TL;DR
Harold Robbins introduces Jonas Cord Jr. in a cockpit, not a flashback — and the test-flight opening of The Carpetbaggers is a masterclass in revealing competence, appetite, and damage while withholding motivation. He's the underread bridge from pulp noir to Luxe Noir.
The Carpetbaggers opens on a test flight. Jonas Cord Jr. at the stick of an experimental aircraft, pushing the airframe past what the engineers signed off on, with a passenger in the seat behind him who did not volunteer for the risk he is about to take. That scene is fifty pages of character work compressed into a chapter. I want to talk about how Robbins does it, what he refuses to do, and why more thriller writers should be reading him than are.
The Bridge Nobody Credits
Harold Robbins sold more than 750 million copies across forty-two languages, and the contemporary thriller shelf barely acknowledges he existed. Michael Callahan, writing in The Hollywood Reporter in 2019, called him the forgotten man of American commercial fiction. His biographer Andrew Wilson, quoted in the same piece, makes the stronger claim: that prestige soap drama from Mad Men outward inherits its architecture — secrets, the corrupting nature of power and wealth, the dynastic arc — directly from Robbins.
That's the argument I want to extend. Robbins is the bridge between the hard pulp noir of the forties and what I've been calling Luxe Noir: thrillers that take the dynasty itself as the protagonist, not the prey. The Martin Dynasty in the Feeder Series owes Robbins a royalty cheque. So does half of what's on the airport shelf.
My take: Robbins is underrated as a commercial engineer and overrated as a prose stylist, and you can say both without contradicting yourself. The prose is workmanlike. The architecture is extraordinary.
What the Test Flight Reveals
The Carpetbaggers (1961) opens with Jonas Cord Jr. flying a prototype. Robbins doesn't bury the character in backstory. He puts him in a cockpit and lets behaviour do the work.
Three things land in that scene, and Robbins lands them without saying any of them outright.
Competence. Cord flies the plane. He understands the instruments, the stress tolerances, the physics of what he's asking the airframe to do. Robbins doesn't explain aviation to the reader; he just has Cord operate, and the reader infers the mastery from the rhythm of the operation. This is Hemingway's iceberg, retooled for a mass-market audience that would have choked on Hemingway.
Appetite. Cord pushes the plane past the spec because he wants to. Not because he has to, not because someone bet him, not because the plot requires it. He wants to find out what happens at the edge. That appetite — for risk, for proof, for the next increment — is the entire character arc of the novel compressed into one decision at altitude.
Damage. He does this with a passenger. A man who did not consent to the risk profile Cord is running. That detail is the whole moral problem of Jonas Cord as a character: the people around him are instruments. He does not see this. Robbins does, and trusts the reader to see it too.
What Robbins Withholds
Here is the craft lesson that matters. Robbins shows you Cord's competence, appetite, and damage in the first chapter. He does not tell you why any of it exists.
Cord's motivation is held back. His relationship with his father is hinted at but not explained. The cost of who he is — to himself, to the people around him — is present in the scene but never named. The passenger's fear is on the page. Cord's interior is not.
This is the move. A lesser commercial writer in 1961 would have opened with a flashback to Cord's childhood, the dead mother, the cold father, the scene that made him. Robbins refuses. He gives you the behaviour and makes you sit with it for three hundred pages before the why arrives.
That restraint is why the book still works. Contemporary thrillers tend to over-explain their protagonists in the first fifty pages — trauma delivered like an origin story, psychology workshopped onto the page. Robbins, in 1961, on a pulp-market novel, already knew better.
Jonas Cord as Howard Hughes
The test-flight opening is not invented. Jonas Cord is Howard Hughes, thinly disguised, and Robbins knew every reader in 1961 would clock it. Callahan in the Hollywood Reporter piece is blunt about this: Cord is Hughes, The Carpetbaggers is a roman à clef, and Robbins built a career on fictionalising real tycoons. Adnan Khashoggi became the protagonist of The Pirate. The Ford family became The Betsy. Porfirio Rubirosa became The Adventurers.
