There is only one person who can stop him - his mother. At the heart of the plan is a child called Ulster, reared specially for the job and now ready to go into action. The Scarlatti Inheritance was a preposterous, yet compelling, yarn revolving around the notion that, back in the 1920s, a worldwide cabal of high-ranking Nazi sympathisers made a plan to ensure world domination. The key ingredients were there from the start - a grand conspiracy, and forces of unimaginable evil that only one individual could thwart. When the theatre business began to pall, he quit to write his first novel. Having a famously deep voice, Ludlum also made some money doing voice-overs on the side he once claimed that uttering the words "Plunge works fast", in a toilet cleaner commercial, put one of his sons through college. In 1960, he produced The Owl And The Pussycat, using a then unknown actor named Alan Alda. Together they went into the theatre, where Ludlum spent the next two decades working as an actor, with minor roles on television and on Broadway, and then as a producer, running what was allegedly America's first shopping-mall theatre, the Playhouse, in Paramus, New Jersey.
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. 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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