Clive Cussler and Dirk Pitt Revealed
By
Clive Cussler with Craig Dirgo
v1.0 Initial release
v1.1 Lots misc OCR cleanup, fixed broken paragrpahs, misc formatting. There are a couple places marked with <<>> around unknown text.
Synopsis:
"A new Clive Cussler novel is like a visit from your best friend."
-Tom Clancy
DIRK PITT: He is the consummate man of action who lives by the moment and for the moment . . . without regret. A graduate of the Air Force Academy, son of a United States senator, and special projects director for the U.S. National Underwater and Marine Agency (NUMA), he is cool, courageous, and resourceful-a man of complete honor at all times and of absolute ruthlessness whenever necessary. With a taste for fast cars, beautiful women, and tequila on the rocks with lime, he lives as passionately as he works. Pitt answers to no one but Admiral James Sandecker, the wily commander of NUMA, and trusts no one but the shrewd, street-smart Al Giordino, a friend since childhood and his partner in undersea adventure for twenty years.
CLIVE CUSSLER: He is a No. 1 New York Times bestselling author whose books have been translated into forty languages. With his NUMA crew of volunteers, Cussler has discovered more than sixty lost ships of historic significance, including the long-lost Confederate submarine Hunley. Like Pitt, Cussler collects classic automobiles. His collection features eighty-two examples of custom coachwork and is one of the finest to be found anywhere. Cussler divides his time between the deserts of Arizona and the mountains of Colorado.
Dirk Pitt Adventures by Clive Cussler
Flood Tide
Shock Wave
Inca Gold
Sahara
Dragon
Treasure
Cyclops
Deep Six
Pacific Vortex
Night Probe!
Vixen 03
Raise the Titanic!
Iceberg
Mediterranean Caper
Nonfiction by Clive Cussler and Craig Dirgo
The Sea Hunters
Available from POCKET BOOKS
For orders other than by individual consumers, Pocket Books grants a discount on the purchase of 10 or more copies of single titles for special markets or premium use. For further details, please write to the Vice-President of Special Markets, Pocket Books, 1633 Broadway, New York, NY 10019-6785, 8th Floor.
For information on how individual consumers can place orders, please write to Mail Order Department, Simon & Schuster Inc 200 Old Tappan Road, Old Tappan, NJ 07675.
CLIVE CUSSLER & CRAIG DIRGO
POCKET BOOKS New York London Toronto Sydney Tokyo Singapore
The sale of this book without its cover is unauthorized. If you purchased this book without a cover, you should be aware that it was reported to the publisher as "unsold and destroyed." Neither the author nor the publisher has received payment for the sale of this "stripped book."
An Original Publication of POCKET BOOKS
POCKET BOOKS, a division of Simon & Schuster Inc. 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020
Copyright C 1998 by Clive Cussler
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.
For information address Pocket Books, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020
ISBN: 0-671-02622-4
First Pocket Books printing November 1998
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
DIRK PITT is a registered trademark of Clive Cussler.
POCKET and colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster Inc.
Front cover illustration by Rick Lovell
Printed in the U.S.A.
Contents
Foreword by Arnold Stem
Introduction
The Reunion
An Interview with Clive Cussler
The Clive Cussler Car Collection
Advanced Pitt Trivia
The Dedications
Brief Synopses of the Dirk Pitt Novels
The Mediterranean Caper
Nonfiction
A Concordance of Dirk Pitt Novels
The Continuing Characters
The World of NUMA
Answers to Advanced Pitt Trivia
Prologue to Atlantis Found
"Nobody does it better than Clive Cussler, nobody."
Quote by Stephen Coontz for Cyclops. Though I knew that authors rarely resemble their protagonists, I could not help but wonder if Clive Cussler would look like Dirk Pitt when I met him. He didn't exactly.
Unlike the hero of his books, Cussler had hair and beard of a pewter gray. He stood tall, but the years had added a few inches to his waist. The bluegreen eyes were bright, and he moved with the quickness of a much younger man. His face bore the weathered wear of someone who spent half a lifetime in the great outdoors and gave him the look of an explorer who had just returned from the jungles of the Congo or the icy mountains of Antarctica. It didn't take much imagination to picture him thirty years ago when he might easily have passed for Dirk Pitt's elder brother.
