The Assassination of Robert Ludlum.

The Assassination of Robert Ludlum

by james bezerra

The novelist Robert Ludlum
was no dumb-dumb
when it came to acts of literary terrorism.

See, once John le Carre
found a devious way
to plant an explosive device
inside Ludlum’s lucky dice.
When the first author rolled for a seven,
the dice went off and killed eleven!
Miraculously Ludlum was unscathed;
by the thick Craps table he’d been saved.

That was not the only attempted assassination!
Ludlum was once shot during a mugging.
It was discovered, upon further investigation,
that the mugger had been Ian Fleming!
Ludlum survived after much recuperation.

Years later there was yet another close call.
See, after the shooting, Ludlum moved secretly to Montreal
where he toiled over his final Bourne book.
Little did he know that Tom Clancy* was impersonating his cook!
Clancy poured an entire gallon
of super-deadly poison
into the building’s water supply
hoping that - while bathing - Ludlum would die!
What was not accounted for
by the author of The Hunt for the Red October
was that Ludlum never took a shower!

But eventually the smelly, unwashed Ludlum ran out of luck.
While on a book tour in Washington D.C.
he was run down by a mysterious black Buick.
The murderous driver was, quite surprisingly,
none other than Agatha Christie!

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* Dear Tom Clancy, as you are the only living** author named in the poem above; please do not sue us for accusing you of attempted murder. By the way we have actually read The Hunt for Red October and think that it is a very good novel*** and not at all the sort of fetishist military hardware pornography you ended up writing in your more recent novels****.

** We actually do question whether or not Tom Clancy is still alive because it has been, like, a decade since he published a novel that didn’t say – in a small font under his name – “with so-and-so other writer”.
*** Though still not as good as the movie. The screenplay is simply more tightly written than the book, though to achieve that it left out too much back-story about Ramius’s wife, but whatever. If we’re all willing to overlook the fact that the Lithuanian Soviet submarine captain has a Scottish accent, then I think we can overlook the minor lack of back-story.
**** Sorry, we didn’t mean to insult your more recent work*****, we think all of it is great and please don’t sue us again.
***** Except that it isn’t actually your more recent work, since you are clearly dead******
****** Please do not sue us for saying you’re dead.
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