawsuit was without merit.

"As publisher of both ''The Da Vinci Code'' and ''The Holy Blood and The Holy Grail'', we are genuinely saddened that two of the three authors of HBHG have chosen to bring this litigation against us...Random House takes no pleasure in defending a legal action that it believes is without merit and we are confident that we will prevail."

If this case is successful it could threaten the film; starring  and  from opening. 

''The Da Vinci Code'' is a fiction book and has over 36 million copies in print worldwide.  The dust jacket for the novel apparently includes longitude and latitude coordinates which lead to the  headquarters near , . 

Brown's next book, ''The Solomon Key'', is rumoured to be about the Yale  society.  Notable alumni of the society include current United States President George W. Bush, former President George H.W. Bush, and Massachusettes Senator John Kerry.