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Robert Ludlum (1927-2001) - pseudonomyms: Jonathan Ryder; Michael Shepherd |
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American thriller writer whose violent, fast-paced books during his lifetime sold some 290 million copies worldwide. Robert Ludlum started his literary career relatively late, after working in the theatre, both as actor and producer. Ludlum's special skill is to capture the imagination of his readers from the first pages, and keep them absorbed in the story. Although critics considered his style melodramatic and the plots unbelievable, the author often used material from current events in international politics. Characteristic for Ludlum's stories is a paranoid view of the world, in which global corporations and shadowy military and governmental organizations undermine the international status quo. Heroes are thrown into a web of intrigues, where they do not know who is their real friend and who is the enemy. Finally, against all odds, they defeat seemingly superior adversaries. "So I suppose I equate suspense and good theatre in a very similar way. I think it's all suspense and 'what-happens-next'. From that point of view, yes, I guess, I am theatrical." (Ludlum in Bestsellers: Top Writers Tell How, 1997) Robert Ludlum was born in New York City, the son of George Hartford Ludlum, a businessman, and Margaret Wadsworth Ludlum. Soon after his birth, the family moved to the suburban community of Short Hills, New Jersey. Ludlum's maternal grandfather, an English silk importer, left the family wealthy enough to provide him a college education after his father died in 1934. Ludlum was
educated at the Rectory School for boys in Pomfret,
Connecticut, the Kent School, and at the Chesire Academy.
Before acting in the long-running comedy Junior Miss on
Broadway at sixteen, Ludlum had already appeared in school
theatricals – his first ambition, however, was to be a quaterback
in football. During World War II Ludlum tried to join the Royal Canadian Air Force. The attempt failed but upon graduating from Cheshire Academy, Ludlum served as an infantryma in 1945- 47 in the U.S. Marine Corps. He was was posted to the South Pacific, where he wrote a manuscript of some two hundred pages of his impressions. The manuscript was lost while he celebrated his discharge in San Francisco. He had been a private when he entered the Marine Corps and was a private when he discharged. After studies at Wesleyan University, Middletown, Ludlum received in 1951 his B.A. In the same year he married the actress Mary Ryducha; they had three children. Ludlum's career in the1950s as a stage and
television actor was moderately successful, but he never achieved star
recognition. With his wife he performed in New England repertory
theatres. He was in 200 television dramas, among them The Kraft
Television Theatre, Studio One, and Robert Montgomery
Presents.
"Usually," Ludlum recalled, "I was cast as a lawyer or a homicidal
killer. . . . But I got bored with the total lack of control an actor
has, which is when I decided to become a producer." ('Ludlum, Robert,' in World Authors 1980-1985, edited by Vineta Colby, 1991, p. 554)
In The Strong Are Lonely (1952) by Fritz
Hochwalder Ludlum played a soldier, he was Spartacus in Robert
Montgomery Bird's The Gladiator (1954), and D'Estivel in Saint
Joan
(1956) by G.B. Shaw. By the late 1950s, Ludlum left acting for producing. In 1957 he became a producer at the North Jersey Playhouse, Fort Lee, New Jersey and in 1960 he opened the Playhouse-on-the-Mall in Paramus, with funding from the Actors Equity Association and the William C. Whitney Foundation. After twenty years in the theater and producing more than 370
stage
productions for New York and regional theatre, Ludlum wrote his first
novel, The Scarlatti Inheritance (1971), a tale about Nazis and
international financiers. Before it appeared, he had been a
long time "a closet writer," as he once said. After ten rejection
slips, it was published by World Pub. Co., and became an
immediate best-seller and a Book-of-the-Month Club alternate selection.
