From his Q & A with Alexandra Alter for the Wall Street Journal's Speakeasy blog:
This is your darkest book to date. It deals with some very grim themes, like the imminent collapse of the human species.--Marshal Zeringue
You can’t write about Dante without writing about darkness. Inferno is the most fascinating of the three canticles. As a thriller writer, it was the one I was immediately drawn to. I’ve written about fine arts but never about literary arts, so Dante called to me as something new, but it’s also safe solid ground for Langdon. It’s such a masterpiece. It’s like the Mona Lisa of the literary world.
You and your publisher have gone to great lengths to make sure the plot remained secret until publication day. How did you research the locations in Florence, like the Palazzo Vecchio and the Baptistery of San Giovanni, without giving away what you were working on?
It’s a double edge sword. On the good side, I now have access to people and locations that I have never had in the past. On the challenging side, if I’m trying to keep things secret, it’s impossible to talk to these specialists without them saying, “Oh my God, you wouldn’t believe who was here today and what he was asking.” So these trips usually take longer than they should, because out of ten things I see, five of them have nothing to do with the book. Five questions I ask have nothing to do with the book. I’m constantly trying to keep people guessing as to what I’m doing and I will spend enormous amounts of time looking at manuscripts and asking questions and people will say, I know...[read on]
