Warning!
The following reveals the most recent whereabouts of Jason Bourne, last seen in Bali. Therefore, should you decide to continue reading, you will, of course, have to be killed.
Now that everyone understands the rules . . . .
As of June 1, you'll find Bourne in Cleveland, Ohio, where he . . . wait, sorry--Bourne will be in Helena, Montana, and is . . . no, cancel that--it's actually Danbury, Connecticut. right by . . . ah, make that Naples, Florida, dressed in . . . whoops, ixnay Aples-na and change it to Knoxville, Tennessee . . . .
Oh, hell, forget it! Just open a damn atlas, close your eyes, point to any place you want and, wherever books are sold there, you'll find Jason Bourne, cleverly disguised as a 437-page novel called The Bourne Objective. But better act fast. If history is any guide, a lot of people will be out to get Bourne, eager to carry him off, maybe to a bedside or a beach or a lakeside cottage--who knows. The only sure thing is that not long after he's been snatched, Bourne'll pop up again--on the bestseller lists like his other seven incarnations, the first three by his creator, author Robert Ludlum, and the rest by the man who took over one of thrillerdom's most successful franchises and made it his own, Eric Van Lustbader.
The Bourne Objective [officially Robert Ludlum's The Bourne Objective--all Bourne books carry the originator's name as part of the title] will start flying out doors just as Lustbader is flying into New York with his wife, Victoria, herself an author, back home from Paris and Rome where he spent three weeks piecing together the next Bourne book.
"I knew I wanted to set part of book in Rome," Lustbader says, "although I don't know about Paris."
And even if he does, Lustbader probably wouldn't say. Besides being a "very private person" a self-described "outsider" who freely admits to not wanting his readers to know "anything about me" beyond what they can glean from his books, he's adept at keeping a secret. (Which, if you have deep ties in the intelligence community, as Lustbader does, is probably a valuable, if not life-sustaining skill.) Lustbader, however, will offer this much about that next as yet untitled book--one of two he is currently committed to writing: "There are elements in The Bourne Objective that start the next series of books. It's a minor thing, nothing more than a background thing, but it becomes a major force in the book I'm writing now."
Fair enough. So given that, what's he willing to say about The Bourne Objective?
"Objective is the third book in a trilogy that features the Russian named Leonid Arkadin who was the first graduate of Treadstone [a Central Intelligence Agency training program], so he is in every way a match for Bourne, sort of like Moriarty," Lustbader offers. "So in a way so this climaxes the cat and mouse game between." Suddenly he stops, explaining that he doesn't want to give away anything more, then, unable to resist, throws in "there are some really pretty startling scenes in the book."
Hardly a surprise for a man who, drawing on an observation Ludlum shared with him, compares writing thrillers to a roller coaster. "Think of that up and down motion like a sine wave that keeps going upwards," Lustbader says. "And think of the top of the sine wave as a climax of tension and action. Then you have a release and a quiet period so that people can digest what happened and you can move the story along for characterization. Then you go up again to another climax that's more exciting than the last one. So say a book has three parts. The first part ends on a climax and the second part ends on a climax but it will be more tension-filled than the first part. And of course the end of the third part is the highest level of tension. Ludlum was absolutely right: that's exactly the way thrillers works. It was a particularly insightful opinion on his part and it stuck with me."
Lustbader and Ludlum discussed writing among a multitude of things over a friendship that spanned 20 years. It was, an unusual bond considering that, according to Lustbader, "Bob had a reputation for not being particularly friendly to authors."
Still, in 1980, at a party given by Henry Morrison, the agent they shared, the 53-year old Ludlum, who had just published The Bourne Identity, asked to meet the then 34-year old author of The Ninja, which also had just been published and was causing a sensation.
"We talked the whole night," Lustbader says. "We talked about how to write thrillers, how similar the moral characters of our leading protagonists were, how much of our own selves were in them and we became good friends. I mean we didn't hang out together, but we admired each other professionally and talked on and off until he became ill and died in 2001."
A year later, the movie version of The Bourne Identity was released and was a huge hit, leading Jeff Weiner. who was executor of Ludlum's estate, and others to conclude that there might yet be print life left in the old operative, So Weiner, who once had been Ludlum's accountant, dangled the prospect before Lustbader, another former accounting client, who, by then was a highly successful author with a slew of books under his belt, encompassing not only thrillers but science fiction and fantasy as well.
"It was a no-brainer but I wasn't sure I wanted to do it," Lustbader says. "So I told him if you want me to write in Ludlum's style, forget it. And I also told him I'm not a ghost writer so if the book just has Bob's name on it, I'm not interested. I want my name on it"
Weiner quickly conceded both points, but Lustbader was still undecided and went home to mull over the offer.
"I spent overnight think about it," Lustbader recalls, displaying none of the memory lapses that plague Jason Bourne, and then reveals a little known incident of intelligence wet work. "The next morning I got into the shower and by the time I came out I had the plot for the first book."
Not that the hand off was flawless. It seems Jason Bourne had an adversary few knew about, one who was more threatening than any he had--or would--face, and it turned out to be Robert Ludlum.
"Bob never thought of Bourne as a serial character," Lustbader explains. "He wrote The Bourne Identity and, frankly, he never wanted to do another Bourne book again. Bob never created that character to continue on."
