He then attended Wesleyan University, in Connecticut, where he met his actress wife, Mary Ryducha. His parents soon rescued him from Broadway, after which he spent two years with the US Marine Corps in the Pacific in the aftermath of the second world war. He left home as a teenager in 1941 and, getting a part in a touring play, tried to make it as an actor. Ludlum was born in New York, and grew up in Short Hills, New Jersey. And yet he did not write his first novel, The Scarlatti Inheritance (1971), until he was in his 40s. Like Arthur Hailey and Tom Clancy, Ludlum blasted aside such boundaries, mirroring, as he did so, the rise of the modern Hollywood blockbuster. Before him, its popular fiction had been rooted in established genres - westerns, crime fiction, historical romance, sub-James Bond spy thrillers. Put crudely, Ludlum was the fictional arm of the globalisation of American culture. He enjoyed a 30-year writing career in which, according to his publisher, he sold more than 210m copies of his 21 novels. WorldCat.The thriller writer Robert Ludlum, who has died of a heart attack aged 73, in the gulf coast town of Naples, Florida, was one of a handful of authors who invented and came to define airport fiction.
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Written under the Ludlum brand by Gayle Lynds Works by other authors based on the author's characters Title Written under the pen-name Michael Shepherd
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Written under the pen-name Jonathan Ryder
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Putnam's Sons, taking over from Grand Central Publishing who held the rights from 2007 to 2017. Since 2019, publishing rights in the United States have been held by G. Following Ludlum's death, his estate has continued to publish novels under his name with ten authors having written a combined twenty-seven novels under the Ludlum brand, a trademark inscription of "Robert Ludlum's" on every book (e.g. Ludlum also created the Covert-One series, overseeing the first three novels with Gayle Lynds and Philip Shelby before his death. Of his twenty-seven novels, two were originally published under the pseudonym of Jonathan Ryder and another under the pseudonym of Michael Shepherd. Robert Ludlum (1927–2001) was an American author of twenty-seven novels between 19, the last being issued five years after his death.