Angels & Demons

Angels & Demons was published in 2000 and introduced Robert Langdon, the Harvard symbology professor who returns in Dan Brown's later novels. It was published by Pocket Books and then by Corgi, and the elements that structure it became the pattern for the books that followed: conspiracies built on secret societies, a compressed single-day timeframe, and the Catholic Church at the centre of the problem.

The book's visual signature is the ambigram. Several of the ambigrams in it were drawn by the typographer John Langdon, including the title design and the four elements, and the hardcover jacket carried the title as an ambigram, which is a large part of why the device became familiar to a general readership. The plot is a chase: Langdon and Vittoria, the dead physicist's adopted daughter, move between churches, archives and tunnels in Rome while a killer works through a list of cardinals, and the chapters turn over quickly to keep the reader moving with them.

The story turns on antimatter, a laboratory at CERN, the conclave that elects a pope and a centuries-old claim about the Illuminati, and it treats real places and real institutions as its furniture. Information arrives in explanations as well as in scenes, so the setting does as much work as the conspiracy, and the reader is asked to keep up rather than to sit back. The character returns in Brown's later novels, which kept to the same template, and a film adaptation followed in 2009.