What is the Scarlatti inheritance [in Ludlum's book of the same name]? Well, if you must know, you'll have to find your way through petrified forests of flashbacks to a Swiss hotel on the German border. Here, in a suite of exclamation points, we come finally face to face with Ulster Stewart Scarlett, turncoat, Nazi, gangster, international rotter, as he prepares to turn over his cached hoard to his heir. ("They contain millions! Millions! But there are certain conditions … you will learn to understand! When you grow older you'll know those conditions have to be met! And you'll meet them!… Because this power is the power to change the world!")
It's too late, fortunately, for Ulster Scarlett and his vile plans. And much too late for the reader to take seriously yet another lurid melodrama. Mr. Ludlum peppers his dynastic shenanigans with real persons—Cordell Hull, Joseph Goebbels, Gregor Strasser. But he doesn't breathe reality into the fictional characters he invents as their peers.
Martin Levin, "Reader's Report: 'The Scarlatti Inheritance'," in The New York Times Book Review (© 1971 by The New York Times Company; reprinted by permission), April 4, 1971, p. 49.
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