CLIVE CUSSLER

Adventure stories that made good films series. Authors of action.

 

 

Clive Eric Cussler was born on the 15th of July 1931 in Aurora, Illinois. He is a well known American adventure novelist and marine archaeologist. He is best known for his thriller novels such as Raise the Titanic, many featuring the character Dirk Pitt, have reached The New York Times fiction best-seller list more than seventeen times. Cussler is the founder and chairman of the real-life National Underwater and Marine Agency (NUMA), which has discovered more than sixty shipwreck sites and numerous other notable sunken underwater wreckages. He is the sole author or lead author of more than 50 books.

 

 

Clive Cussler in diving suit

 

Clive Cussler

 

 


Biography

 

Clive Cussler was born in Aurora, Illinois, and grew up in Alhambra, California. He was awarded the rank of Eagle Scout when he was 14. He attended Pasadena City College for two years and then enlisted in the United States Air Force during the Korean War. During his service in the Air Force, he was promoted to Sergeant and worked as an aircraft mechanic and flight engineer for the Military Air Transport Service (MATS).

Clive Cussler married Barbara Knight in 1955, and they remained married for nearly fifty years until her death in 2003. Together they had three children—Teri, Dirk, and Dayna—who have given him four grandchildren.

After his discharge from the military, Cussler went to work in the advertising industry, first as a copywriter and later as a creative director for two of the nation's most successful advertising agencies. As part of his duties Cussler produced radio and television commercials, many of which won international awards including an award at the Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival.

Following the publication in 1996 of Cussler's first nonfiction work, The Sea Hunters, he was awarded a Doctor of Letters degree in 1997 by the Board of Governors of the State University of New York Maritime College who accepted the work in lieu of a Ph.D. thesis. This was the first time in the college's 123-year history that such a degree had been awarded.

 

 


 

 

 


Cussler is a fellow of the Explorers Club of New York, the Royal Geographic Society in London, and the American Society of Oceanographers.

Literary career

 

Clive Cussler began writing in 1965 when his wife took a job working nights for the local police department where they lived in California. After making dinner for the kids and putting them to bed he had no one to talk to and nothing to do so he decided to start writing. His most famous creation is marine engineer, government agent and adventurer Dirk Pitt. The Dirk Pitt novels frequently take on an alternative history perspective, such as "what if Atlantis was real?" or "what if Abraham Lincoln wasn't assassinated, but was kidnapped?"

The first two Pitt novels, The Mediterranean Caper and Iceberg, were relatively conventional maritime thrillers. The third, Raise the Titanic!, made Cussler's reputation and established the pattern that subsequent Pitt novels would follow: a blend of high adventure and high technology, generally involving megalomaniacal villains, lost ships, beautiful women, and sunken treasure.

Cussler's novels, like those of Michael Crichton, are examples of techno-thrillers that do not use military plots and settings. Where Crichton strove for scrupulous realism, however, Cussler prefers fantastic spectacles and outlandish plot devices. The Pitt novels, in particular, have the anything-goes quality of the James Bond or Indiana Jones movies, while also sometimes borrowing from Alistair MacLean's novels. Pitt himself is a larger-than-life hero reminiscent of Doc Savage and other characters from pulp magazines.

Clive Cussler has had more than seventeen consecutive titles reach The New York Times fiction best-seller list.

 

Raise the Titanic

Lost Empire The Silent Sea

The Thief

The Jungle Sahara

 

 

 

Art imitating life - NUMA

 

As an underwater explorer, Cussler has discovered more than sixty shipwreck sites and has written non-fiction books about his findings. He is also the founder of the National Underwater and Marine Agency (NUMA), a non-profit organization with the same name as the fictional government agency that employs Dirk Pitt. Cussler owns a large collection of classic cars, several of which (driven by Pitt) appear in his novels.

