An Interview with Clive Cussler

 

 

    CRAIG DIRGO: Let's talk about your early life for a moment.

 

    CLIVE CUSSLER: I was born in Aurora, Illinois, on July 15, 1931, at 2:00 A.M a habit I kept later in life when closing bars. I was the only child of Eric and Amy Cussler. My mother liked the name Clive, since it came from a well-known British movie actor of the time, Clive Brook. My middle name was Eric after my father. I'd like to think they never had another child because they thought it was highly unlikely they'd do better, but the truth of the matter was that many families had only one child in those days simply because they couldn't afford to raise more.

 

    It was the depths of the Depression, and Dad was only making eighteen dollars a week. He worked out a deal with the baby doctor, paying him fifty cents a week against the twenty-five-dollar fee for my delivery. After one payment, the kindly old doctor told Dad to forget it, saying facetiously that he would make it up on a rich widow patient from Chicago. Thus, I only cost fifty cents to come into the world.

 

    CRAIG DIRGO: Tell us about your parents.

 

    CLIVE CUSSLER: My mother, the former Amy Hunnewell, was a beautiful dark-haired lady whose ancestors came to America from England in 1650 and settled in Boston. She was born in 1901 in St. Joseph, Missouri.

 

    Her father worked for the railroad and later retired to run a fishing lodge and a saloon in Minnesota, wisely selling the latter just two weeks before Prohibition was voted in. Mom was vivacious and humorous and always teasing Dad and me. She also had a creative side that was never fully nurtured but was passed along to her son. She often told of going to a carnival when she was sixteen with her bevy of girlfriends and paying twenty-five cents to a Gypsy lady to tell their fortunes. The obvious question among young girls was: Who will I marry? The Gypsy fortune-teller told Mom she would have a famous daughter. A near miss on that one. As for her husband, the Gypsy said he was tall, dark and in the Army, wearing a gray uniform.

 

    Mom and her friends laughed at the revelation.

 

    America had just entered World War I, and they all knew that the American doughboys, as soldiers were called then, wore khaki uniforms.

 

    Little did Mom know that her future tall and dark husband was born and raised in Germany and was serving in the Kaiser's army on the Western Front. And, oh yes, the Germans wore gray uniforms.

 

    My dad, Eric Cussler, had a tough life when he was young. His father was abusive and didn't want his young son under his feet, so he shipped him off to military academy when he was only eleven years old. When Dad turned sixteen, he served in an infantry brigade as a sergeant, fighting in the trenches on the Western Front. After a leave home, he was promoted to lieutenant and ordered to a hell hole called Verdun.

 

    On the march back to the front, British aircraft strafed his column, and he was hit by a bullet in the knee. In the hospital, he developed gangrene and came within an inch of dying. He owed his life to a captured British surgeon who took a personal interest in Dad due to his young age.

 

    Because his knee was irreparably damaged and Dad would always walk with a stiff leg, the British surgeon ingeniously operated and slightly bent the frozen knee so that Dad's limp would not be nearly as pronounced as Chester's in Gunsmoke. Dad recovered and after the war worked in a bank before attending Heidelberg University, where he received a degree in accountancy. While working in the bank, he made a small but tidy nest egg on the European stock market.

 

    CRAIG DIRGO: How did he come to America?

 

    CLIVE CUSSLER: One of his two sisters had come to America and married.

 

    He decided to leave Germany and come across, too. He was almost denied entry into the country when an immigration official considered Dad a potential welfare case because of the injured leg. After a six-day stay at Ellis Island, where he conned his way into the country by claiming to be a piano player, a job where the injured leg would have no effect, he took a train to his sister's farm in Illinois, where he worked in the fields while he learned English. The following. year, he moved to Chicago during the Roaring Twenties and experienced exciting times, driving a Stutz Bearcat, making gin in a bathtub, seeing Al Capone on the courthouse steps, finding gangsters' bullet riddled bodies in the street and finally meeting my mother.

 

    CRAIG DIRGO: Wasn't your mother in Minnesota?

 

    CLIVE CUSSLER: Mom was living in Minneapolis, and while visiting a friend in Chicago, they decided to go dancing. Dad and Mom always claimed they were introduced by mutual friends. It wasn't until they were in their seventies that the truth came out. It seems they actually met when Dad asked her to dance at the Trianon Ballroom to the music of Ted "Is Everybody Happy" Lewis. So it could be said that Dad picked Mom up. This was in 1929. They were married on June 10, 1930, and had me a little over a year later.

 

    As usual, my timing was bad, and I arrived on the same day Dad was laid off his job along with a hundred other workers at Durabilt Steel, a company that made steel cabinets. He moved my mother and me to Minneapolis, where we lived with her parents.

 

    My grandfather was making good money working as an engineer on the railroad. Dad finally found a job as a traveling auditor for a company called Jewel Tea that sold coffee and related supplies door-to-door.

 

    We moved around the country, living in Terre Haute, Indiana; Louisville, Kentucky; and then back to Minneapolis, where I started in kindergarten.

 

    CRAIG DIRGO: What happened next?

 

    CLIVE CUSSLER: During the winter of 1937, I came down with pneumonia and nearly passed on to the great beyond. Those were the days before antibiotics, and I lived in an oxygen tent for six days before finally showing signs of improvement. As I began feeling better, the hospital moved an old derelict into the bed next to mine. The police had found him half frozen in an alley. Old Charlie was a neat guy. He taught me card games and told stories no six-year-old should have heard in the days before TV and R-rated movies. One morning, when the nurse came into the room to check on me, I nodded over at Old Charlie and asked why he had turned blue. She gasped, whipped the curtain around Charlie's bed, and within minutes he was whisked out of the room covered by a sheet. When Dad found out an old drunk had died in the bed next to his little sonny boy, he damn near tore the hospital down to its foundation. Boy, was he mad!

 

    Against doctor's orders, he and Mom carried me to their little apartment so I could enjoy Christmas at home. They had sacrificed their small savings to buy me a Lionel electric train complete with a tunnel, a fort with wooden soldiers and a little switchman who came out of a tiny house to swing his lantern when the train went past.

 

    About this time, Dad was offered a promotion within the company that called for a transfer to Chicago. At the same time, there was also an opening in the Los Angeles office if he remained at his present salary level. It was the dead of winter in Minnesota, the snow was piled eight feet high around our apartment and his sickly son looked like death warmed over. He never thought twice. Within the week, we were all in our 1937 black Ford Victoria and headed for sunny Southern California. Dad drove straight south to Texas to get out of the snow and cold as quickly as possible and caught old Highway 66 west into the Golden State.