But Ludlum yielded. When he had an idea for a new book, Lustbader said he called Henry Morrison and asked whether it should be a stand alone or another Bourne thriller. Morrison opted for Bourne, and so was born The Bourne Supremacy. (Apologies for the last sentence, which may well have broken the Bourne Barrier.) And he would go on to write one more book in the series, The Bourne Ultimatum.
Even so, Ludlum committed a serial character no-no: "He had Bourne marry and have kids, which is something you never do with a serial character," Lustbader says. "I mean, what do you do with the family? You're in danger all the time. Do you shuffle them off to the side? What do you do?"
What Lustbader did, realizing that "I couldn't keep the family going," was have Marie, Bourne's wife, die. "Not killed or murdered," Lustbader say, "but in an accident." So while Marie made it through The Bourne Legacy, Lustbader's first book in the series, she's gone by the start of The Bourne Betrayal, his second book and the kids are shipped off to Marie's family in Canada.
Lustbader also faced another issue. "There was a whole slew of new readers coming to the books who knew Bourne only from the films," he says. "I didn't want to do anything to alienate the Ludlum fans, but I didn't want people who had seen the film to come and read the book and say 'what the hell is this? I don't understand this. It's not the same character.'" (By the way, not that you asked, but Lustbader, who terms himself "a visual writer," never envisioned Matt Damon as Bourne, although ten minutes into the film he conceded it was the right choice.)
So in The Bourne Legacy, Lustbader took two characters from Ludlum's books--Alex Conklin and Dr. Morris Panov--and killed them off right at the start. "The Bourne people will be familiar with them," Lustbader says of the two characters, "and it's a really good launching pad for the new book. But then that'll be the end of it. All new characters will start."
Indeed, now all the characters, except for Jason Bourne, are Lustbader's creations. And Lustbader states "I would never violate any of Bourne's characteristics that Bob created." Not that there's any need to. "One of the reasons felt comfortable doing the project in the first place is I really knew Bourne inside out," Lustbader says, notes that he is very similar to Nicholas Linnear, the protagonist in his Ninja-themed books.
"I adore writing characters," Lustbader says, so much so that he confesses "I sometimes get impatient and more involved with characterization and skip something and my editor will say to me, you know you really have to describe that." Even with that safeguard, Lustbader is sure that some of this still slips into print, although it doesn't bother him since "I'm not a believer in perfection."
While Lustbader insists that he would "he brings something to the books--"a far more female-centric aspect."
"All my thrillers have very strong women in them," he says. "I believe in that." He cites Soraya Moore, whom he introduced in The Bourne Betrayal, and whose power with the intelligence community continues to grow, crescendoing in The Bourne Objective.
"It was very important that Soraya be half Egyptian," Lustbader says, pegging his reasoning to, among other things, the concept that thrillers "have to be of the moment so the threats have to be understandable to today's world."
"That leads us to radical Islam," he continues. "But Islam itself is not anybody's threat, so it was important to me to have a moderate Islamic as a positive to offset the Islamic villains."
And that ties in to what Lustbader calls his need "to have a purpose to what I'm writing and to tackle important issues." To that end, he uses entertainment "as a framework to get sociological and psychological issues across." His next non-Bourne book, for example, will deal with white slavery and the way women are treated in the world.
"My job isn't to teach people," he says, even though he once worked in the New York City school system and holds licenses in both elementary and early childhood education. "I want to get people to open up their minds, to think about these issues and let them make up their own minds. I'm not telling them which way to think."
Even with all the mystery surrounding Bourne and, to a lesser degree, Lustbader, a few things are certain. The Bourne book that follows Objective will incorporate many different locales, places, Lustbader says, "where customs and people interact with each other in ways that bring a verisimilitude to the book.
"In the old days before the internet, people were more satisfied with books about the menace of the Soviet Union or Neo-Nazism or Communist China and now I think people have a broader perspective and need a sense of being in different places they've never been to and have a fascination for," he says.
And you can also be sure that that next book will, as have all Lustbader's others, be written to "rock and chill out music," a concession to the industry where, working for Elektra and for CBS Records, he achieved pre-print success. Now for those who are love tantalizing clues, puzzle ye this: Lustbader says that, were he a song, he would be Led Zeppelin's classic "Stairway To Heaven".
There you go! "Stairway To Heaven". Maybe that's the key to the still dormant secrets of Jason Bourne's past and to the future that awaits him, just as a strangely engraved ring is the key to all that he encounters in The Bourne Objective.
But if you discover that it is, say nothing, for if you do, you know the rules. You will have to be killed.
Gary Kriss's THE ZODIAC DECEPTION, about a con artist who having learned the art of illusion from Houdini is recruited by the OSS to use his skills for the ultimate deception: infiltrate the Nazi Occult Bureau and persuade Himmler to plot the assassination of Hitler, and its prequel, THE HOUDINI KILLER, will be published by TOR/Forge in 2011 and 2012 respectively. A writer for longer than he cares to remember, including a respectible stint with THE NEW YORK TIMES, Kriss now exists solely to make his lovely wife, Pat, his publisher, his editor, his agents, his dog and his cats proud of him. He still holds out hope that he can win over the dog.
