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Dustin Thomason ’03 and Ian Caldwell, both 29, have been best friends since they met in third grade at a birthday party. They have been writing together ever since—starting with short stories, plays and skits for elementary school talent shows, moving on to more elaborate projects in high school and culminating in a best-selling novel, The Rule of Four, published last year.

The authors started writing the novel just after they graduated from college. Thomason went to Harvard, where he studied writing and won the Hoopes Prize for outstanding scholarly work, and Caldwell to Princeton, where he studied history and graduated Phi Beta Kappa. The separation was difficult for them, so in 1998, their senior year, with college graduation and adulthood looming, they decided to reconnect by collaborating on a novel about academia and friendship.

Time and Friendship

“The Rule of Four” is both the answer to a 500-year-old scholarly mystery and an allusion to the friendship that enables the story’s four protagonists to solve it. On the eve of graduation, four college friends race to decipher a coded text scholars have struggled with since the Renaissance and that now seems connected to a violent murder on campus. It is both a compelling suspense novel and a sensitive coming-of-age story, exploring the subject of male friendship.

“One of the big themes of the book is the effect of time on friendships and the transition between youth and adulthood at that kind of seminal moment of graduation,” Thomason says from Los Angeles, where he now lives. “Those were themes that were very pertinent in our minds at the time we were writing.”

They planned to write the book over the summer—side by side on two laptops in the basement they had played in as kids—before entering the real world that fall. “We never really expected too much to come of it,” Thomason says. But the project grew and took on a life of its own. Six years later, the novel has topped the best-seller lists, sold more than a million copies and been turned into a screenplay.

In the years it took them to write The Rule of Four, the authors managed to balance their writing with graduate school, jobs and relationships. Thomason earned his MBA and MD from Columbia Business and Medical Schools in 2003. Caldwell worked full-time as a software engineer and then as a teacher, and he got married. “We both just feel like there’s time in the day to do more than one thing,” Thomason says. “You can’t write all day, every day.”

So, in their free time, the authors assigned themselves reading lists—books about the Renaissance and novels in the historical-mystery genre. The latter included The Name of the Rose, The Secret History and The Alienist. “There’s certainly a rich tradition of those kinds of books,” Thomason says, preempting a comparison with Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code, the runaway best seller against which The Rule of Four is inevitably—and favorably—judged.

The Hypnerotomachia Poliphili and the Italian Renaissance

Critics praise The Rule of Four for its scholarly handling of the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, a dense and esoteric 15th-century text written in seven languages and made even more inscrutable by hidden messages in anagrams, acrostics and ciphers.

The Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, which translates as “Poliphilo’s Struggle for Love in a Dream,” has been variously described as “the most beautiful book in the world, and also the most unreadable,” “an encyclopedia masquerading as a novel, a dissertation on everything from architecture to zoology” and “the world’s longest book about a man having a dream,” one that “makes Marcel Proust, who wrote the world’s longest book about a man eating a piece of cake, look like Ernest Hemingway.”

Thomason and Caldwell chose the Hypnerotomachia as their subject after Caldwell began researching it for a class taught by the acclaimed Princeton history professor Anthony Grafton. It is a text that has baffled scholars for centuries, and critics have enjoyed—though not endorsed—The Rule of Four’s creative resolution of the book’s two main mysteries: the identity of the book’s author and its meaning.

The former has been presumed partially solved ever since the discovery of an acrostic formed by the first letters of each chapter spelling out, in translation, “Brother Francesco Colonna loved Polia tremendously.” While most scholars believe the author was a 15th-century Roman nobleman named Francesco Colonna, others argue it was a Dominican monk in Venice of the same name.

Thomason and Caldwell chose the Venetian Francesco Colonna, whose story they linked to such figures and events of the Italian Renaissance as the Florentine religious leader Girolamo Savonarola and “the bonfire of the vanities.” Grafton, while praising The Rule of Four in the New York Review of Books, disagreed with their choice of the author’s identity. “We knew that the consensus of scholarship was pointed in the other direction,” Thomason says, “but the story was much more interesting to go in the direction we chose.”

The Rule of Four’s story about friendship, love, loyalty and betrayal makes for a good read. But what sets the novel apart is its scholarship—its appreciation of Renaissance history and intellectual discovery—and its fictional weaving of real people and events with Colonna and his text. The meaning of the Hypnerotomachia, according to The Rule of Four, can be found only by true lovers of scholarship.

Thomason and Caldwell devised secret codes, hidden messages and riddles based on art, science, engineering and other disciplines for their protagonists to decipher. In the process, the authors strove to be faithful to the ideas on which these puzzles were based. “We tried really hard to use as much real history as we could,” Thomason says. “We steered away from making enormous culture-shifting claims.”

Business Training and Versatility

Now business partners as well as friends, Thomason and Caldwell credit The Rule of Four with strengthening their relationship. “If Ian and I hadn’t written this book, we would probably talk once every two weeks or so on the phone,” Thomason says. “We would still be friends, but you know, people get older and relationships change . . . . Our relationship has changed as a result of this, but at least it’s changed in a way that forces us to spend more time together.”

They have sold the movie rights to The Rule of Four to Warner Bros. and are writing a second book, although they will not discuss the details. “I would say it’s like a brother to The Rule of Four, but not an identical twin,” Thomason says. And they have written a television pilot with a character-driven story line that explores male friendship. Thomason is producing the pilot for ABC Television.

“I always wanted to work as a writer and work in books and in TV and in movies,” says Thomason. “We had some very good fortune with the book, and that kind of opened up some doors. I’m very happy about that and doing exactly what I love now.”

Thomason wants to combine both the creative and business sides of the entertainment industry, and he thinks his MBA training will help him in Hollywood. He has found a mentor in John Wells of such shows as ER and The West Wing, who embodies the executive producer/writer combination.

“A lot of times, people in the entertainment business—especially artists, creators—tend not to think much about . . . the kind of big-picture stuff that businesspeople fancy themselves very good at thinking about,” Thomason says. “Hopefully, I can use my business training to do a little of the stuff that artists tend not to do.”