 

    CRAIG DIRGO: Where did you live in California?

 

    CLIVE CUSSLER: We settled in a small suburban community outside Los Angeles, called Alhambra, where I lived for the next twenty-three years. My inaugural in the first grade was an introduction into the differences between east and west. All my classmates were healthy, tanned Californians, while I was this pale, sickly kid with ribs poking through his chest who looked like an anemic ghost. I recall they laughed at me because I wore short pants when no self-respecting California kid would ever be caught dead in short pants.

 

    I survived and still treasure happy memories from my eight years at Fremont Elementary School in Alhambra. The principal was a tough old bird, rather attractive as I think back now, and well respected. Her name was Mary Mullin. Those were the days when teachers took no crap from their pupils. A number of fathers, including my own, wrote letters to Miss Mullin, stating that if their boys were naughty, she had their express permission to paddle their asses, which she did on numerous occasions. I only felt her wrath twice, as I recall.

 

    Amazingly, at my fortieth high school reunion, nearly twenty kids out of my old Fremont grammar school class attended.

 

    Friendships were made that are still cherished.

 

    CRAIG DIRGO: What did you do for fun as a child?

 

    CLIVE CUSSLER: I was very fortunate in growing up in a neighborhood where there were six boys of the same age who caused mischief and were all punished by razor straps, belts or switches but were very industrious and creative. From the age of eight until we all entered high school, we built tree houses and eight-room (granted, they were small) clubhouses, dug caves and covered them with boards and sod, and developed entire miniature cities out of mud.

 

    In the open fields behind our homes, before the Southern California housing boom in the postwar years, we struggled to move bales of hay from a local rancher's harvest and constructed a huge fort, where we played French Foreign Legion fighting off the raiding Tuaregs of the Sahara Desert. We also built a twenty-foot boat in the middle of a vacant lot and pretended we were pirates raiding the Spanish Main.

 

    I joined the Boy Scouts at age twelve and was a member of the Cobra Patrol of Alhambra Troop Six. My scoutmaster was a wonderful man I've never forgotten. His name was Guy Smalley, and along with my dad, they inspired me to make Eagle Scout by the time I reached fourteen. The camping trips, the hikes, those Thursday night meetings in a log structure built from telephone poles donated by the phone company, they're still with me. Few boys had a finer childhood.

 

    CRAIG DIRGO: What was your first job?

 

    CLIVE CUSSLER: When I was old enough, my father insisted I learn work ethics. My job, if I was to be offered food and clothing, was to mow and trim the lawn every Saturday. We lived on a corner lot, and if you've ever lived on a corner lot, you know how much yard there is to maintain. The trimming was the part I hated. There must have been five miles of sidewalks and flower beds to edge. Even to this day, I'd rather run up a steep slope in my bare feet on pea gravel than trim a yard. I also had to wax Mom's linoleum floors. Remember those? And dry the dishes every evening. All for twenty-five cents a week.

 

    When I became a teenager, Dad raised me to a dollar a week. I wasn't impressed. With the canny mind of a fourteen-year-old, I began doing such a rotten job of taking care of the yard, Dad finally threw up his hands in exasperation and hired a gardener.

 

    Through high school, I worked every chance I got. Getting up at 4:00 A.M. to deliver the Los Angeles Times seven days a week for twenty dollars.

 

    Selling magazine subscriptions door-to-door. Loading trucks at a laundry. Boxing groceries in a supermarket. Working a dirty job grinding the burrs off the impellers that went inside water pumps. I saved every nickel and dime for that glorious day when I could afford to go out and buy my own car.

 

    CRAIG DIRGO: What about high school?

 

    CLIVE CUSSLER: Except for the extracurricular activities at Alhambra High, I found school to be a colossal drag. Frankly, I hated it.

 

    During algebra and civics classes, I stared out the window, blocking out the teacher's lecture while I fired a cannon with John Paul Jones on the Bonhomme Richard in his epic battle with the British frigate.

 

    Miraculously, I managed to survive four years without an F and, I might add, an A or a B. My report cards, much to the frustration of my self-disciplined and highly intelligent German father, were filled with C's and D's and the usual notation: "Clive seems bright, but he doesn't apply himself."

 

    When fans and interviewers ask me what teacher inspired me to expand my horizons and enter a writing career, they always seem saddened to learn I never had a teacher who saw any potential in a boy who seemed lost in Never-never Land. All they saw was a disinterested student who would probably end out his days working as a farm laborer. I've always thought that education is geared more to students who show a flair of scholarship than those who have an untapped well of creativity.

 

    CRAIG DIRGO: So school was not your favorite activity.

 

    CLIVE CUSSLER: Hardly. The early forties were the heyday of California hot rods. When my buddies and I weren't making clowns of ourselves trying to impress girls, we were body-surfing on the beach and laboring over our rods. Buying a car meant more to me than sports. Despite being a competent football pass receiver and baseball hitter, I opted for working until I had enough money to buy a 1936 Ford four-door sedan. Never half as fast as I hoped and prone to throwing rods and breaking axles, it was nonetheless a pretty car in dark green metallic paint with the louvers of the hood filled in, moon ripple disk hubcaps, lowered in the back and touched off with teardrop fender skirts. I poured my heart and a thousand dollars into that car.

 

    After I went into the Air Force, Dad sold it for sixty-nine dollars.

 

    My friends and I had a lively time in high school.

 

    A few actually had girlfriends, but mostly our love was directed toward our cars. I once bought a big black 1925 Auburn limousine with vanity mirrors and flower vases in the backseat for the grand sum of twenty-two dollars. It was right after the war in 1945, and most of the American public, having coaxed the family car to keep running in spite of the gas shortage for nearly five years, wanted a new car. The used-car market fell through the floor, and old classics could be purchased for next to nothing.

 

    For the football games, my motley crew and I would dress up like gangsters, complete with overcoats and old fedora hats pulled down over our eyes, and smoke cigars. My poor parents had once suffered for three years in a vain attempt to make me play the violin, and I took the case down from a shelf in the garage and carried it under one arm as the gangsters supposedly did when concealing their submachine guns.

 

    Pulling up to the football stadium in the big black limousine, our gang would rumble through the aisles and up the steps to our seats. The security guards never did catch on to the fact that I smuggled beer and wine into the stands inside the Violin case.

 

    CRAIG DIRGO: But you ended up graduating.

