In the 1970s, for example, the novelist Robert Ludlum excelled at creating such conspiracies in a hugely popular series of novels, including one about a circle of political killers who were responsible for the assassination of President Franklin Roosevelt. (But wait, you say: FDR wasn’t assassinated. Exactly.) Ludlum sold millions of books and created the fictional superassassin Jason Bourne, who was the main character in a string of lucrative movies in the twenty-first century.
