How Has Robert Ludlum's Readership Held Up Over the Years?

When I was researching The James Bond We Forget I found myself looking for empirically useful indications of the readership of the James Bond novels in recent years--originals and continuation novels alike. In the process I hit on the idea that the number of Goodreads ratings a book got might be an indicator. Going by these it seemed that, as I had suspected, there were not many of them. Casino Royale, greatly boosted by the hit movie, still had some 70,000 ratings when I looked--and the figure fell by more than three-fifths between there and the next book, Live and Let Die. The numbers continued trending downward from there, to about 10,000 for The Man with the Golden Gun, while the continuation novels did even less well--some of them having under a thousand such ratings.

Just for the sake of comparison, Fifty Shades of Grey, Gone Girl and The Girl on the Train each have over 2 million ratings, and Me Before You over 1 million ratings. Of course, the books in question were older and the platform less favorable to them--but compare Casino Royale even with Tom Clancy's The Hunt for Red October--which had well over 300,000 ratings.

Recently I wondered where Robert Ludlum fits into the picture. As it happens his novel The Bourne Identity has an impressive 420,000 ratings--doubtless also helped by having been the basis for an identically titled hit movie. But, even with the boost provided by hit adaptations of the sequels, these did far, far less well. The Bourne Supremacy has about 181,000 ratings, The Bourne Ultimatum a mere 63,000. And while Bourne got his continuation novels the way Bond has the ratings for these dwindled fast--the more recent of these scoring about a couple of thousand. Meanwhile Ludlum's non-Bourne novels have not held up all that well readership-wise, if one goes by this measure. The most-rated non-Bourne novel is The Matarese Circle, with a mere 42,000 ratings, The Icarus Agenda having about 30,000 (not sure why it ended up next in line), and The Aquitaine Progression a little under 19,000, with his The Road to Omaha (one of his two comedies) at the bottom of the list with just 4,000.

I think I was more surprised by the limited evidences of a readership for Ludlum than for Fleming. After all, Fleming's storytelling style (telling the doings of James Bond as though he were writing Madame Bovary, while every so often subjecting us to a thirty-page account of a card game) is not what readers of popular fiction these days expect from a thriller, such that Bond fans--especially fans who think of a Bond movie as properly a light, fun, gimmick-packed action-adventure secret agent procedural--quickly drop the books in disinterest. Meanwhile they never acquired the level of cachet a John le Carrè has had, leaving those who might otherwise bear with them unwilling to struggle with an old, difficult book--while many regard the social attitudes of that Edwardian Etonian as unforgivable. (Race and gender get all the press, but there is much, much more there to be offended by.)

By contrast Ludlum was a more recent writer (not 2020, but still, not a writer already being lambasted as a reactionary in the '50s), offering more straightforward, brisker, more action-packed novels. (Indeed, I think that more than anyone else he can be credited with having brought the paperback shoot 'em-up-style just arriving on the scene in the '70s into the high-end, big-press hardcover spy thriller.) There is, too, the cachet that the Ludlum media franchise has had--which I expected to do more for the readership of his books than the Bond movies manage to do for Fleming's books (let alone Gardner's), as well as the buzz that a number of his works make from development hell (as with those versions of The Matarese Circle and The Chancellor Manuscript that we heard about). But it has been far from being enough to save him--and at least to go by what I see on the Goodreads pages, a reminder that where popular fiction is concerned blockbusters very quickly lose their appeal for most readers. Indeed, I suspect that had Doug Liman's film The Bourne Identity not become a hit back in 2002 the Ludlum name (which through the '90s went from topping the bestseller lists to falling right off of them) would be all but forgotten today save by a few older fans and hardcore students of the form--a latterday William Le Queux or E. Phillips Oppenheim.