Mad Lib Thriller Title

Many spy, thriller, and speculative fiction novels follow a specific formula in their titles:

1. The...
2. Noun or person's/place's name, often something esoteric and classical that sounds like it could be code for something (often Gratuitous Greek).
3. Noun with political or symbolic undertones. Also, often some type of document.

This creates a feeling of conspiracy, like the reader has just glimpsed the title on a sealed manila folder and now needs to dig through the secrets of powerful men to discover... just what is The Antigone Cypher?

Compare The Crime Job, The Case of..., and Ominous Legal Phrase Title.

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Examples:

Robert Ludlum

Robert Ludlum was quite fond of this trope, so he deserves his own folder... The Ludlum Folder.

• The Bourne...
  • Identity
  • Supremacy
  • Ultimatum
  • By other authors:
    • Legacy
    • Betrayal
    • Sanction
    • Deception
    • Objective
    • Dominion
    • Imperative
    • Retribution
    • Ascendancy
    • Enigma
  • Robert Ludlum's The Bourne Conspiracy, a video game based on the Matt Damon Bourne movies, follows this naming pattern.
• The Janson Directive. Also its following sequels by other authors:
  • The Janson Command
  • The Janson Option
  • The Janson Equation
• The Scarlatti Inheritance
• The Osterman Weekend
• The Matlock Paper
• The Rhinemann Exchange
• The Gemini Contenders
• The Chancellor Manuscript
• The Holcroft Covenant
• The Matarese Circle
• The Parsifal Mosaic
• The Aquitaine Progression
• The Icarus Agenda
• The Scorpio Illusion
• The Apocalypse Watch
• The Matarese Countdown
• The Prometheus Deception
• The Sigma Protocol
• The Tristan Betrayal
• The Ambler Warning
• The Bancroft Strategy
• The Covert-One series of novels, written by other authors supposedly based on Ludlum's ideas, also follows this naming convention:
  • The Hades Factor
  • The Cassandra Compact
  • The Paris Option
  • The Altman Code
  • The Lazarus Vendetta
  • The Moscow Vector
  • The Arctic Event
  • The Ares Decision
  • The Janus Reprisal
  • The Utopia Experiment
  • The Geneva Strategy
  • The Patriot Attack
• Parodied in Mystery Science Theater 3000 episode 405 ("Being from Another Planet"). During the film a bookshelf is shown, and Joel and the 'Bots begin rattling off a Long List of fictional titles from "the Ludlum Library" starting with the relatively innocuous The Horshack Conspiracy before spinning out into nonsense like The Migraine Containment, The Crankshaft McNogginbee, and The Greengreen Gagrinegagrinega.
• Also parodied in Series 4 Episode 6 of Armando Iannucci's Charm Offensive, which had a round called "The Bourne Ulti-Ludlum" whereby panel members drew [the] + [normal noun] + [exotic noun] from hats to create titles like "The Byzantium Potato". "Who thinks potato is an exotic noun?"
• Ludlum even parodied it himself, by having one character write bestselling thrillers which always have a single-word title connected to the action like "TANK!" or "SHARK!" — other characters comment on how predictable he is for it.