 

    CLIVE CUSSLER: Barely. I had so many demerits that to graduate on the stage with the rest of my class, the Alhambra High class of '49, I had to work as a gardener on the school grounds after class for two hours a day. I next enrolled at Pasadena City College. It was a junior college in those days. For no good reason that I can think of, I applied myself and began receiving B's and a couple of A's. My dad almost went into cardiac arrest and demanded to know why I was impersonating his son.

 

    During the summer of 1950, an old school pal, Felix Duprey, and I took off in Felix's 1939 Ford convertible and toured the country, covering thirty-six states in three months. We slept in freight cars in Boise and Houston, in a bandstand in Vermont, in the bushes directly beneath the Capitol building in Washington, D.C. and under the front porch of a school in Kingsland, Georgia, where the local sheriff arrested us for trespassing. He followed our car into town, where he made us sit in a barbershop because the barber happened to be the justice of the peace.

 

    There was the threat of thirty days on the Georgia chain gang until I launched into a speech about the ill treatment two red-blooded American boys received in Kingsland, Georgia, while traveling the great United States. Unintiniidated and dubious, but maybe a tiny bit confused, the sheriff and the justice of the peace ordered us to remain in the barber shop while they went over to the post office to see if there were any wanted posters out on us. Once they were gone, Felix and I looked at each other, ran to the car and beat it over the Florida border only three miles away.

 

    CRAIG DIRGO: So after the trip, did you go back to Pasadena City College?

 

    CLIVE CUSSLER: When we returned to Alhambra, we were stunned to find all our friends enlisting in the armed services. We'd paid no attention to the news during the trip and were only vaguely aware of the conflict in Korea. Times were different then, and few boys hesitated to serve their country. Felix and I tried to sign up for flight training in the Navy and Air Force, but because so many college students had enlisted while we were driving the country, flight school had a nine-month backlog. So we signed up with the Air Force and went off to basic training at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio, Texas.

 

    On the train ride from Los Angeles, along with sixty other recruits, we all became drunk on cheap bourbon that had to be smuggled on board, because we were all under age, and proceeded to sing "Good Night Irene" while breaking out the windows in the club car. When the train reached El Paso, a squad of military police boarded the train for the rest of the trip to prevent another incident.

 

    After basic training, I was sent to aircraft and engine school to become a mechanic. The sergeant who interviewed me for a job classification ignored MY pleas for the motor pool. "All you do is change spark plugs," he said, waving his hands airily. "What you want is aircraft and engine school." The Air Force had this irrational concept that if I loved rebuilding old automobiles, I would simply adore maintaining C-97 Boeing Strato cruisers in the Military Air Transport Service. The big difference was that my old Ford flathead V-8 had only eight spark plugs. The twenty-eight-cylinder Pratt-WUtney 4,360 cubic-inch engines that powered the C-97 each had a total of fifty-six spark plugs that required changing all too frequently. After graduating from mechanic school, I asked to be shipped to Europe in the forlorn hope I could visit my relatives in Germany. Naturally, the Air Force sent me in the opposite direction-Hickham Field, Hawaii, to be precise.

 

    Like school, the Air Force and I never really hit it off. If I found an angle to get off work, I used it. My medical records read like an Encyclopedia Britannica. I once found a large medical book dating back to 1895 in the back of an antique store. I bought it and began studying the entries. I remember one doctor asking me what my symptoms were.

 

    I told him, "Sir, I see purple spots before my eyes, I have hot flashes, the back of my neck has gone numb and I can't seem to bend my fingers."

 

    He looked at me strangely for several moments, then he gasped. "My God, son, it sounds like you have Borneo Jungle Incepus. I want you in the hospital."

 

    Very astute, that doctor. His diagnosis was right on the money. I was impressed he was aware of a disease considered rare even in 1895.

 

    After three days of blood tests and warnings to stop harassing the nurses, I was declared fit and sent back to the flight line. That antique medical book was the best investment I ever made.

 

    The final six months of my overseas tour passed slowly but pleasantly.

 

    I made many fine friends who remain in touch today. Dave Anderson, a sculptor from Tulsa, Oklahoma; Charlie Davis, a pilot from Chicago; and, of course, Al Giordano, a rugged, sarcastic little stonemason from Vineland, New Jersey, who became the inspiration for Albert Giordino, Dirk Pitt's close pal in all the NUMA adventures.

 

    Al is now retired and living in Stuart, Florida.

 

    After roll call, Dave, Al and I, along with Don Mercier, who has since passed away, would jump in our cars, drive around the island of Oahu to a secluded cove and go skin diving. We soon became as tanned as the Polynesians and as agile as the fish we speared. Diving was wonderful in those days.

 

    The beaches and coves were deserted, and we had the reefs and the turquoise waters to ourselves. It was then I enhanced my already established love for the sea.

 

    To supplement my meager one hundred and thirty dollars a month as a buck sergeant, I used to buy old cars from the new-car dealers, fix them up and sell them to the troops arriving for service in the islands. Not relishing Air Force life, I bought an airplane with three other fellows, a 1939 Luscombe, and rented an apartment at Waikiki Beach.

 

    A 1940 Packard limousine was my transportation to and from the base until I bought and restored a 1939 Fiat Topolino with a little 500cc engine. I sold that car when I returned home and always regretted it.

 

    On a return vacation to Hawaii several years later, I found that the car had been converted to a dragster that won several trophies on the local drag strip.

 

    CRAIG DIRGO: It was about this time you met your wife, correct?

 

    CLIVE CUSSLER: I met my wife-to-be, Barbara Knight, shortly before I left overseas in October of 1951.

 

    She and I were introduced by a mutual friend, Carolyn Johnston, on a blind date when we attended a football game." They arrived to pick me up at my parents' house, and I sauntered out wearing a leather flight jacket, a white scarf flowing over my shoulders, Levi's, and smoking a cigar. I thought I looked rather dashing, but Barbara took me for some kind of barbarian member of a motorcycle club. She sat as far away from me as she could and spoke only about ten words the whole evening.

 

    To me, she looked rather dowdy, and I thought she was the most introverted girl I had ever met. Later that evening, when I walked her to the front door of her grandmother's house where she was living, for some indescribable reason I became carried away and asked for a date the following night. I admit I was desperate. To this day, she can't imagine why her brain refused to function and she accepted.

 

    Saturday night, resplendent in my uniform, I showed up at her doorstep at the appointed time.

 

    Barbara opened the door and stood like a radiant vision dressed for an elegant night on the town. We stared at each other for a full minute, unable to believe we were the same two people who had met the night before. What a difference clothes make.