Cussler's web site claims that NUMA discovered, among other shipwrecks, the Confederate submarine Hunley. This claim is disputed by underwater archaeologist E. Lee Spence who first reported finding it in 1970 The first expedition to dig into the site and bring back videographic evidence was the 1994/1995 SCIAA/NUMA H.L. Hunley expedition, directed by underwater archaeologist Dr. Mark M. Newell. That was largely financed by Cussler, thus his claim to have discovered it. Based on sworn statements by Dr. Newell, that expedition relied, at least to some extent, on Spence's maps of his earlier work. The dive team that took the video was led by diver Ralph Wilbanks who is on NUMA's Board of Directors.

 

 

Clive Cussler formal dress

 

 


Important finds by Cussler's N.U.M.A. include:

The Carpathia. 

 

The ship famed for being the first to come to the aid of Titanic survivors.
The Mary Celeste. The famed ghost ship that was found abandoned with cargo intact. (The identification of this wreck as the Mary Celeste has since been disputed.)


The Manassas. 

 

The first ironclad of the civil war, formerly the icebreaker Enoch Train. A Visual & interactive depiction of Dr. Cussler's NUMA Foundation Expeditions has been made available as an extension of NUMA's original website. web site it is an informative and educational overview from a global perspective of Dr. Cussler's expeditions and discoveries.


Appearances as characters

 

In what started as a joke in the novel Dragon that Cussler expected his editor to remove, he now often writes himself into his books; at first as simple cameos, but later as something of a deus ex machina, providing the novel's protagonists with an essential bit of assistance or information. Often, the character is given an alias and not revealed as Cussler until his exit with the characters remarking on how odd the name is. The cameos are usually restricted to the Pitt adventures, although the Fargo Files books Lost Empire and Spartan Gold had Cussler making an appearance.

A regular name in Cussler novels was Leigh Hunt. Seventeen books have had a character named Hunt appear in the opening prologues, usually dying. In the introduction to Arctic Drift, Cussler says there was a real Leigh Hunt who died in 2007 and the novel is dedicated to him.

 

Titanic sailing into the iceberg

 

 

 

Cinematization

 

The first film of a Clive Cussler novel was Raise The Titanic! (1980), starring Richard Jordan as Dirk Pitt. It grossed $13.8 million on a budget of $36 million.


Paramount Pictures released Sahara on April 8, 2005, starring Matthew McConaughey as Dirk Pitt, Steve Zahn as Al Giordino, William H. Macy as Admiral Sandecker, and Penélope Cruz as Eva Rojas.

 

 

Dirk Pitt Adventure

 

Novels featuring Dirk Pitt, and his children, Dirk Pitt Jr. and Summer Pitt.

 


# Title Publication Date
1 †Pacific Vortex! 1983
2 The Mediterranean Caper 1973
3 Iceberg 1975
4 Raise the Titanic! 1976
5 Vixen 03 1978
6 Night Probe 1981
7 Deep Six 1984
8 Cyclops 1986
9 Treasure 1988
10 Dragon 1990
11 Sahara 1992
12 Inca Gold 1994
13 Shock Wave 1996
14 Flood Tide 1997
15 Atlantis Found 1999
16 Valhalla Rising* 2001
17 Trojan Odyssey* 2003
18 Black Wind* 2004
19 Treasure of Khan* 2006
20 Arctic Drift* 2008
21 Crescent Dawn* 2010

 

† Although published in 1983, Pacific Vortex! was written, and takes place before The Mediterranean Caper.

 

 

The NUMA Files

 

(co-authored with Paul Kemprecos on the first eight, Graham Brown on the rest)

This series of books focuses on Kurt Austin, Team Leader of NUMA's Special Assignments division and his adventures. Some characters from the Pitt novels appear such as Sandecker, Rudi Gunn, Hiram Yaeger and St. Julien Perlmutter. Pitt makes brief appearances in the books "Serpent", "White Death", "Polar Shift", "Devil's Gate", and "The Storm."