Other Literature

• Strangely enough of all of Ian Fleming's works, only a single James Bond short-story actually fits this pattern: "The Hildebrand Rarity".^note Which isn't even a spy thriller per se, but a dark domestic drama that Bond just happens to tag along on.
  • Though not written by Fleming, the title of a spin-off novel series, The Moneypenny Diaries, definitely counts (though the novels themselves don't follow this naming pattern).
  • As does The Killing Zone, an unofficial Bond novel by Jim Hatfield.
  • As does The James Bond Dossier, the first critical analysis of Ian Fleming's Bond novels by Kingsley Amis (who would later write a Bond novel himself).
• Michael Crichton liked this one:
  • The Andromeda Strain
  • The Venom Business
  • The Terminal Man
  • The Death Divers
• Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code; and also The Solomon Key, the working title for The Lost Symbol.
• Adam Hall relied on this formula for his Quiller spy novels — The Quiller Memorandum, The Tango Briefing, The Cobra Manifesto, etc, until The Peking Target. Then after that it was Quiller Northlight, Quiller Barracuda, Quiller's Run and so on.
• The Night's Dawn Trilogy has a different name for the series, but two of the individual novels follow this pattern:
  • The Reality Dysfunction
  • The Neutronium Alchemist
• Most Artemis Fowl books:
  • The Arctic Incident
  • The Eternity Code
  • The Opal Deception
  • The Atlantis Complex
• The Laundry Files books are entirely named “The (Something) (Document(s))”:
  • The Atrocity Archive
  • The Jennifer Morgue
  • The Fuller Memorandum
  • The Apocalypse Codex
  • The Rhesus Chart
  • The Annihilation Score
  • The Nightmare Stacks
• Frederick Forsyth:
  • The Odessa File
  • The Kill List
  • The Fourth Protocol
• Trevanian:
  • The Eiger Sanction
  • The Loo Sanction
• The Looking-Glass Wars
• The Xanadu Talisman, from the Modesty Blaise series.
• The Damascus Cover by Howard Kaplan. The upcoming movie version lost the "The".
• The Cobra Event by Richard Preston.
• Lisa Shearin uses this one for her "SPI Files" Urban Fantasy series, creating suitably espionage-flavored titles like The Grendel Affair, The Dragon Conspiracy, The Brimstone Deception and The Ghoul Vendetta.
• The original US edition of Unnatural Death by Dorothy Sayers was titled The Dawson Pedigree, though later editions have reverted to Sayers' title.
• Jo Walton has said that, if she hadn't been sticking to theme naming for her "Small Change" series, Ha'Penny would have been called The Hamlet Bomb.
• The Caine Mutiny. It's not a thriller, but the title fits, and is ominous enough.
• Even "respectable" literary fiction can indulge in a Mad Lib Thriller Title now and then, like the Goncourt-winning Kamel Daoud novel The Meursault Investigation.
• The Gun Seller, something of a parody of thriller novels in general, written by Hugh Laurie.
• Parodied in the Discworld novel The Last Continent, where a humorous aside notes how any self-improving book you bring along for beach reading seems to transform into a conspiracy thriller with at least one Greek letter in the title, like The Gamma Imperative or The Mu Kau Pi Caper.
• Novelist Salman Rushdie amuses himself by making up Mad Lib Thriller Titles for Shakespeare plays. Some of Rushdie's inventions:
  • The Dunsinane Deforestation
  • The Elsinore Vacillation
  • The Rialto Forfeit
  • The Capulet Infatuation
  • The Kerchief Implication
  • The Solstice Entrancement
• In They Eat Puppies, Don't They? by Christopher Buckley, defense-contractor lobbyist Walter "Bird" McIntyre moonlights as a thriller writer, being the author of The Armageddon Infiltration, The Armageddon Immolation and The Armageddon Exfiltration.
• The Fear Index
• The Turing Option
• The Adversary Cycle
• The Forever Watch
• The Genesis Code
• The Manchurian Candidate
• The Treyton Injections
• Parodied in How NOT to Write a Novel with "The Manchurian Parallax of the Thetan Conspiracy Enigma".

Comic Books

• Tintin: The Calculus Affair, and a few others.

Films — Live-Action

• The Anderson Tapes
• The Bedford Incident
• The Caine Mutiny
• The Cassandra Crossing
• The China Syndrome
• The Eiger Sanction
• The French Connection
• The Hudsucker Proxy — which is odd, seeing as it's a screwball comedy rather than a thriller.
• The Ipcress File
• The Mattei Affair
• The McKenzie Break
• The Ωmega Man
• The Parallax View
• The Pelican Brief
• The Poseidon Adventure
• The Poughkeepsie Tapes
• The Russia House
• The Santa Clause
  • The Santa Clause 2: The Mrs. Clause
  • The Santa Clause 3: The Escape Clause

Live-Action TV

• Every episode title from The Big Bang Theory ("The Fuzzy Boots Corollary", "The Hamburger Postulate", etc.). It should be noted that these are intended to sound scientific, rather than thrilling.
• Doctor Who:
  • "The Macra Terror"
  • "The Sontaran Experiment"
  • "The Armageddon Factor".
  • "The Shakespeare Code" — a deliberate pastiche of this title type.
  • "The Lazarus Experiment"
  • "The Sontaran Stratagem"
  • "The God Complex".
  • "The Tsuranga Conundrum"
  • The Expanded Universe Telos Novella The Dalek Factor.
• Jeopardy! had an entire category about this trope in the “Battle of the Decades” tournament called “Make Your Own Spy Novel Titles” where contestants would see a “word equation” and you had to give the title which sounded like a spy novel. For Example,
  • Clue: “The + a Mongol emperor's poetic palace + a type of papal teaching letter first issued in 1740“. Correct Response: “The Xanadu Encyclical”.
• British game show, The Krypton Factor.
• Lost features The Dharma Initiative.
• The Man from U.N.C.L.E. really takes it up a notch: every episode is named "The [Something] Affair".
• The Middleman does a variation of this (with two meaningful-sounding nouns or, occasionally, adjectives in the middle) for every episode:
  • The Pilot Episode Sanction
  • The Accidental Occidental Conception
  • The Sino-Mexican Revelation
  • The Manicoid Teleportation Conundrum
  • The Flying Fish Zombification
  • The Boy Band Superfan Interrogation
  • The Cursed Tuba Contingency
  • The Ectoplasmic Pan-Hellenic Investigation
  • The Obsolescent Cryogenic Meltdown
  • The Vampiric Puppet Lamentation
  • The Clotharian Contamination Protocol
  • The Palindrome Reversal Palindrome
• Generally averted in episode titles for The Professionals, despite the frequent appearance of government conspiracies or foreign spies. However "The Ojuka Situation" involves the attempted assassination of a foreign head-of-state by the agents of an unnamed power.
• The first series in the BBC's Quatermass franchise was called The Quatermass Experiment.
• Parodied in a Saturday Night Live segment for fictional author Harlan Kane's new novel, The Abacus Conundrum. Other books by the author include The Medici Codex, The Genghis Rubicon, The Harlequin Protocol, The Ichabod Formula, The Pinochet Sudoku, The Nostradamus Mechanism, The Godiva Gyroscope, The Pokemon Directive, The Vespucci Containment, The Fuddrucker Ultimatum, The Marmaduke Betrayal, The Brenda Effect, The Picasso Embrogio, and Mac For Dummies.
• Whether live or animated, classic Star Trek liked these titles, with examples such as The Corbomite Maneuver, The Enterprise Incident, The Lorelei Signal, The Ambergris Element, and many more.
  • Next Generation continued to carry the tradition, although a bit less enthusiastically: The Icarus Factor and The Vengeance Factor are perhaps the only inarguable examples.
  • Star Trek: Voyager also got into the act, with The Omega Directive, The Voyager Conspiracy, and The Killing Game.
• In Warehouse 13, Claudia Donovan tries to hack into the Warehouse computer and finds out that this was anticipated, and she's activated something called the "Donovan Contingency". Her reaction: "Cool! I'm the star of a Ludlum novel."