Hailed as the grand master of adventure novels, Cussler is about as down-home as you can get. Although he writes in an incredible office that he built in a Taos chapel style to match his adobe home, he dresses like the neighborhood handyman. He answers all his fan mail by hand, addressing fans by their first names as if they were old friends, often inserting a page from the original draft of his latest book as a souvenir. He's never hired a secretary, and his wife has never had a part-time housekeeper. "She cleans the house before the cleaning lady comes," he explains.
It all goes with the Cussler image of an author who was once described as following the beat of a drummer who was playing in a field on the other side of town. He does things few authors ever attempt. He once bought one of his books back from the publisher.
He injects himself into his own stories as did Alfred Hitchcock in his movies, except that Cussler utters dialogue to his hero, who never recognizes him. And he writes wild, far-fetched adventure tales with the same cast of characters. A feat few writers attempt in this day and age.
He and his agent, Peter Lampack, have negotiated book deals with publishers that have been copied by the trade as models of ingenuity.
And, unlike all too many writers who peak after one or two books, Cussler incredibly seems to improve. Strangely, he never uses an outline or writes more than one draft of a novel, and yet his complicated plots have hit the best-seller lists in both fiction and nonfiction no fewer than fourteen times.
Relying on his many years of experience as a creative director in advertising, he personally directed the design and layout of the jackets of his books, insisting on the same illustration for the hardcover as for the paperback for the sake of continuity. Instead of the pretentious black-and-white studio portraits that portray most authors on their book jackets, Cussler figured that since the front illustration was in four colors, the author photo on the back might as well be printed in color, thereby adding very little to the cost of the publisher in the print run. He has his own photographer shoot the photo of himself with the Dirk Pitt classic car featured in the book and has his illustrator set the type and do the overlay before sending it to the publisher's production department.
When asked why the photos focus on the car while he stands in the background, Cussler responded, "I'm sure the reader finds an exotic automobile of more interest than me."
What also sets Cussler apart is that he has a genuine fondness for Dirk Pitt. Both Conan Doyle and Ian Fleming hated their protagonists and tried to kill them off but were later forced to resurrect them after an outcry by their reading public.
"He's a likable guy," Cussler says of Pitt. "I doubt whether he'll die so long as I'm alive. Even then, I'm certain my agent and publisher will find some other writer to pick up the flag and carry on after I go to the great beyond. As an adventure hero, Pitt is as timeless as they come. Stories about lost treasure, like a bouquet of flowers to a pretty girl, never go out of style."
Cussler has been called America's Jules Verne, but, unlike the famed French novelist of Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea, he doesn't sit and write day in and day out. As soon as he sends in the manuscript of a Dirk Pitt adventure to his publisher, he heads for the water and searches for a lost shipwreck. And when he isn't on the rolling deck of a survey boat with his search crew, he collects, restores and maintains a warehouse filled with more than eighty classic cars.
Several of the models and makes he owns are driven in his novels by Dirk Pitt. He also collects paintings by Southwest artists for his adobe home, while his office is filled with maritime paintings and models of shipwrecks he and his crew have discovered.
It can be said that Cussler is a man for all seasons.
He is certainly in a class by himself apart from most writers I have interviewed. He is genuinely an interesting guy, down-to-earth, approachable, with a Rodney Dangerfield self-deprecating humor. A modest man, he mounts his many achievement awards and certificates on the walls of his office bathroom. Unlike more vain people who display a sea of photographs of themselves standing with famous celebrities, there are only two photos of Cussler to be found in his home or office.
One shows him standing in a Star fleet command uniform in the control room of the Enterprise amid the Star Trek crew. The other has him with feet braced on the mast of a sinking boat while he clubs the shark from Jaws with an empty rifle. Both were accomplished with digital imagery.
All goes with the personality. Cussler loves to tell funny stories about himself as the butt of comedy in strange situations only he could encounter.
Unlike many successful people, he has been happily married to the same woman for forty-three years. He and his lovely wife, Barbara, match together like a pair of old, comfortable shoes. When confronted with the complimentary titles bestowed upon him by book reviewers and his army of fans, Cussler looks through the blue-green eyes that twinkle, smiles, and says, "That's nothing. When Barbara is mad, she calls me Old Crap." A cheap man? Hardly. He and Barbara support several charities and school endowments. And, of course, there is his commitment to preserve America's maritime heritage through his nonprofit foundation, the National Underwater and Marine Agency (NUMA).
