HERE'S AN INTERVIEW with the authors of The Rule of Four, Ian Caldwell and Dustin Thomason (Voice of America News). Excerpts (Caldwell speaking in the first):

"A Renaissance history professor suggested I write my final paper on a book called the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, which I'd never heard of, and neither of us could spell," he said. "So I went to the library to look it up, and it turns out to be one of the most valuable books in the history of Western printing. Nobody knows who wrote it, and yet there's a code inside the book that seems to suggest the identity of the author. It's written in about half a dozen ancient languages, everything from Italian and Latin and Greek to Hebrew and Arabic and Egyptian hieroglyphics. The material in the book is also very peculiar. There's a lot of sexual imagery, a lot of violence that makes it surprisingly un-Christian considering the Christian time period, the Renaissance and the culture it came out of. So all the way around it's something that scholars have been puzzled by."

If there are Egyptian hieroglyphics in the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, they must be either gibberish or copied from an ancient text without the author knowing what they said: no one could read them in the time the book was written.

Ian and Dustin turned that real life mystery into a fictional story set at Princeton University, where a group of students race to unravel the secrets of the Hypnerotomachia. When things turn violent, the students realize there's more at stake than intellectual curiosity. Dustin Thomason says they drew inspiration from their own college experiences and from the Hypnerotomachia .

"Neither one of us had any professors who were as evil as the ones that are represented in The Rule of Four," he said. "But we tried as best we could to recreate the feeling of being a senior in college and the feeling of working on something your senior thesisthat is incredibly important to you.

Let's hear it for evil professors.

Ian and Dustin were aided in their research by the first English translation of the Hypnerotomachia , which was published while they were working on their novel. They divided up the writing duties, working on separate chapters, then reviewing them together. Over time, Ian Caldwell says they developed a single voice for their main character, a Princeton senior named Tom Sullivan.

If this means that Caldwell read the book in the original when he was an undergraduate, well, I'm impressed. But I suppose it's more likely that he just used secondary sources.

From the little I've heard so far, The Rule of Four sounds a lot more worthwhile than the idiotic Da Vinci Code.