 

    I took her to Hollywood, where we swept into all the jazz joints featuring such greats as Nappy Lamar, Stan Getz, Red Nichols and Charlie Parker.

 

    Barbara was only eighteen, and I was twenty, and the legal drinking age was twenty-one in those days.

 

    But perhaps because I looked older in uniform and Barbara was so dazzlingly attractive, we were never asked for our ID. We had a marvelous time, stayed relatively sober, and I still got her to her grandmother's house at a reasonable hour.

 

    After I was sent overseas, we corresponded for the next two years, until I managed a flight back to the States, courtesy of the Air Force, for a two week leave. Incredibly, I arrived on her birthday, and we went out to celebrate. The days flew, and I recall a fabulous two weeks together before I returned to the islands. On the flight back, I made my mind up to marry her and began laying the foundation for courtship. I made Ebenezer Scrooge look like a spendthrift while I saved my meager Air Force pay supplemented by my used-car sales. I sold my share in the Luscombe, gave UP MY apartment at Waikiki Beach and moved back into the barracks to accumulate a nest egg.

 

    A year later, I flew back to Camp Stoneman near San Francisco to receive my discharge. A civilian again after three years, nine months and sixteen days, I caught an American Airlines midnight flight from San Francisco to Burbank. A couple of fellow passengers took up a conversation with me, asking about my time in the Air Force and what I was going to do when I got home. I recognized the taller of the two as Richard Tregaskis, who wrote Guadalcanal Diary. The other was Lowell Thomas. Little did I know I would meet him again in New York thirty years later and receive an honor from the Explorers Club in his name.

 

    At the airport, I found an early-morning bus that dropped me off six blocks from home. I was burdened with so much baggage, I had to drag my duffel bag and diving equipment over the sidewalk the entire trip, arriving at my front door to be greeted by my parents at 5:30 in the morning. Three hours later, with a cashier's check totaling my hard-earned wages over the past three years clutched in my grubby hand, -1 bought an XK 120 modified Jaguar roadster at a foreign automobile dealership, receiving a nice discount because Dad audited their books.

 

    CRAIG DIRGO: So you returned, bought a new car and went to claim Barbara.

 

    CLIVE CUSSLER: That was the plan. So I drove over to Barbara's house and was shocked to find her going with a sailor stationed on a ship in Long Beach. I guess while I was overseas, it was a case of out of sight, out of mind. It never occurred to me that my goal of marriage was not mutual. And yet, my best-laid plans and sacrifice paid off.

 

    The swabbie took one look at dashing, debonair Cussler in his brand-new Jaguar, and he took off for his ship, never to be seen again. Who can blame him?

 

    His competition was simply too stiff and uncompromising.

 

    After a four-month courtship, I took Barbara out to dinner, then dancing at the Palladium in Hollywood, to the music of Sonny Burke's big band, then drove to Mullholland Drive, where I proposed.

 

    They just don't come any more romantic than me.

 

    Barbara, unable to resist my best-laid plans, could only say yes.

 

    CRAIG DIRGO: Do you think it was the Jaguar that swayed her?

 

    CLIVE CUSSLER: Probably. Possessing a mind rigid with practicality, I promptly sold the Jaguar and with the hard-earned cash purchased a Nash Rambler station wagon, a beautiful cherry-wood Magnavox TV with a record player, living-room sofa and chairs, dining-room tables and chairs, a new refrigerator and a washer/dryer. My dad gave us a stove, and I took my old bedroom set. So when we moved into a little duplex on Heilman Boulevard in Alhambra, every stick of furniture was paid for.

 

    Barbara never forgave me. She always claimed she would have cooked dinner on a Coleman stove, eaten on the floor and furnished the place with blankets and wooden crates if I had kept the Jaguar.

 

    Barbara must have seen something in me my teachers never did, and she had to have nerves of steel.

 

    I know she could have reached much higher. At the time we were married in the Chapel of Roses in Pasadena in 1955, I was making $240 a month pumping gas in a Union station on Sixth and Mateo streets in Los Angeles. You might say it was a case of coming from nothing and bringing it with me.

 

    Fortunately, Barbara and I matched together like a pair of old socks.

 

    After a honeymoon in Ensenada, Mexico, we set up housekeeping as if we'd been doing it for years. Barbara worked in the personnel department of the Southern California Gas Company, while I filled gas tanks for the Union Oil Company. I didn't finish college because I still hated school and had no idea of what I wanted to be when and if I ever grew up.

 

    Six months later, a longtime friend and neighbor, Dick Klein, who married Carolyn Johnston, the lady who introduced Barbara to me, and I became partners and leased a Mobile Oil station on Ramona Boulevard and Garvey Avenue in Alhambra. No more than seventy-five feet separated us from the fence bordering the San Bernardino Freeway. Between us, Dick and I had less than a year's experience, and I've always suspected the only reason the company allowed us to operate the newly built station was that no other dealer wanted a location that was difficult for heavy traffic to reach. Dick and I, however, saw potential, since it was the last stop for gas before entering the freeway, and it was also in a neighborhood where we grew up and knew many of the residents.

 

    The three and a half years I pumped gas was an interesting milestone toward a writing career. So much happened, I could easily write a book on our experiences. We were held up, burglarized, shortchanged, cheated, fleeced and vandalized. A drunken driver missed the turn and crashed into the station, luckily missing everyone who was working that day. You can bet our insurance adjuster became tired of seeing our faces on a continual basis.

 

    We fought constantly with the company over promotions they tried to cram down our throats, much like fast-food chains do today with their franchisees.

 

    We put in ungodly fifteen-hour days. As time went on and we could afford to hire help, this dropped to ten hours a day.

 

    We gave aid to more accident victims than I care to remember. A young girl, who walked her dog past the station every afternoon, used to stop and talk. One afternoon, I looked out from my office and saw her lying in the street after she was struck by a car. Dick and I took care of the dog and made her comfortable until the ambulance arrived. She survived. We rushed to perform first aid for a young boy who was struck on his bicycle. He survived, too.

 

    And then there were the injured and dead we helped pull from the mangled wreckage of cars on the freeway. Whenever we saw traffic back up on either the east or west lane, one of us jumped on our three-wheel Harley-Davidson motorcycle and took off with a tool box toward the accident, knowing we might have to dismantle doors to remove the victims. We nearly always arrived before the police and ambulance and helped ready the injured for the hospital. I believe that in the three and a half years we had the station, Dick and I testified in eighteen traffic investigations.