The idea for the story came from an old article in the Illustrated
London News,
in which a photograph showed a German pushing a wheelbarrow full of
inflation banknotes, and another picture showed members of the Nazi
Party. Ludlum's next thriller, The Osterman Weekend (1973), was later made into a film, directed by Sam Peckinpah. It was released without Peckinpah's approval in 1983 after he refused to make changes suggested by the producers. Alan Sharp, author of Night Moves and Ulzana's Raid, wrote the screenplay. In the story a television news executive, John Tanner, is recruited by CIA to reveal a ring of Soviet agents, who are perhaps his close friends. Tanner became the prototype of Ludlum's male protagonist, who is more lucky and resourceful than the villains ever could guess – and who finds it hard to trust anyone. From the mid-1970s, Ludlum was a full-time writer. From Leonia, New Jersey, the Ludlums moved to Long Island, where they bought a two-hundred-year-old clapboard farmhouse. A second home they had in Florida. Ludlum traveled widely to collect background material for his novels. Paris become his favorite city and the backdrop for some of the scenes in his novels. The Bourne Identity
(1980) resonated with European and American readers on a profound
level. It utilized the formula that had been used very successfully in Alfred Hitchcock's film The 39 Steps (1935), based on John Buchan's novel from 1915, Alan J. Pakula's conspiracy film The Parallax View (1974), and Sydney Pollack's paranoid political thriller Three Days of the Condor (1975) from James Grady's spy novel. Ludlum's thriller was the first in a series about an American counter-assassin and his nearly superhuman opponent,
Carlos, who confront in different parts of the world. The character of
Carlos was partly based on the Venezuelan-born freelance terrorist
Ilich Ramírez
Sánchez (born 1949), who participated in the raid on the Vienna
OPEC conference in 1975 and was involved in many other terrorist
activities. In 1994 he was captured in Sudan and
flown to
France for trial. He
is serving a life sentence in a French prison. In 2003 Sanchez
published a
book, entitled L'islam révolutionnaire
(Revolutionary Islam). The Bourne Identity
starts in the middle of action:
"The trawler plunged into the angry swells of the dark, furious sea
like an awkward animal trying desperately to break out of an
impenetrable swamp. . . . Two abrupt explosions pierced the sounds of
the sea and the wind and the vessel's pain. They came from the dimly
lit cabin that rose and fell with its host body. A man lunged out of
the door grasping the railing with one band, holding his stomach with
the other." The protagonist is found half-dead in the Mediterranean,
without
memory of who he is. An alcoholic doctor tells him: "The recessed
psychological
pressures will allow – are
allowing – your skills and talents to come back to you. But I don't
think you'll ever be able to relate them to anything in your past." I
gradually turns out that he is David Webb, a young Far East scholar,
who has got a new identity by "Treadstone Seventy-One" to kill the
notorious Carlos the Jackal, but has been betrayed. By the end of the
story, Webb is no more merely a cold-blooded assassin, but a man trying
to grasp the mystery of his true self. In the movie
version CIA officials are the real "bad people." The Bourne
Supremacy brought on the stage Bourne's sadistic doppelganger, who
has started to execute people in Hong Kong. In the third novel, The Bourne Ultimatum, the showdown between Carlos and Bourne was set in Russia. "The Bourne Supremacy may be Mr. Ludlum's most overwrought, speciously motivated, spuriously complicated story to date. It's difficult to tell whether he's writing worse or it's just getting easier to spot his tricks. And yet – shameful to admit – one keeps reading. Is it the violence of the action? The adolescence of the fantasy? The maddening convolutions of the plot? Whatever, the effect is like dessert after certain rich meals. It's too much. One shouldn't. One doesn't really feel like it. ''Oh, my God,'' one gasps, contemplating the enormity of it. And promptly devours the entire concoction." (Christopher Lehmann-Haupt in The New York Times, March 6, 1986) The fourth novel in the series, The Bourne Legacy (2004), was written by Eric Van Lustbader (b. 1946), who has blended in his earlier works ninja mysticism, eroticism, exotic locations, and government corruption. In Ludlum's novels multinational right-wing intrigues are
often
born from economic reasons. The real life reference poits are
Bildergerg Group, the Trilateral Commission founded by David
Rockefeller, the Bohemian Grove, the World Economic Forum,
and other clubs and conferences of the world's political and
economic elite. Morever, Ludlum draws parallels between the Nazis and modern
