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Let's get this out the way: The DaVinci Code, by Dan Brown, deserves its phenomenal popular success - by virtue of possessing the most thrillingly entertaining and well constructed plot you were likely to find in a published book of this type during the last decade.

It has largely been maligned by po-faced critics with a breathtaking lack of self-awareness and a large dose of hubristic ignorance concerning the prevailing fashions and technical merits of genre fiction.

There is a reason why books by men such as John Grisham, Robert Ludlum, Thomas Harris, Tom Clancy, Michael Crichton and now Dan Brown sell so well: it's because these men are exceptionally good at what they do - the best in fact - and they deliver the books that people enjoy and want to read the most. Anybody in denial of this home truth has simply not been paying attention, and must surely be wholly unaware that Dan Brown is exactly the writer he wants to be - notwithstanding the huffing and puffing of the outraged literati.

To criticize The DaVinci Code effectively and fairly is difficult because it really is a master class of its kind. To lambaste the prose style as many have done is to completely miss the point of how successfully it services the pacing of the story. To decry the characterization is to miss out on the energy of the plot they are swept up in. And maybe the ending is a bit silly, but that is to deny how exhilarating and exuberant the ride was. What's better, this is actually a sequel to another book, Angels and Demons, which offers up yet more portions of the same.

None of which in any way excuses the interminably dull movie adaptation foisted on the unsuspecting public by Ron Howard and Tom Hanks - two men who really should hang their heads in shame as they are capable of so much better - in which the characters inexplicably exposit the plot to one another, again and again, and in solemn tones, as the bafflingly insufficient onscreen action fails to show the audience why they should care at all.

The concept should be familiar to nearly all by now, but in case it is not: Robert Langdon is a Harvard University professor, called upon to assist a French cryptologist who must solve the brutal murder of her grandfather, the curator of the Louvre art museum in Paris. Together they decipher a series of riddles that should lead them to the identity of the killer, but which also point to tantalising revelations about human history, knowledge of which has been encoded in the work of Leonardo da Vinci.

The book is engrossingly suspenseful and would have worked as an effective Indiana Jones sequel to Raiders of the Lost Ark if George Lucas and Steven Spielberg had thought of the idea (or bought the rights to The Templar Revelation and Holy Blood Holy Grail) a few years before.

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