Review: The Matlock Paper, by Robert Ludlum

WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD

In Robert Ludlum's third novel, 1973's The Matlock Paper, the FBI, looking to identify the leader of a powerful drug trafficking network in the northeastern U.S., determining that Connecticut's "Carlyle University" is central to the activity, enlists one of that university's professors, James Matlock, to help in their investigation--and promptly plunged into a conflict between parties of which he knows nothing, and for which he is woefully unprepared and unequipped.

As is generally the case with the early Ludlum The Matlock Paper is more a suspense story than an action story, if one with the danger and violence and piling up of bodies beginning rather early on and coming more consistently afterward than in his two preceding works. On that level the book is efficient and effective. Moreover, while I generally find that even the better thrillers are more satisfying in their mechanics than in their explanations of what in the end the intrigue was all about--and Ludlum was no exception in that regard--this time around he gets a good many points for at least having a surprise to spring on us. As it turns out the big network was organized and run by the administrators of New England's universities in an attempt to save their institutions financially in an era in which government and private donors were not willing to give them the resources they needed to go on. And in the end Matlock is caught between Little Ivy university presidents-turned-Pablo Escobars and the Black nationalist movement's military wing's answer to the Navy SEALs operating out of a frat house named "Patrice Lumumba Hall" (in a Little Ivy-type liberal arts college in the early 1970s!), and forced to make a temporary alliance of convenience with whichever seems the more survivable to him.

The scenario may seem ridiculous, but then as Ludlum's characters so often scream the "Madness!" of "Maniacs!" is pretty much what makes a Ludlum plot a Ludlum plot, and all things considered it seems to me that there is more than just over-the-top plotting in this image of Matlock caught in between president Adrian Sealfont and Black radical Julian Dunois--the political symbolism unmissable, a centrist nightmare of a country caught in between a traditional Establishment sinking to the very depths of corruption on the one hand and "extremist" radicals on the other. Distinctly '70s, the book seems about as unlikely as any of Ludlum's works for a film adaptation, but I'm sure that someone is trying to make something of it anyway, with such an effort perhaps looking more plausible amid the "Madness!" and "Maniacs!" of 2022--which, I must admit, have me wondering what Ludlum, were he alive and still working, would be producing after looking at today's American political scene.