 

    Mobile Oil estimated our station, despite having only two pumps, should sell twenty-six thousand gallons of gas a month. Company estimates were universally inflated to urge their dealers to unparalleled heights. I never agreed with the psychology behind it. Few stations came close to the estimates. Dick and I, however, were promoters. We called ourselves Clive & Dick's Petrol Emporium, bought an old 1926 Chevrolet truck and painted it in company colors, actually using it to the embarrassment of stalled customers when we pushed them into the station with it. We picked up and delivered cars for service with our Harley that the company painted with our name and phone number. Dick talked a nearby tire company into wrapping a hundred used tires which we stacked around the station to make customers think we were a big tire dealer and could offer them discount prices. We dreamed up promotions for free brake adjustments and lube jobs just to sell brake jobs and oil. During gas wars, we painted a big sign with lowered prices-I believe we once got down to 27.9 cents a gallon-and propped it on the old truck next to the freeway.

 

    Within a few months, Clive & Dick's Petrol Emporium was pumping forty thousand gallons a month. We were taking home eight hundred dollars a month and thought we had arrived in fat city.

 

    Dick bought a new house and a Ford station wagon.

 

    I bought a triplex and played landlord.

 

    You talk about cheap. I was a partner in a gas station. I drove a Volkswagen, and I walked to work. My gas tab averaged four dollars a month.

 

    CRAIG DIRGO: So things were good.

 

    CLIVE CUSSLER: For a while. My daughter Teri was born, and I began to think about the future. Because of our success, Dick and I had hoped either to buy or lease a fleet of service stations and build an empire.

 

    But the company stepped in and said no. "You're doing fine with your one little moneymaker." With nowhere to go, least of all up, we told Mobile Oil officials to stick it in their ears and sold out. In keeping with my grandfather, who peddled his saloon in the nick of time, we sold our gas station six months before they closed off Garvey Boulevard to build the Long Beach Freeway. The gallonage at the station soon plummeted from forty thousand a month to eleven thousand.

 

    Nothing exists of Clive & Dick's Petrol Emporium. An apartment now sits on the corner we once occupied.

 

    CRAIG DIRGO: What then?

 

    CLIVE CUSSLER: I drifted for a while, selling the Encyclopedia Britannica, Lincoln-Mercury automobiles and a newspaper cartoon service to retail merchants.

 

    It didn't take a message inscribed with fire on stone tablets to tell me I couldn't sell a glass of water to a dehydrated prospector in the Mojave Desert. If I wasn't the worst salesman in Los Angeles, I was no more than two steps away.

 

    Then I got lucky. I overstated my qualifications and was hired as advertising manager for a plush supermarket at the entrance to Lido Island in Newport Beach, California, called Richard's Lido Market.

 

    I've never seen another food store with a comparable style and degree of sophistication. The dream child of a peppery little guy, Dick Richard, the store was quite large for its time, with high ceilings painted a dark blue-green. A maze of spotlights provided the illumination, giving the floor the atmosphere of a nightclub.

 

    Richard's concept was to provide the finest-quality groceries possible, and he achieved his goal. No other chain store could come close to matching the superiority of the produce, meats and deli products. If it was imported or gourmet, Richard's stocked it. There was simply no independent food store in the nation like it. Richard's spent large sums of money for advertising and in store promotions that were unique for their time.

 

    On my first day on the job, I was required to lay out a full-page ad for the week's food specials. I had never laid out an ad in my life.

 

    Canny guy that I am, I talked to the man who had formerly held my job but who had now been promoted to store manager. I told him that since he had a distinctive manner of laying out the previous ads, I thought it a good idea if he laid out the next one so I could get a feel for his style. He took the bait and showed me the tricks of the trade. I quickly got the hang of it and was off and running.

 

    Advertising and I were meant for each other. It was all there. A devious mind combined with an industrious talent for innuendo, duplicity and hokum.

 

    I had found my niche in life. Within six months, I was winning awards for creative advertising from the Orange County Advertising Club and the Ladies Home Journal-National Supermarket competition. I even talked the local newspaper into giving me free space to write a homemaker page. Naturally, the recipes all tied in with the market specials for the week on the adjoining page. We even did a column called Sally's Salmagundi, which meant medley or mixture.

 

    Barbara, Teri and I moved from our triplex in Alhambra and rented a little apartment on the beach in Newport. I'd go body-surfing in the morning before bicycling to my office at the supermarket.

 

    In the evening, we'd walk along Balboa Island to the Crab cooker Cafe for a bowl of chowder. Eighteen months later, we bought a little tract home in a subdivision called Mesa Verde in Costa Mesa, where my son, Dirk, and second daughter, Dana, were born.

 

    I slaved in the yard, building an Oriental pond, a mound with a distorted pine tree, a unique divider between mound and pond, a redwood fence and poured concrete with gravel surface for steps leading to the front door and my backyard patio. I planted trees and an Oriental garden in the front and flower beds in the backyard that curved around the lawn. I constructed a Polynesian playhouse for the kids that was perched on sawed-off telephone poles. The roof and sides were sheathed in bamboo matting with a sandbox under the floor. Yes, I missed my calling as a landscape designer.

 

    CRAIG DIRGO: But you found a calling in advertising.

 

    CLIVE CUSSLER: I enjoyed it. I decided to leave Richard's, and along with a talented young artist, Leo Bestgen, I formed a small advertising agency. We decorated the office with antiques and a huge conference table we bought for ten cents on the dollar from Railway Express because it was slightly damaged by the shipping company. We opened our doors and struggled for several months before paying the rent. To enhance our income-Barbara was home with Teri and son Dirk, who had arrived in 1961-I worked evenings in a liquor store in Laguna Beach.

 

    Times were tough, but as a family we still managed to have fun. I restored a 1952 Jaguar Mark VII sedan that was owned by a Hollywood screenwriter and loaned to the director for the movie Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? It was driven by Jayne Mansfield and Tony Randall.

 

    I also restored an at 42 tractive speedboat whose owner had become drunk on his palatial yacht one night and took the smaller speedboat to shore. He collided with several moored yachts and ran aground before the speedboat sank. He said I could have it for free. So I bought a used trailer, and with the help of friends, grunted and strained and pulled the boat off the beach and hauled it home. I sanded and repainted the hull red, white and blue and repaired the damage. I took out the inefficient little inboard engine and replaced it with a hundred-horsepower outboard motor. On weekends, we'd speed around Newport Harbor, find a secluded beach on an undeveloped island, park the boat and picnic while the kids swam.

 

    Eventually, I sold the outboard and bought an old twenty-six-foot double-ender navy whale boat that had been converted into a fishing boat by a Swedish carpenter who built a deck and a cabin on her. I spent many evenings and weekends remodeling her into a character boat.

