SO YOU THINK that paranoid Jason Bourne, played in three films by actor Matt Damon, was completely made up by writer Robert Ludlum? Think again.
One day Jan Decker found himself in a man-to-man fight, in his own barn. Wife Grietje tried to intervene, but the other guy hit her with a knife: a big slash in her head. It was a time of intense brawling with the locals. When you could never know for sure if someone wouldn’t accuse Jan of riding over somebody else’s pig. Jan Decker had reasons to look over his shoulder, all the time.
There’s your 17th century Jason Bourne. Jan Decker, of the Deckers who had emigrated to America from Heerde in Gelderland, had a hard time. Brawls, injustices, lawsuits, and Griet who tried to help, but who was just as often the cause of trouble. She had a child before she met Jan, accused Piet of being the father, but Piet insisted he knew nothing about it.
A BUNCH of Dekker families still live in Heerde. Unaware that there’s a good chance that they’re related to Jason Bourne’s creator, Robert Ludlum. His grandmother was Hettie Decker.
Some already spelled their name with a C way back when they were still living in Holland. Same was true for the Deckers from Schoonrewoerd, Zuid-Holland. Others used the double K. Sometimes preceded by Den, the, indicating where the name came from: they used to be roofers by trade. Working as thatchers in smaller villages, but in cities such as Arnhem, near Heerde, or Utrecht, not far from Schoonrewoerd, they’d be laying clay tiles. Since the Middle Ages, Dutch cities have had roof tile ordinances, fearing that otherwise one burning house would destroy the entire town.
ROBERT LUDLUM didn’t start writing until after he turned forty. He was an actor, played on Broadway, did advertising voice-overs, had small roles in TV films. After lying about his age, he joined the Marines in WWII and kept a 500-page diary. He lost those the night he was decommissioned in San Francisco, because “it was that kind of a night,” he stated. And as happened all too often in the history of bestselling authors, the first publisher he submitted his work to refused his first book.
Ludlum wrote 27 of them, including his Bourne trilogy. After 33 translations, nobody really knows how many copies have been sold, at least 300 million, but it could also be twice that many. His work is categorized as thrillers, but he never agreed with that. Paranoia, said Robert Ludlum, is the common thread in his books. Main characters who constantly look back over their shoulder because they never know for sure what or who is after them. He returned to acting only one more time: in an American Express commercial, playing a successful writer traveling in the Orient Express. In real life, he drove around in a pink Cadillac convertible.
His death was fitting, shrouded in mystery. He burned alive in a house fire, apparently the result of arson. His second wife did it, whispers the family. Which sounds paranoid enough to be true.
