In the mid-1970s notorious Venezuelan terrorist Carlos the Jackal orchestrated a high-profile attack on an OPEC meeting in Vienna, Austria which resulted in the deaths of three people. It was just one of a string of crimes committed by Carlos across the continent, making him one the most-wanted fugitives of the era.
Back in the ’70s American author Robert Ludlum didn’t know a great deal about Carlos the Jackal, but that soon changed. One night Ludlum and his wife tuned in to a radio program featuring journalist Pierre Salinger; Ludlum wasn’t aware what he was on air to speak about and had chosen to listen largely due to the fact Salinger had written an introduction to the French edition of Ludlum’s 1977 novel The Chancellor Manuscript. It turned out Salinger was discussing Carlos the Jackal, which piqued Ludlum’s interest. He immediately began researching the infamous assassin.
I put the two germs of thought together and thought, supposing a man was after Carlos the Jackal and lost his memory.
Three days later, while having coffee in his Connecticut home, Ludlum fielded a call from his accountant confirming he expected Ludlum at 11 at his office in New York. Confused, Ludlum insisted he was never informed of the meeting, though his accountant explained he’d been with Ludlum at his home the previous day and they had talked about it. It turned out Ludlum had suffered a case of transient global amnesia and lost 12 hours of his life. This episode got him thinking even more.
“I put the two germs of thought together and thought, supposing a man was after Carlos the Jackal and lost his memory, by going into deep cover,” Ludlum told journalist Don Swaim during a 1986 interview. “That was the genesis of The Bourne Identity.”
Ludlum had promised his wife he wouldn’t sit down and start another book for a few weeks, but the idea was irresistible. Bourne was born.
Robert Ludlum was a master of airport fiction. In fact, alongside the likes of authors like Michael Crichton, Arthur Hailey, Clive Cussler, and Tom Clancy he really helped define the genre. Ludlum’s novels are fast-paced thrillers filled with intrigue and action; meticulously researched but accessible and easy-to-read.
In 1978 critic John Leonard wrote in The New York Times that Ludlum “finds his characters on the back of cereal boxes, his prose in movie magazines, his sex in the want ads and his paranoia in our dental cavities.”
However, he also stressed that Ludlum “stuffs more surprises into his novels than any other six-pack of thriller writers combined” and that he “pleases and seduces, telling his story like a man who must get it done before the house burns down around us. I sprained my wrist turning his pages and didn’t notice until an hour later.”
The first edition.
Robert Ludlum wrote 27 books before his death in 2001 but it’s his original Bourne trilogy of novels he’s best remembered for. The Bourne Identity, the tale of a mystery hero found floating in the Mediterranean with no memory and the single clue to his former life a microfilm containing Swiss bank details hidden in his hip, was first published back in February 1980.
In The Bourne Identity novel ‘Jason Bourne’ is a trained assassin and former American Foreign Service officer stationed in South-East Asia during the Vietnam War, recruited by a shadowy agency after the death of his family and set loose to hunt Carlos the Jackal. The Bourne Identity has gone on to become regarded as one of the best and most-iconic spy thrillers of all time, and has inspired a multimedia juggernaut, but Ludlum had never planned to write a sequel, much less two of them.
I’d heard time and time again after I wrote that book, ‘What about a sequel?’
“I’d heard time and time again after I wrote that book, ‘What about a sequel?’” said Ludlum during the same 1986 interview. The key reasons he didn’t want to were that the real Carlos the Jackal was still alive and he had no interest in writing another book where Carlos escaped at the end, and that he was generally opposed to sequels.
However, on a trip through Hong Kong, Macau, and up to Beijing at the time of the 1984 Sino-British Joint Declaration, Ludlum developed another story idea; a thriller set against the backdrop of the delicate negotiations.
“My god, there’s a story here,” said Ludlum. “Then I began to think, ‘Now I’ve gotta find a protagonist’, be it a he or a she or whatever, and I was racking my brain and I thought to myself, ‘Gee, you can’t throw a Western innocent into the Oriental chaos without hundreds and hundreds of pages of exposition and explanation.”
“Then I found some notes that I’d written six years ago about The Bourne Identity in my office and I thought, ‘My Lord, there’s my man.’ He was an Oriental scholar. He was a Foreign Service Officer in Phnom Penh; he knows half-a-dozen Oriental languages – perhaps three dozen dialects. That’s my man.”
Author Robert Ludlum.
“I thought many times that sequels are sort of a cop out in characterisation; you’re not inventing something new, you’re going over retreads. But in this case it wasn’t a question of that because the last line of The Bourne Identity is, ‘My name is David.’ I had never explored who David Webb was, who had become Jason Bourne to go after The Jackal.”
If you were unfamiliar with the novels but have seen the Matt Damon films it should be clear by now Ludlum’s books are largely different from the feature films they ultimately inspired. In fact, The Bourne Supremacy (1986) and The Bourne Ultimatum (1990) novels share nothing in common with the films at all.
The Bourne Ultimatum, which brought back Carlos the Jackal for a final showdown, was the final Bourne novel by Robert Ludlum himself. Since his death author Eric Van Lustbander has written a further 10 Bourne novels under the ‘Robert Ludlum’ brand, controlled by the Ludlum estate; the most recent one was published just last month, in June 2016.
Unfortunately Ludlum didn’t live to see Matt Damon’s portrayal of his most famous character. An earlier made-for-TV miniseries based on The Bourne Identity, made in 1988 by Warner Bros. and featuring actor Richard Chamberlain in the lead role, was the only on-screen Bourne to arrive during Ludlum’s lifetime (a film featuring Burt Reynolds as Bourne was on the drawing board in the early ’80s but never happened). A shame, perhaps, considering that while Bourne is a very well-known literary character (Ludlum was an extremely successful novelist; it’s estimated the number of his books in print could be as high as 500 million) it was definitely the Universal film franchise that’s made Bourne a true household name.
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