 

    We all had great times cruising around the bay amid yachts costing millions of dollars. Since the outboard had been named First Attempt, naturally the whale boat became the Second Attempt. We entertained many friends and business associates on that little boat. I learned my lesson about the old adage of a boat being a hole in the water you pour money into. Except for a little eight-foot Sabot sailboat that came later, she was the last craft I ever owned.

 

    After three years, the advertising agency of Bestgen & Cussler prospered to the point where I could stop working in the liquor store and we could make a livable wage. Leo had a great artistic talent and preferred doing illustrations over laying out mundane ads. After many discussions, we decided to sell our accounts and furniture and close the doors, Leo to go into design and illustration and me to become a copywriter at a big-time advertising agency. Everybody thought we were crazy when success was just around the corner. But it was a case of two young men who were not as interested in money as they were in doing what they wanted to do.

 

    Leo became a successful and respected illustrator whose work can be seen in national magazines, and I went to work during the next several years at three national advertising agencies on Wilshire and Sunset boulevards, gradually working up to creative director. This was in the sixties, the truly creative years for advertising. I was fortunate to work with a number of creative people on accounts such as Budweiser beer, Ajax detergent, Royal Crown cola and Bank of America, to name a few. Eventually, I produced radio and television commercials.

 

    I still enjoyed writing and creating original concepts and transferring them into visual images that sold a product and made everybody happy.

 

    It wasn't as much fun as being a slayer of kings and ravager of women, but along with occasional fulfillment, there were incredible pressures from deadlines and campaigns that didn't measure up to the clients' expectations. For every four successes, there was one failure that could result in the loss of an account.

 

    The awards for outstanding television and radio advertisements that I won seemed flattering at the time but soon began to pale. Years later, when I earned a living writing books, I put them in a big box and left them for the trash man. They were part of a past I seldom cared to dwell on.

 

    CRAIG DIRGO: So advertising was growing old?

 

    CLIVE CUSSLER: It was. We still lived in Costa Mesa, and it was on those long rides on the crowded freeways between the office and home that I created My best ad campaigns. But by now, the old enthusiasm was fading, and I began to think about other ways to make a living.

 

    Unknowingly to both of us, Barbara presented the key.

 

    She would go through cycles, staying home with the kids when they were young, then going back to work, then becoming bored with her job and staying home again. Finally, she found an interesting job working nights for the local police department as a clerk, dispatcher and matron for female prisoners.

 

    The schedule worked out very well for the family.

 

    She was with the kids during the day, and I took over when I returned in the evening. After fixing the family dinner and putting Teri, Dirk and, by now, Dana, who arrived in 1964, to bed, I faced many an evening with no one to talk to. I was never the type to take my work burdens home with me, so out of solitude I decided to write a book.

 

    But what book? I didn't have the great American novel burning inside me or an Aunt Fanny to chronicle who came across the prairie in a covered wagon.

 

    After mulling the idea over in my mind for a few nights, I thought it would be fun to produce a little paperback series. No highfalutin schemes to write a best-seller entered my mind.

 

    Thanks to my marketing experience, I began researching and analyzing all the series heroes, beginning with Edgar Allan Poe's Inspector Dumas. Next came Conan Doyle and Sherlock Holmes and all the other ensuing fiction detectives and spies. Bulldog

 

    Drummond, Sam Spade, Phillip Marlowe, Mike Hammer, Matt Helm, James Bond, I studied them all.

 

    When creating advertising, I had always looked at the competition and wondered what I could conceive that was totally different. I thought it foolish to compete on the same terms with already-famous authors and their established protagonists. Bond was becoming incredibly popular through the movies, and I knew I couldn't match Ian Fleming's style and prose.

 

    So I was determined not to write about a detective, secret agent or undercover investigator or deal in murder mysteries. My hero's adventures would be based on and under water. And thus, the basic concept for Dirk Pitt the marine engineer with the National Underwater and Marine Agency (NUMA) was born.

 

    CRAIG DIRGO: So, unlike a lot of writers, you started writing with a definite plan in mind.

 

    CLIVE CUSSLER: Correct. The days of Doc Savage and Alan Quartermain were long past, yet I found it interesting that almost no authors were writing pure, old-fashioned adventure. It seemed a lost genre.

 

    After taking a refresher course in English, I launched the first book that introduced Pitt and most all of the characters who appeared in the following thirteen novels. The first book was named Pacific Vortex..

 

    When I speak at writers' classes, I usually tell the students they can save many, many hours of wasted time by studying and copying the writing style of successful authors who write in the same genre.

 

    Ernest Hemingway often told how his early style borrowed heavily from Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky.

 

    Thomas Wolfe, when he was in the merchant marine, purchased a used copy of James Joyce's Ulysses, which came close to being the size of the Manhattan phone book. When sailing from port to port, Wolfe laboriously copied the entire book by hand. Months later, when he had at last finished, he took the three-foot-high stack of paper and threw it off the stern into the wake of the ship. When his stunned shipmates asked why, after so much labor, he had simply cast it away, Wolfe said shrewdly, "Because now I know how to write a book."

 

    Me? I leaned heavily on Alistair McLean on my first two books. I was flattered when critics of my early work said I wrote like him. By my third book, though, I began to drift into my own convoluted style with a myriad of subplots. Iceberg was always a sentimental favorite of mine because it begins in Iceland and ends up at the Pirates of the Caribbean in Disneyland.

 

    After completing Pacific Vortex, I was about to launch a second book when I was offered an excellent position it a large advertising agency as a creative director on the Prudential Insurance account.

 

    This was a lucrative opportunity that paid extremely well, but my wife, shrewd judge of me that she is, circled an ad in the help-wanted column of a local newspaper. The ad was for a clerk in a dive shop that paid four hundred dollars a month.

 

    She said, "You want to write sea stories, why don't you take this job instead."

 

    Odd person that I am, I wasted little time in deciding to decline the $2,500-a-month ad job, which was dam good money in 1968, and walked into the Aquatic Center dive shop in Newport Beach to apply as a behind-the-counter salesman. The owners, Ron Merker, Omar Wood and Don Spencer, looked at me as if I had stepped from a UFO. The obvious question was, "Don't you think you're overqualified?"

 

    Maybe I was, but they were astute enough to see a sincerity behind my application and hired me to work in their Santa Ana store. Although I had dived since my years in Hawaii, I was never certified.

