How Did Robert Ludlum Become a Mega-Seller?

Looking back at the history of spy fiction one is struck by British domination of the field for most of its history, where significant, genre-founding and genre-reinventing innovation, the authorship of the classics that stood the test of time, and its largest commercial names, are concerned. William Le Queux virtually invented it in the form in which we know it in Secrets of the Foreign Office, and continued to lay down its foundations in subsequent works like Spies of the Kaiser, along with Erskine Childers, E. Phillips Oppenheim and Joseph Conrad. Following these the writers we tend to remark are Sax Rohmer, John Buchan, H.C. McNeile, W. Somerset Maugham, Eric Ambler, Graham Greene, Ian Fleming, William Haggard, John le Carrè, Len Deighton, Frederick Forsyth . . . as Americans, if taking occasional and sometimes more than occasional interest, only occasionally produced a book like The Manchurian Candidate before going on to other things.

This changed in the 1970s, however, with that decade and the next seeing two American authors of spy fiction enter that uppermost rank of really commercially successful authors, the Flemings and le Carrès and Forsyths, namely Robert Ludlum and Tom Clancy.

I have, of course, got in my two cents on Clancy's success (which had at least as much to do with the boom of the techno-thriller as spy fiction, more narrowly defined). I have given less thought to Ludlum's, but the recent turn of my research and writing has me doing so now.

It strikes me that, in contrast with Fleming (whose sales went through the roof when Bond became a screen hit in the early '60s), or le Carrè (whose career it appears was helped greatly by Martin Ritt's film version of The Spy Who Came in From the Cold shortly after the book hit the market), or Forsyth (whose first novel Fred Zinnemann turned into another commercial success and instant classic), or the later Clancy (whose early Jack Ryan novels John McTiernan and Philip Noyce turned into major hits in a critical period for his career, while shortly after Clancy exploded in the world of video gaming with Rainbow Six), Ludlum did not get a significant boost out of cinematic or other multimedia success during his commercial peak in print. (There were two major feature films based on his work in the '80s, as it happened, helmed by legendary thriller directors--Sam Peckinpah's The Osterman Weekend, and John Frankenheimer's The Holcroft Covenant--but both were commercial and critical flops, while the TV versions of his work, like the 1988 Richard Chamberlain-Jaclyn Smith miniseries version of The Bourne Identity, could do only so much for him.)

And where his writing was concerned he managed to be less accessible than most pop-oriented writers (the way Forsyth and Clancy were, with their transparent prose and straightforward storytelling), without winning critical plaudits (the way le Carrè did), and not wholly without reason. The convoluted plots, and the manner in which he sometimes withheld information, could make his stories hard to follow without their being particularly accomplished artistically. Indeed, Ludlum's prose has been much derided as overdone and melodramatic.

1. The market for American spy fiction was opening up. In the '60s Americans became really big consumers of spy fiction for the first time. They consumed mainly imports--Fleming, le Carrè--but it did suggest opportunity for local product, and Ludlum came out in '71, virtually the first of that crop of Americans to make names for themselves here (James Grady, Charles McCarry, Trevanian).

2. At the start of the decade Frederick Forsyth established the fashion for "super-thrillers"--novels twice as long as had been usual for spy stories and the like--with The Day of the Jackal. As it happened, Ludlum was inclined to big books from the first, and the books went on getting bigger as the decade proceeded. (Looking at those '70s-era novels it seems that most of the competition was behind the curve that way.)

3. Where content was concerned Ludlum was relatively in tune with the times, politically and aesthetically. Suspicion of the security state and of corporate power, international terrorism, and World War II nostalgia were all big in the '70s. Indeed, he did not hesitate to be blatantly topical, writing prominent recent and present day figures into his plots. (In 1977's The Chancellor Manuscript he spun a tale about the then-recent death of J. Edgar Hoover, while the plot of 1980's The Bourne Identity centered on the hunt for Carlos the Jackal.) He also handled the political material in a manner palatable to the broader public. (He was, after all, a centrist in a way that would be less fashionable in the '80s, but hardly as dangerous to one's career as, for example, was the case for Trevanian.)

Jet-setters were popular subject matter, too, and he capitalized on this as well. (Ludlum's heroes were commonly international professional types, whose adventures abroad tended toward the sort of touristy European spots Americans would like to go on vacation.) And the '70s all saw the thriller increasingly shift from mystery-suspense to paramilitary-style shoot 'em up action-adventure, another wave Ludlum rode. (Just compare the suburban head games of The Osterman Weekend to the ample gunplay of The Bourne Identity.)

In short, his early arrival on the scene with distinctly American, rather large, and from the standpoint of theme and style, topical and fashionable, novels, were plenty to give him a shot at the big time, so to speak, and it proved more than enough.