He also gives of himself. In talks with agents and editors about authors over lunch in New York, few are mentioned with the respect of Clive Cussler. Authors whose first books he has endorsed with quotes are in great number. Tom Clancy and Stephen Coontz are among those who received endorsements from Cussler for their first published works.
Clive Cussler writes to his readers. He has written books that are enjoyed by children as young as nine years of age and seniors in their nineties, and by men and women in every walk of life. He is read by presidents, prime ministers, members of the armed forces, housewives, teachers, business executives, construction workers, firefighters, police and even convicted criminals. He is considered the most popular adventure writer of our time because his books and characters come alive and he gives readers their money's worth.
The only mystery I can find behind such an intriguing man is that no one has stepped forward to write a biography of him.
Tom Clancy said it best when he wrote, "A new Clive Cussler novel is like a visit from an old friend."
Arnold Stem
With more than 90 million copies of his books in print, Clive Cussler has earned his moniker "The Grand Master of Adventure."
He has also been called America's Jules Verne. His works are translated into forty different languages, and the exploits of his primary character, Dirk Pitt, are read throughout the world.
In 1996, Cussler branched out into nonfiction, co-writing with Craig Dirgo The Sea Hunters, a volume about the exploits of his nonprofit foundation National Underwater and Marine Agency. To the amazement of critics and the publishing community alike, the book reached number five on the New York Times hardcover best-sellers list. The introduction of the paperback edition of The Sea Hunters gave Cussler his first number one best-seller. He followed up in 1997 with the return of Dirk Pitt in the hardcover novel Flood Tide, which opened on the New York Times hardcover fiction list at number three, moving to number one the following week, a first for a Dirk Pitt novel.
What, then, does the future hold for the author who has often said, "I envisioned writing a small paperback series; when I started I thought that if I could make ten thousand dollars a year I would be a happy man."
In this, the companion book to Cussler's works, we will examine the phenomenal success he has achieved and look at the evolution of the Dirk Pitt novels.
Delving into Clive Cussler's life, we will see how life imitates art and the close ties that are present between Pitt and Cussler. No work about Clive Cussler would be complete without a section devoted to his famous car collection or a concordance listing the characters in Pitt's adventures.
Join me now as we dig deep into the world of Clive Cussler.
Craig Dirgo
The evening air was brisk, an overture for the approaching cold of winter, when a yellow and green cab stopped at a security gate on the south end of Washington's National Airport. The guard studied the pass that was extended by a hand from the rear window, then handed it back and spoke in an official tone.
"Stay on the road. You're in a restricted area."
The driver swung onto the narrow service road that ran parallel with the east-west taxi strip on the southern border of the airport. "You sure this is the right way?" he asked, seeing nothing but an empty field.
"I'm certain," answered the gray-haired man in the backseat. "I've been here before."
"May I ask what you're looking for?"
The man in the backseat ignored the question. "Pull up at that pole with the red light on the top. I'll get out there."
"But there's no sign of life."
"Can you return for me in about forty minutes?"
"You want to stand out here in the middle of nowhere on a cold night for forty minutes?" asked the uncomprehending driver.
"I enjoy solitude."
The cabbie shrugged his shoulders. "OK. I'll take a break for a cup of coffee and come back for you in forty minutes."
The man passed the driver a fifty-dollar bill and stepped from the cab.
He stood in the middle of the road beside the pole until the red taillights of the cab faded in the distance. Then he stared at, a ghostly building that seemed to materialize out of the night, its silhouette becoming defined against the lights of the nation's capital across the Potomac River. Slowly, the building became physical and recognizable as an old aircraft hangar with a rounded roof. At first glance it appeared deserted. The surrounding land was covered with weeds, and the corrugated sides of the building wore a heavy coat of rust. The windows were boarded over, and the huge doors that once rolled open to admit aircraft for maintenance were welded closed.
The man standing in the road was not alone, and the hangar was not abandoned. At least two dozen cars were neatly parked in rows among the weeds. As he watched, a Lincoln Town Car pulled up to the front entrance door of the hangar, and an elegantly dressed woman exited the car, her door held open by a valet parking attendant.
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