The Man Who's Riding Dan Brown's 'Code' Tales

But for the publisher, there's more to it than that. Odds are the next Dan Brown work will be one of the biggest sellers ever -- and who do you think will be ideally positioned to rush a true guide into print? "We intend to do a whole 'Secrets of the Solomon Key,' " says Burstein, laughing, "once we can read 'The Solomon Key.' "

He's far from the only one piggybacking on Dan Brown. By now there are a couple dozen books with such titles as "Da Vinci Decoded" and "The Da Vinci Hoax" that serve as guides to or refutations of Brown's megahit. And there's even another preview title -- "The Guide to Dan Brown's 'The Solomon Key,' " by Greg Taylor -- though it lags behind "Widow's Son" in Amazon sales rank.

Burstein isn't losing sleep about competition. "People are so interested," he says.

The Soul of an Old War

"Just Another Soldier." "My War." "I Am My Brother's Keeper." "One Bullet Away." "Love My Rifle More Than You." Seems like publishers are churning out first-person war stories almost as fast as the authors' tours of duty in Afghanistan and Iraq are up. All, no doubt, offer valuable perspectives. Still: There's something to be said for a military memoir that wasn't lobbed into print like a hand grenade.

Take Tracy Kidder's "My Detachment," which took 36 years to make its way onto the printed page.

Kidder is a Pulitzer Prize-winning author of elegant nonfiction narratives built on immersive reporting, among them "The Soul of a New Machine" and "Mountains Beyond Mountains." But "My Detachment" has its roots in an attempt at fiction. When he got home from Vietnam, in 1969, he started a novel in which he imagined what it would have been like to lead a platoon in combat instead of what he actually did, which was to command a detachment of enlisted men doing communications intelligence work behind the lines.

Thirty-three publishers rejected it. Kidder burned his copies of the manuscript and gave up fiction writing for good. Nonfiction, he says, "just seemed to me something I could do ."

Still, he wanted to write about Vietnam. He started a memoir in 1985 but had a hard time controlling its tone. The problem: He was trying to deny any connection between his mature self and the immature twenty-something who'd stepped off a plane in the midday Bien Hoa heat and into a command for which he was in no way prepared.

"I had gone to training camps for over a year and learned to avoid venereal disease and march and make my bed and fire weapons," Kidder writes, "but I had never received a single instruction on how to handle troops." What do you do when a soldier you're supposed to be commanding expresses displeasure with your leadership style and announces calmly: "We can shoot you any time we want, Lieutenant"?

Lt. Kidder had no clue. Nor could he have guessed that, a couple of decades later, that soldier would track him down, buy him lunch and explain why Kidder's own men had set fire to his latrine.

Why dredge up memories that still make him wince? Well, he's glad to have them out in the open where they can no longer ambush him. This kind of candor has a side benefit, too: As his friend and editor Richard Todd once pointed out, no one is likely to accuse Kidder of falsifying his experience "because there's never been a book about a young man at war who's been turned down by a prostitute."

Kidder does more than evoke his own embarrassments, however. He's drawn a classic portrait of a confused young man caught up in a dishonorable war. Take the scene in which an artillery captain reports how many Viet Cong his men have killed in a recent engagement.