Review: The Holcroft Covenant, by Robert Ludlum

Reading my way through other long sequences of books by popular authors I have often noted that they often produce a number of fairly varied works in the earlier part of their career from which they distill a formula with which they tend to stick afterward. Thus did Ian Fleming produce very different works in Casino Royale, Live and Let Die, Moonraker, Diamonds Are Forever, and From Russia, with Love--and then extract from them the formula that he used in subsequent books like Dr. No and Goldfinger and Thunderball, which in their turn provided much of the material for the formula seen in the classic Bond movies of the '60s (the international travel, the megalomaniac villains with their high-tech, geopolitically consequential plots, etc.).

So does it seem to me to go with Ludlum, with books like The Scarlatti Inheritance and The Rhinemann Exchange and The Gemini Contenders providing a body of work Ludlum distilled into the formula that he came to be known by, with the first true example 1978's The Holcroft Covenant--with its international range, and especially its use of West European settings; its globally consequential conspiracy in which international terrorism is an instrument of the villains, but not in the way most of the public thinks; its action movie heroics and its romantic subplot; ticking off all the boxes.

Being the first The Holcroft Covenant is, as one might expect, fresher in feel than many of the books that would follow it, but Ludlum's increasing tendency to overwrite, and clutter the narrative with the melodramatic tics for which he is notorious (italics, exclamation points, "Madness!" and "Maniacs!" and so forth), is also quite evident, more so than before. I might add that the mystery is diminished by the biggest revelation arriving at the beginning, namely that Noel Holcroft is actually the son of the Third Reich's banker, who in his contrition over his involvement in its crimes embezzled vast sums for the sake of helping the victims after the war, and left the responsibility for completing that task to him, while the would-be architects of a Fourth Reich about which we learn at the opening very soon prove to have other plans for the plan. Of course, Holcroft is slower to learn all of this than the reader (indeed, in the early part of the story, annoyingly slow to realize that the fact that people are constantly being gunned down and poisoned around him has anything at all to do with him and his present situation). All the same, even he figures it out eventually, as a result of which fact Ludlum's tale this time around has less to do with unraveling the mystery of "What is it all about?" than with the mechanics of stopping the villains, with Holcroft’s effort to get the funds released and keep them from the Neo-Nazi plotters running nearly five hundred pages. Still, Ludlum manages to hold the reader's attention through it, while the book's twist ending is by itself plenty to make it memorable. ("How about a Bond novel where the bad guys win?" I once wondered. So it goes here.) Indeed, while I am not particularly enthusiastic about sequels it seems to me that this book more than any other by Ludlum merited one--but then that would have taken Ludlum out of his usual territory into science fiction-land, and unsurprisingly Holcroft, unlike four of Ludlum's other novels to date, never got such a follow-up.