A serious Da Vinci Code plagiarism case

Author Lewis Perdue wrote a book titled The Da Vinci Legacy which was first published in 1983. That book really does seem to have some very close parallels to Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code. Perdue has a couple of blogs where he has written about his legal case (that began when Random House sued him over his postings on the Internet about the similarities between Brown's book and his). He's pointed out a number of apparent misrepresentations by Brown about his life, as well as another case where a work of Brown's is unaccountably identical with the work of another author.

An overview of Perdue's case is here.

Unlike the Baigent and Leigh lawsuit over Holy Blood, Holy Grail (which purported to be a work of nonfiction), Perdue doesn't allege plagiarism of the general idea, but over a large number of very specific elements that are identical between the books.

Perdue says that anything he wins in court will be donated to charity, and so it's not about the money.

The oddest thing on Perdue's blog is talk about postings from somebody named Ahamedd Saaddoodeen, who Perdue says he's traced to Blythe Brown, Dan Brown's wife.