Digital Fortress, Dan Brown’s pre-Da Vinci Code novel, to be adapted for TV

Deadline Hollywood reports that Dan Brown’s Digital Fortress is about to become the basis for a new ABC TV series:

After producing the blockbusters The Da Vinci Code and Angels & Demons, Brian Grazer and Ron Howard’s Imagine Entertainment is re-teaming with best-selling author Dan Brown to adapt another one of his books, this time for the small screen. Thriller Digital Fortress, from Imagine TV and 20th Century Fox, where the company is based, has landed at ABC with a put pilot commitment…. Written by Josh Goldin and Rachel Abramowitz (Outlaw Country), Digital Fortress an international thriller set in the world of the NSA during a global threat. It’s described as a sexy cat-and-mouse game between a Snowden-esque character that is threatening to release all of the government’s secrets to the highest bidder and our female cryptographer and her elite team who are tasked to stop him. 

Published in 1998, five years before The Da Vinci Code, Digital Fortress was the novel where Dan Brown worked out some of his key plot elements that would ultimately be integrated into his later novels. The ticking time clock; the clever man and the brainy, beautiful woman working as a team against a deadline; intriguing European settings (Seville in Digital Fortress); global stakes; confusion over who the real bad guy is; Brown’s fascination with codes and cryptography; and a hefty sprinkling of technology that has some fundamental resonance with real life issues but no effort at verisimilitude. For all its flaws, the book did foreshadow the NSA scandal, the concerns of people like Edward Snowden, and many other issues that have surfaced in the last few years. It will be interesting to see how it is adapted to the TV medium and an ongoing series.