Robert Ludlum writes spy thrillers the way the rest of us play Scrabble. Ludlum has 25 tiles, with words on each—words like World War II, secret documents, Nazi war treasure, CIA, Vatican, Rio/Buenos Aires, Geneva/Zurich, Berlin, MI-5, Maserati, beautiful blonde, Gestapo, double agent, international banker, false passport. Each year Ludlum chooses half the tiles, face down, and turns them over, arranging them this way and that until some reasonably plausible sequence appears. He then plays them on a board whose red and blue squares are marked violence (lots of them), sex (less), doublecross, disguise, assassination, fear of insanity, and so forth. Fill in the details and you have a Ludlum thriller. A CIA agent in a sexual encounter with a disguised beautiful blonde in Moscow? No problem. A chase through Geneva in a Maserati for Nazi war treasure? Voila. When the book is finished, Ludlum takes one tile from "names" and one from "nouns," and thus is born The Scarlatti Inheritance, The Ostermann Weekend, The Matlock Paper, The Gemini Contenders, The Chancellor Manuscript and now The Holcroft Covenant.
The Holcroft Covenant is a story of Nazi war treasure, but with a twist: the treasure in this case was accumulated during the war by a small group of high-ranking German officers appalled at Hitler's desecration of humanity; shortly before their deaths they entrust the riches to a Geneva bank to gather interest until their young sons and daughters come to maturity, accept the fortune from the bank and use it to make amends to the victims of the Holocaust. Thirty years later, the bank reveals the secret covenant to Noel Holcroft, whose mother left her Reichsfinancier husband Heinrich Clausen in 1939…. Holcroft, awed by the covenant's revelation that the father he never knew was really a good German, must locate the unsuspecting children of his father's colleagues so that together they can become trustees of the treasure and use it for its noble purpose.
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Read the rest of this Criticism with our Ludlum, Robert 1927–: Critical Essay by Allan A. Ryan, Jr. Access Pass.
