
In 1945 he joined the Marines and served in the South Pacific. While on the road in Detroit, he crossed into Windsor, Ontario, and tried to join the Royal Canadian Air Force but was turned down because of his youth. In 1943, to his astonishment, he won a role in the Broadway production of ''Junior Miss'' and then played another part with the show's national touring company.

''It was like a kid running away to join the circus,'' he said in an interview with The Chicago Tribune. He loved participating in school theatrical productions.Īt 16, while still a student at the Cheshire Academy, he began auditioning for shows in New York. After his father died in the mid-1930's, his mother sent him to private schools in Connecticut. Ludlum was born on May 25, 1927, in New York City and grew up in suburban New Jersey. all in the name of discovering a truth that involves complicated weapons, wily governments and buxom blondes,'' Rebecca Ascher-Walsh wrote in Entertainment Weekly. ''Reading a Ludlum novel is like watching a James Bond film: The action is so slickly paced, the political details so all-consuming, the weapons and women so blatantly steeped in sex appeal. Some critics simply reveled in the verbal show. He continued: ''Nevertheless, he pleases and seduces, telling his story like a man who must get it done before the house burns down around us.
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Ludlum ''finds his characters on the back of cereal boxes, his prose in movie magazines, his sex in the want ads and his paranoia in our dental cavities.'' Writing in The New York Times in 1978, John Leonard complained that Mr. Even when criticizing him for convoluted plots, simplistic morality and other real or imagined sins, critics invariably referred to his books as page-turners. His novels have been translated into 32 languages and, in sales, are at the top of a genre that might be called international conspiracies. Within two years, he had published two more successful books, ''The Osterman Weekend'' (World, 1972), and ''The Matlock Paper'' (Dial, 1973), and voice-overs became a memory.

Ludlum hedged his bets by continuing to do voice-overs for television commercials for Tuna Helper and Plunge bathroom cleaner, among other products.

The book was a Book-of-the-Month Club selection and a best seller in both hardcover and paperback, but Mr.