Video Games

• The Callisto Protocol
• Hitman (2016) & Hitman 2's escalation contracts are all named in this particular fashion, such as "The Dexter Discordance", "The Aelwin Augment" and "The Delgado Larceny". "The Kotti Paradigm" and "The Bigmooney Flamboyancy" are notable in that they are named after usernames (the former is a speedrunner, the latter a Youtube personality).
  • In the Hitman: Absolution level "Death Factory", two NPCs talk about a secretive area of the factory called "the Omega Facility", one of them remarks on the name:
    "Really? Is that what they're calling it? Sounds like a trashy airport novel. Wait, I can see it now. [does his best announcer impression] When a CIA agent is found dead on a pier, renegade journalist Jack Benson returns to face his personal demons and uncovers a secret file that reveals that shadowy government organization only known as... The Omega Facility!
• Metal Gear is a series of interactive sci-fi spy thrillers, and name clearly fits. It's not as obviously noticeable however, because modern installments are usually called "Metal Gear Solid", making the pattern less obvious. Considering that Hideo Kojima is a huge movie buff, and Metal Gear games are styled after thriller movies, this is almost certainly intentional. The subtitles of nearly all games fit in their own right. In-universe, events in the canonical timeline are known under such names. "Phantom Pain Incident", "Shadow Moses Incident", "Tanker Incident", "Zanzibar Land Disturbance" or "Mercenary War".
• The Talos Principle
• The Lazarus Instrumentality, a quest in New World.
• The Stanley Parable

Webcomics

• This Penny Arcade comic pokes fun at a similar theme among espionage video games.
  • Now Hilarious in Hindsight thanks to Real Life example Odyssey Dawn.
• xkcd: The Corliss Resolution (to The Fermi Paradox).
• The Doghouse Diaries

Web Video

• Dangeresque 3: The Criminal Projective

Western Animation

• In the Corner Gas Animated episode "Spy Me to the Moon", Davis gets an advanced copy of the last book in the Max Braylorn Spy Trilogy, "The Braylorn Redundancy".
• Every episode of Men in Black: The Series was titled in this style as "The (Insert Subject Here) Syndrome''.
• In season seven of The Venture Bros., every episode written by Doc Hammer has this style of title in homage to Robert Ludlum, due to Hammer's admitted distaste for coming up with pun episode titles. Each episode commentary on the DVD has fellow writer Jackson Publick quiz Hammer on the episode's title due to how esoteric some of the titles get, such as "The Rorqual Affair" and "The Inamorata Consequence".

Real Life

• Israel's nuclear strategy is called "The Samson Option." Note that this isn't the official name. There is no official name, since there is no official status of Israel's nuclear capability.
• The Moscow Criterion was a Cold War era term referring to the ability of British nuclear weaponry to pierce Soviet defences and annihilate Moscow.
• An animal which seemingly disappears from the fossil record only to reappear at a later point is known as a "Lazarus taxon".
• The Xanthos Obelisk, The Letoon Trilingual, The Pyrgi Tablets... what do you mean, they're all just bilingual inscriptions?
• The Manhattan Project, the US programme to develop the first nuclear weapons during World War II.

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A few trope names have a Mad-Lib Thriller Title as well. Coming soon to a wiki near you:

• The Dulcinea Effect
• The Firefly Effect
• The Scarpia Ultimatum
• The Schizophrenia Conspiracy
• The Tetris Effect
• The Worf Effect
• The Xanatos Gambit

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