 

    Merkel soon took care of that chore, and before long Spencer had me acting as dive master on diving expeditions to Santa Catalina. I had many fun experiences with those three fine men that are related in the book The Sea Hunters.

 

    After a few weeks, they put me in charge of the store while Spencer was working other duties. I'd carry my portable typewriter with me when I opened the doors in the morning and write at a card table behind the counter when business was slow, usually in the afternoons. A little over a year later, I finished Mediterranean Caper, bid a fond farewell to the dive shop and returned to the unscrupulous world of advertising.

 

    Having received nothing but rejection letters on Pacific Vortex, most of them printed forms, and with the manuscript of my second book in hand, I figured that now was as good a time as any to find an agent.

 

    I've told the following story more times than Judy Garland sang "Over the Rainbow," but here goes.

 

    Working in TV production in Hollywood, I knew a number of people at theatrical casting agencies but no literary agents. Gathering the names of twenty-five literary agents in New York from the casting people, I set about contacting them one by one. Having an idea about the competition and how many manuscripts agents and editors receive in a week-anywhere from thirty to sixty-I wisely concluded that I had to beat the odds somehow.

 

    I bought a thousand sheets of blank stationery and a thousand envelopes and had the art director of the ad agency where I was working design a logo and specify the type. Then I went to a printer and had him print the stationery and envelopes so that they read "The Charles Winthrop Agency." For an address, I used my parents' since they lived in a ritzier neighborhood than mine. Next, I wrote to the first name on the list, which happened to be Peter Lampack, who was with the William Morris Agency in Manhattan.

 

    The letter read:

 

    "Dear Peter:

        As you know, I primarily handle motion picture and television screenplays; however, I've run across a pair of book-length manuscripts which I think have a great deal of potential.

        I would pursue them, but I am retiring soon.

        Would you like to take a look at them?"

 

    Signed Charlie Winthrop.

 

    I mailed off the letter to Lampack and waited for whatever response without a great deal of optimism.

 

    A week later my dad called. "You have a letter from New York."

 

    Peter replied, "Dear Charlie, on your say-so, I'll take a look at the manuscripts. Send them to my office."

 

    Thinking so far so good, I sent off Pacific Vortex and The Mediterranean Caper and pushed the event to the back of my mind while I worked on a campaign to introduce a new El Toro lawn mower. Two weeks later, another letter arrived from Lampack:

 

    "Dear Charlie: Read the manuscripts. The first one is only fair, but the second one looks good. Where can I sign Cussler to a contract?"

 

    I almost went into cardiac arrest. I couldn't believe it was that easy. I fired off a final letter from Charlie Winthrop telling Peter Lampack where he could reach Clive Cussler. Peter sent a letter introducing himself along with a contract I promptly signed and returned. I threw away the envelopes and wrote the next book, Iceberg, on the back of Charlie Winthrop's stationary.

 

    CRAIG DIRGO: So you had an agent now.

 

    CLIVE CUSSLER: It may not have appeared so, but this was a major turning point in my life. Peter taking me on as a client was enough of an inspiration for me to leave advertising and consider life as a writer.

 

    Sure, no book was published and no money coming in, but still it was worth a shot. Fed up with Southern California smog and traffic and wanting to change our lifestyle, which now that I look back on it was the only sane thing to do, I sold the boat thank God I sold the boat and actually broke even-then sold the house, bought a new car, a big 1969 Mercury Monterey four-door sedan, and a tent trailer. After the house cleared escrow, we stored the furniture and took off for places unknown in the summer of 1970.

 

    Teri, Dirk and our youngest daughter, Dana, all in elementary school, were happy to go. It wasn't as traumatic for them to pack up and take off as it might have been if they were attending high school.

 

    The whole family looked upon our escape as a big adventure. It struck me that it was almost impossible to starve in the United States. The idea was to find a nice little resort area off the beaten path, where Barbara might find a part-time job and I could drive a school bus between hours spent over a typewriter writing the next Dirk Pitt epic. Naturally, all our friends and relatives thought we were crazy to leave California in those days. As it turned out, we were the vanguard of a mass exodus over the next twenty-eight years.

 

    After a remarkably enjoyable summer, we finally settled in Estes Park, Colorado, a lovely little community at the entrance to Rocky Mountain National Park. We leased an attractive alpine house with spectacular views and took up residence. The kids entered their new schools, Barbara took up housekeeping and I began writing Iceberg.

 

    The entire family enjoyed an idyllic life for almost a year and a half.

 

    I finished the book but had yet to be published. Peter Lampack tried very hard to sell my books to editors but met with no success.

 

    At one point, his bosses called him into a conference and urged him to dump Clive Cussler because it was obvious- I was going nowhere. But Peter hung in, bless his heart. He refused to give up on me and kept pushing the manuscripts to editors. He now had two books to promote, The Mediterranean Caper and Iceberg, Pacific Vortex having been condemned to a shelf in my closet.

 

    CRAIG DIRGO: What happened next?

 

    CLIVE CUSSLER: By now, I had put a healthy dent in my savings and the money from the sale of our house in California. I concluded I had to find a job to tide us over until I could finish another book or Peter found me a publisher with an advance of royalties. I put on my best suit, typed my resume, put together a portfolio of my work in Los Angeles and knocked on the doors of Denver advertising agencies, having no concept of how bucolic they were. Three agencies had openings for a copywriter, and I wasted no time in applying.

 

    The vice president of the first agency looked over my resume and portfolio and shook his head.

 

    "You're overqualified," he said. "A former creative director from major Los Angeles agencies taking a twenty-thousand-dollar-a-year pay cut to work as a copywriter in Denver. It hardly makes sense."

 

    "It does to me," said I, competing for the congeniality trophy. "You must admit you're getting a bargain."

 

    "Perhaps, but the last thing we need around here is you hotshots coming in from the east and west coasts and telling us how to run our business."

 

    "I assure you that is not my intention. I simply have a wife and three kids to support."

 

    "Sorry, Mr. Cussler. It won't work out."

 

    Incredibly, the next agency director who interviewed me had seemingly memorized the last interviewer's remarks. It was like listening to a recording. He actually said, "You must remember, the last thing we need is for you hotshots from the big cities coming in here and telling us how it's done."

 

    I was sorely tempted to drive to the city limits and make sure the sign said "Welcome to Denver" and not "Pumpkin Corners."

 

    I made an appointment with the last agency for the following Monday morning. Over the weekend, I took my oldest suit, wadded it up and threw it in a corner of the bedroom. Then I revised my resume backward, putting only a few of my newspaper ads in the portfolio, and left the demo tapes of my television commercials in a drawer. And, oh yes, I didn't shave for two days. Properly subdued, I drove to Denver and walked into an agency called Hull/Mefford. I noticed that only one four-year-old local advertising award plaque hung in the lobby.