The roman-à-clef mechanic is a thriller technology most working writers have forgotten how to use. Robbins understood that readers bring a parallel text to the page — the gossip, the news, the public record of the real person — and that a fictional version can exploit that parallel text to do character work the novel doesn't have to do itself. Cord flies the prototype and the reader is already remembering the Hughes crashes, the XF-11, the weeks in hospital. Robbins gets that for free.
Stephen King, quoted in the same Hollywood Reporter retrospective, said: "I don't want to finish up like Harold Robbins. That's my nightmare." King was talking about the lifestyle collapse — the $50 million fortune burned through in yachts and affairs and ghost-written late novels. Fair. But King was also, I'd argue, quietly acknowledging that Robbins had built something worth being afraid of.
The Ghostwriter Problem
Late Robbins is not Robbins. The final decade of his bibliography, and the posthumous continuation program his estate ran for years, were largely written by other hands with his name on the jacket. This is the same pattern the Wilbur Smith estate runs now — the brand outliving the writer, the books downstream of the last authentic title being something closer to franchise product than novel.
My advice to any working thriller writer picking up Robbins for the first time: read the 1948–1976 window. Never Love a Stranger through The Lonely Lady. Read The Carpetbaggers first, then A Stone for Danny Fisher, then The Adventurers. Skip anything published after 1985 unless you're specifically studying the ghostwriter pattern as an industry artefact.
What Luxe Noir Takes From Him
The Feeder Series inherits three things from Robbins directly, and I'll name them because the lineage matters.
First, the dynasty as protagonist. The Martin Dynasty in the Feeder books is the centre of gravity, not the target. Robbins did this with the Cords and the Hardemans before the thriller genre had a shelf for it.
Second, the roman-à-clef instinct. The Feeder universe is dense with historical anchor points — the Escobar-era cartel history, the Goldblood ancestral thread — because I learned from Robbins that fiction gets stronger when it rhymes with something the reader half-remembers from the news.
Third, the competence-appetite-damage triangle. Every major Martin in the series gets introduced the way Cord gets introduced: in motion, making a decision the reader can't fully interpret yet, with a cost to someone else that the character does not fully register. John Martin on page one is Jonas Cord in the cockpit, wearing a different suit.
Robbins is not fashionable. He is not taught. He is not in the bookshops the way he was in 1975. But if you write thrillers about powerful families and the damage they leave behind, he is one of your ancestors whether you've read him or not. Go read him. Start with the test flight.
The four published Feeder novels — The Feeder, Alien AI, Goldblood, and Luxe Rage — are available in print, ebook, and Listening Room format on jfklovlien.com. Book 5, Nirvana Nights, is in development.
Sources
- Michael Callahan, "Revisiting Harold Robbins, the Forgotten 'Dirty Old Man' of American Letters," The Hollywood Reporter, November 2019 — includes Andrew Wilson biographer commentary and Stephen King "nightmare" quote
- Andrew Wilson, Harold Robbins: The Man Who Invented Sex (Bloomsbury, 2008) — authorised biography, source for the Mad Men / dynastic architecture lineage argument
- Harold Robbins, Wikipedia — career bibliography, sales figures, posthumous ghostwriter program (Junius Podrug continuation novels)
- The Carpetbaggers (novel), Wikipedia — publication history, Howard Hughes / Bill Lear / Harry Cohn / Louis B. Mayer composite protagonist, Murray Schumach New York Times review, 1961 obscenity context alongside Lady Chatterley and Tropic of Cancer
- Harold Robbins, Encyclopædia Britannica — biographical details, fabricated-childhood context, roman-à-clef bibliography (Where Love Has Gone, The Adventurers, The Betsy, Dreams Die First)
- The Carpetbaggers, Encyclopædia Britannica — Howard Hughes and Jean Harlow as character sources, sales trajectory
- Harold Robbins, The Carpetbaggers (Trident Press, 1961) — primary text, including the opening test-flight sequence
- Harold Robbins, Never Love a Stranger (Knopf, 1948) — primary text, Francis Kane as the early Robbins protagonist and the 1949 Philadelphia obscenity trial precedent
