THE AMBLER WARNING
by Robert Ludlum
Orion, £11.99; 496pp

“THE EVIL THAT MEN DO lives on after them; the good is oft interred with their bones,” Shakespeare’s Marc Antony said of Caesar. It is not the case with Robert Ludlum.

Ludlum was no Shakespeare. His ear for dialogue was laughably lumpen, his attempts at adding atmosphere with snatches of foreign languages made John F. Kennedy look like a polyglot, his characterisation made the Thunderbirds puppets seem lifelike.

What he did have was a knack for a fast-paced plot, even if, like his book titles — The Scarlatti Inheritance, The Eiger Sanction, The Matarese Circle, the list is apparently endless — they were predictably formulaic.

The man was prolific: 22 titles under his own name during his lifetime, six more in collaboration and, remarkably, a further five since he died in 2001. You can’t keep a good man down.

Or at least you can’t prevent his publishers hiring a series of anonymous ghost writers to keep profiting from an established brand. Look closely and you’ll see that Ludlum’s name is now followed by the little sign that means he has been registered as a trademark. There’s immortality for you! The posthumous revival in his fortunes is due largely to the success of the two movies starring Matt Damon, The Bourne Identity and The Bourne Supremacy, both produced after Ludlum’s death and based, increasingly loosely, on the plots of his novels.

The Bourne Ultimatum, published in 1990, is due to become a movie in 2007, while Eric von Lustbader pinched the Jason Bourne character for a sequel of his own called, inevitably, The Bourne Legacy.

What can only now be described as the Ludlum Legacy goes marching on, with The Ambler Warning. The intriguing thing about this new offering is that it is rather good, better in fact than most of what the author himself turned out. The storyline is firmly based on “the Bourne premise” — secret agent for nefarious clandestine US government organisation wakes up with lost memory to find his identity wiped out. Our hero, who thinks he is called Harrison Ambler, also thinks that he is on the run from his captors but may actually be part of a long-term assassination operation designed to prevent the tide of history overtaking US hegemony.

The ignorance of all names and spellings non-American is as impressive as ever: academics refer to “long duree” theories, our hero meets in the Place de la Concord (I mean, even the aircraft had an “e”). But that will not worry Ludlum devotees, who are assured of as lively a pace as ever with improved dialogue and a ghost of characterisation. The king is dead; long live the pretenders.

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