 

# Title Publication Date
1 Serpent 1999
2 Blue Gold 2000
3 Fire Ice 2002
4 White Death 2003
5 Lost City 2004
6 Polar Shift 2005
7 The Navigator 2007
8 Medusa 2009
9 Devil's Gate 2011
10 The Storm June 5, 2012

 

 

The Oregon Files

 

(co-authored with Craig Dirgo on first two, Jack DuBrul on the rest)

 

The Oregon Files focuses on a ship named the Oregon, introduced in Flood Tide. While appearing to be a decrepit freighter, it's actually a high-tech advanced ship used by an unnamed and mysterious "Corporation", under the leadership of Juan Cabrillo. The ship is run like a business, with its crew being shareholders, taking jobs for the CIA and other agencies to help stop terrorism and other crimes. The crew is adept at disguises, combat, computer hacking and more to aid their missions. Kurt Austin, Joe Zavala and Dirk Pitt all make cameo appearances in the fourth book in the series, Skeleton Coast; Juan speaks to Pitt on the telephone, and Austin and Zavala appear at the end.

 

# Title Publication Date
1 Golden Buddha 2003
2 Sacred Stone 2004
3 Dark Watch 2005
4 Skeleton Coast 2006
5 Plague Ship 2008
6 Corsair 2009
7 The Silent Sea 2010
8 The Jungle 2011
9 Mirage September 4, 2012

 

 

 

 

LINKS:

 

 

 

NOVELIST INDEX A - Z

 

 

Jeffrey Archer - Kane & Abel

Isaac Asimov - I Robot

Peter Benchley - Jaws

Enid Blyton - The Famous Five

Charlotte Bronte - Wuthering Heights

Dan Brown - The Da Vinci Code

Emily Bronte - Wuthering Heights

Edgar Rice Burroughs - Tarzan

Lee Child - One Shot

Agatha Christie - Murder on the Nile

Tom Clancy - The Hunt for Red October

Arthur C Clarke - Space Odyssey

Michael Connelly - The Lincoln Lawyer

Michael Crichton - Jurassic Park

Clive Cussler - Raise the Titanic

Daniel Dafoe - Robinson Crusoe

Roald Dahl - The Big Friendly Giant

Charles Dickens - Oliver Twist

Arthur Conan Doyle - Sherlock Homes

 

 

Alexander Dumas - Count Monte Christo

Ian Flemming - James Bond

John Grisham - The Pelican Brief

Charlaine Harris - Dead Until Dark

Stephen HawkingA Brief History of Time

Ernest HemingwayOld Man and the Sea

Amanda Hocking - My Blood Approves

Jameson Hunter - $Billion Dollar Whale

Stephen King - The Thing

Rudyard Kipling - The Jungle Book

Stieg Larson - Girl with Dragon Tattoo

D H Lawrence - Women in Love 

C S Lewis - The Chronicles of Narnia

Jack LondonThe Sea Wolf

Robert Ludlum - Bourne Identity

Ian McEwan - Atonement

Alistair McLean - Bear Island

Herman Melville - Moby Dick

Kyotaro Nishimura - Terminal Murder

 

 

George Orwell - 1984

Beatrix Potter - The Tale of Peter Rabbit

Arthur Ransome - Swallows & Amazons

Nora Roberts - Sweet Revenge

Harold RobbinsThe Carpetbaggers

J K Rowling - Harry Potter

William Shakespeare - Romeo & Juliet

Sidney Sheldon - The Naked Face 

Mary Shelley - Frankenstein

Wilbur SmithShout at the Devil

Bram Stoker - Dracula

Robert Louis Stevenson - Treasure Island

Mark TwainAdventures Huckleberry Finn

Jules Verne - 20,000 Leagues U Sea

Edgar Wallace - King Kong 

H G Wells - War of the Worlds

Oscar Wilde - Picture of Dorian Gray

Virginia Woolf - To the Lighthouse

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A taste for adventure

 

The $Billion Dollar whale, adventure story with John Storm

 

A heartwarming adventure: pirate whalers V conservationists

due for release in 2013 as an e-book, with a film production

planned for 2015/16 - TBA

 

 

 

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