Foreword

    "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