day fanatics striving for power. "When the chaos becomes intolerable, it would be their excuse to march in military units and assume the controls, initially with martial law,'' speculates one of Ludlum's characters in The Aquitaine Progression (1984), a thriller on a global scale. Like Bourne, the hero, named Joel Converse, struggles with his mental state. "The sense of contrast and revelation, of facades and hidden agenda, of the straightforward and the unexpected, reflects not only the structural features of Ludlum's novel, bit the constant "cross and double-cross" experiences by its characters." ( 'The Aquitaine Progression' by Martyne J. Colebrook, in Encyclopedia of American Popular Fiction, edited by Geoff Hamilton and Brian Jones, 2009, p. 10) Many of Ludlum's
heroes work alone, but in The Matarese Circle (1979)
CIA and KGB join their forces, like United States and the Soviet Union
during World War II, to fight against a circle of terrorists plotting
against superpowers. The Matarese dynasty returned again in The
Matarese Countdown
(1997), in which its members have infiltrated the CIA and try to
establish a new world economic order. Billy Crystal (as Harry Burns) in the romantic comedy When Harry Met Sally (1989) reads The Icarus Agenda (1988) in bed. Crystal's character, an ordinary person, living a normal life, is very much the opposite of Ludlum's heroes who regularly save the Western democratic order. It is only the villains who seek to rise above their fellow citizens. And like Icarus, they are doomed to fall from the heights. Ludlum argues in the book, that "democracy may have a lot of flaws," but that it is "the best system man ever devised." Ludlum published books under the pseudonyms Jonathan
Ryder (Trevayne and The Cry of the Halidon) and Michael
Shepherd (The Road to Gandolpho) – the latter was written
in humorist style. With Gayle Lynds and Philip
Shelby he coauthored the Covert-One series about a benign but shadowy US security organization. Ludlum died of a heart attack on March 12,
2001, in Naples, Florida. The Sigma Protocol (2001), his last
novel, was published posthumously. The Prometheus Deception (2000) was perhaps Ludlum's most prophetic novel. In the story a series of terrorist attacks are used in an international conspiracy to restrict civil rights and to increase electronic surveillance for security reasons. The purpose is good – to protect détente and stop wars and crimes. Nicholas Bryson, the protagonist, is a deep-cover agent, who trusts his instincts while his opponents act mechanically, according to their great plan. Bryson has worked years for a shadowy organization called the Directorate. Everybody lies to him, and Ludlum makes it clear to his readers, that they should not believe generally accepted "truths," world leaders or UN Secretary-General. And again the agent, surrounded by enemies, is fighting himself out of all kinds of corners – he escapes from a ship, a French château full of security men, and a Chinese store house. Bryson has much reasons to suspect the intentions of governmental organizations, CIA, FBI, and others, and shout in his anger: "The goddamn GRU, the Russians--that's all in the past. Maybe you Cold War cowboys at Langley haven't yet heard the news--the war's over!" The Tristan Betrayal (2003) appeared with the note: "Since his death, the Estate of Robert Ludlum has worked with a careful selected author and editor to prepare and edit this work for publication." For further reading: Routledge Handbook of Conspiracy Theories, edited by Michael Butter and Peter Knight (2020); Encyclopedia of American Popular Fiction by Geoff Hamilton and Brian Jones (second edition, 2013); 'The Bourne Identity' by Elizabeth Whitehead, in Encyclopedia of American Popular Fiction, edited by Geoff Hamilton and Brian Jones (2009); 'The Aquitaine Progression' by Martyne J. Colebrook, in Encyclopedia of American Popular Fiction, edited by Geoff Hamilton and Brian Jones (2009); 'The Bourne Actuality: A Look at Reality's Role in the Bourne Identity Novel and Film' by S.M. Epps, in Intelligence and National Security, Vol. 23; Number 1 (2008); Robert Ludlum: A Critical Companion by Gina Macdonald (1999); Robert Ludlum: A Reader's Checklist and Reference Guide by CheckerBee Publishing (1999); Mystery and Suspense Writers, Vol. 1, edited by Robin W. Winks (1998); Robert Ludlum: A Critical Companion by Gina Macdonald (1997); Contemporary Popular Writers, edited by David Mote (1997); Bestsellers: Top Writers Tell How by Richard Joseph (1997); St. James Guide to Crime & Mystery Writers, edited by Jay P. Pederson (1996); 'Ludlum, Robert,' in World Authors 1980-1985, edited by Vineta Colby (1991); 'Ludlum, Robert,' by Ann Massa, in Twentieth-century Crime and Mystery Writers, edited by John M. Reilly (1985) Selected works:
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