The Early Robert Ludlum Novels: Some Notes

Robert Ludlum's name has long been synonymous with the type of thriller he increasingly produced in the late '70s and '80s, and the pattern of which clearly characterizes his largest commercial successes. These were contemporary-set thrillers, written at what was then regarded as the "super-thriller" end of the scale length-wise, in which the protagonist, usually a solidly Eastern Establishment bourgeois-professional type, usually at least thirtysomething, usually single, finds himself caught up in an international conspiracy of distinctly contemporary character (international terrorism just about always there, though often with the terrorists as pawns in some larger game, maneuvered by some bigger and more powerful interest). In trying to get out of his mess the hero has to look over his shoulder at the pursuing authorities as much as at the more obvious villains of the piece (not unlike Richard Hannay in Buchan's The Thirty-Nine Steps).

The resulting adventure tends to be mobile in the extreme, with much travel involved (apt to be heavy on West/Central European locations, with Italy, Switzerland, France especially prominent), and that travel generally done in high style; involve him in a romantic/sexual relationship important to the plot (hence the preference for a hero who is single); and written for the age of the action movie, be packed with foot and car chases, close-combat fights and gunplay, in the course of which if the hero was not already an action hero type (as is the case with Jason Bourne), he is compelled to become one just to get through it all (as Noel Holcroft is). The adventure also tends to be sufficiently convoluted that one has a very hard time finding good summaries of the plots and how they progress. (Even Martin Greenberg seemed at a loss at times in The Robert Ludlum Companion.)

And the conclusion is unlikely to be a matter of the good guys simply figuring out what was up, catching the villain, telling the hero he is all in the clear and he can just get on with his life (in which respect it was very unlike The Thirty-Nine Steps). As a matter of fact the villains sometimes win, and win big. (In The Holcroft Covenant the Fourth Reich actually seizes power, and the tale closes with Noel getting its architect in his sights--the defeated hero turning to resistance and revenge after the villains' triumph. And while The Bourne Identity was tidier in its resolution than most there was no going all the way back to his old life for David Webb, and Carlos the Jackal was still at large, and Bourne/Webb and Carlos did indeed have occasion to face each other down again.)

Ludlum's less read earlier output was more diverse, and often very different. The Scarlatti Inheritance and The Rhinemann Exchange were World War II thrillers, as was the first half of The Gemini Contenders. The Osterman Weekend, The Matlock Paper and The Chancellor Manuscript were set domestically, with the events of the first two of those books all but confined to an apparently genteel community in the northeastern United States (an upper class suburb in the first case, a college town in the second), and The Matlock Paper more a crime story than a spy story (centered as it is on financially motivated drug trafficking rather than high-level political machinations). The Gemini Contenders, if more conventionally espionage-oriented, was in its stakes a Dan Brown-ish historical-religious thriller, and, with this going to a lesser degree for The Scarlatti Inheritance, a sprawling family epic, while The Chancellor Manuscript had a metafictional twist, and made use of real-life figures as characters in a manner going far beyond the use of Carlos the Jackal in The Bourne Identity (most significantly, J. Edgar Hoover). And in The Road to Gandolfo Ludlum even produced a comedy. Moreover, the books were rather more compact than they would later become, the hero's sometimes being a family man (as in The Osterman Weekend) limited the prospect of romantic entanglement, and the World War II tales apart, while these thrillers often entailing violence and danger, their often not having very much action, and the protagonist being just a "regular guy" who may not even get up to much in the way of physical heroics, and when he does so is just the ordinary man who had his "back to the wall." (That a hot war was on in the World War II stories made the difference in those books, I think.)

I suppose that Ludlum's increasing adherence to a formula from the late 1970s on was a matter of response to market signals--writing what was selling. Yet as my description of the formula suggests it can be very limiting, not just with regard to premise and theme and structure and tone, but even character and setting. And writing every book out to super-thriller length was doubtless not only exhausting, but seems to me to have led to a good deal of overwriting, and certainly worsened Ludlum's notorious melodramatic tics. (The famous italics, the exclamation points, etc., seem to me to be more evident in the later and longer books than the earlier and shorter ones.)

Still, if it seems likely that cranking out one super-thriller after another according to a formula led to repetitiveness and srain (Ludlum's tendency to overwrite, his tendency to certain literary tics--the exclamation points and so on--seem to me to have got worse, while increasingly it was sequels to old hits and repetition of older concepts), it has to be remembered that the Ludlum novels of the late '80s, at least, were by any measure colossal bestsellers--and that when collapse came in the '90s, pretty much every writer in the genre was affected.* The result is that in the end other factors were clearly more consequential than the strain that came with sticking to the same rather limiting and difficult formula for so long.*

* The Bourne Supremacy (1986) and The Bourne Ultimatum (1990) were sequels to The Bourne Identity, The Icarus Agenda (1988) one to The Chancellor Manuscript, The Road to Omaha (1992) a sequel to The Road to Gandolfo. The relatively thin The Scorpio Illusion(1993) gave us international terrorists-whose-strings-are-pulled-by-corporate-power again (if, again, in relatively competent form, with a timely Post-Cold War update), after which The Apocalypse Watch (1995) provided yet another Fourth Reich plot, and The Matarese Countdown (1997) was one more sequel, in this case to the now long-ago hit The Matarese Circle.