 

    Jack Hull, an intense and congenial man, went through the paces. He bought my pathetic story of escaping those know-it-all hotshots on the West Coast to move to a friendly climate. He offered ten thousand dollars a year to start, but I jacked him up to twelve. Fortunately, when he called my prior agencies in Los Angeles to verify my employment, all he asked the personnel managers was, "Did a Clive Cussler work there?"

 

    They said yes, and he was satisfied I was genuine.

 

    I reported for work the next day and was given an old desk badly in need of varnish next to the restrooms, with an old Royal typewriter and no phone.

 

    My creative talents were not exactly taxed. My assignment was to write ads for a real estate client, cartoon captions for a trucking company series and ads congratulating insurance agents for selling their quotas in premiums. None suspected I was once a big executive who wrote and produced national advertising, and I never said a word.

 

    Everyone in the office thought I was a real hustler because I was typing from dawn to dusk as if my life depended on it. What they didn't know was that I usually knocked out my workload by ten o'clock and spent the rest of the day writing my next book.

 

    I was driving between Estes Park and Denver, a run of sixty-five miles.

 

    The locals thought I was short on gray matter, but after the freeway driving of Los Angeles, I rather enjoyed the scenic trip between city and mountains. The drive soon became old, however, and I moved the family to the suburban community of Arvada just outside Denver, where I bought a tract home on a municipal golf course. Again becoming a slave to the yard, I laid in railroad ties for steps, built a wooden sun deck with stairs and another fence and redwood planters.

 

    Then the day came when the president of our largest million-dollar account, a savings and loan company, notified the head of the agency that if his advertising did not become more creative, he was going to look at other agencies. Pandemonium reigned. I was ignored until someone in desperation said, "What about that guy over by the bathrooms?

 

    Maybe he can come up with something."

 

    I was called into the conference room and asked, "We know it isn't much time, but do you think you can create an advertising campaign our client might consider by Friday?"

 

    This being Wednesday, I stared around the table, smiled my best Machiavellian smile and said modestly, "I'll try."

 

    I actually had a campaign pretty well sketched out, I worked around the fact that all savings and loans gave the same interest and premiums to customers. But the one thing people prized was their name. So I created a campaign where the tellers and managers went out of their way to call the customers by name, to read them off the passbooks and memorize as many as possible. The primary idea was to make the savings and loan office a warm and friendly place to do business. I did a story board on a little, mean, old, nasty lady who was avoided like the plague when she walked down the street.

 

    Mothers snatched their kids from in front of her, shades were pulled when she passed by and men crossed the street to avoid her. Then, when she comes into the savings and loan, she's treated royally and called by name. Simple, but when properly produced, it proved quite effective.

 

    On Friday, I made my dazzling pitch, the client bought the campaign and I was off and running.

 

    With a budget below three thousand dollars a spot, I concentrated on the talent and chintzed on the production. I coaxed Margaret Hamilton, so beloved as the Wicked Witch in The Wizard of Oz, to play the mean little old lady. She was a marvelous, talented woman, kind and approachable to everyone, regaling the production crew with stories about the making of Wizard. During the camera scenes, when she turned and faced the camera after having a pert little teller call her by name, Margaret's taut, prune face lit up like a Christmas tree. Then I had the famous actor of the forties and fifties, Richard Carlson, do the voice over. "Just when you thought you hadn't a friend in the world, isn't it nice to know somebody cares enough to remember your name?" Then came the savings and loan logo before the fade-out.

 

    I produced a series of commercials featuring the great character actors Charlie Dell, who was on Evening Shade; Mike Mazurki, who played gangsters in the classic movie mysteries; Joey Ross from Sergeant Bilko and Car Fifty-four, Where Are You' " and little Judith Lowery, who was Mother Dexter on the Rhoda show. And last but not least, Ted Knight, who played Ted Baxter on The Mary Tyler Moore Show. Character actors, to my way of thinking, are the finest people in the movie business.

 

    They're incredibly cooperative and uncomplaining.

 

    They live normal lives and never have a bad word to say about anybody.

 

    While I was producing the television commercials, I was creating a radio campaign for a company called Deep Rock Water. I dreamed up an old guy who lived in Deep Rock's well by the name of Drink worthy, who spoke with a Maine Down easterner accent through the versatile voice of Johnny Harding, a Denver radio personality. Deep Rock was still running those ads twenty-five years later.

 

    Very quickly, the awards began to roll in for both accounts. Several Cleos and International Broadcast Awards all came to the agency, along with first places at both the Venice and Chicago film festivals.

 

    Hull/Mefford was on a roll. They merged with another agency run by two ladies, Mary Wolfe and Jan Weir, added staff throughout the office and began welcoming new clients who walked through the door now that we had gained a creative reputation.

 

    I was raised to seventeen thousand dollars a year, made vice president of the creative department and given a company car, which was all very well and good but left me little time to write books. My little creative gang, the art directors George Yaeger and Errol Beauchamp, along with Ashley O'Neal, our Southern accountant, always had lunch across 17th Street in downtown Denver at an old hangout called Shanners. A terrific waitress named Brenda never failed to have our private booth reserved. I always ordered a tuna sandwich, heavy on the mayo, with an extra pickle and a Bombay gin martini. I really lived high. The only downside was I had no time for Dirk Pitt.

 

    Then my ad world came crashing down.

 

    I was offered a promotion to executive vice president but turned it down because I preferred to remain in the creative end. So the agency heads hired an account supervisor from a New York agency. I doubt whether he could explain it, I know I can't, but when we shook hands as we were introduced, it was instant dislike. To this day, I can't put my finger on it.

 

    He was a corporate infighter, and I wasn't. It took him only three months to get the ear of the bosses. I was called in one day and told my two-hour martini lunches were not acceptable and to clean out my desk. Dumb old me, I thought as long as I did my job and won awards and pleased the clients, my job was secure. I looked up at God and asked him, "God, let me keep my job." And God looked down at me and said, "Why?" I swore then and there I would never work for anybody ever again until my dying gasp."

 

    CRAIG DIRGO: So you're out of work again.

 

    CLIVE CUSSLER: That was about the size of it. Actually, the sacking was a blessing in disguise. I went home, returned my antennae and wrote Raise the Titanic! in one corner of my unfinished basement, and the rest, as they say, is history.

 

    Peter's persistence finally paid off. He found a publisher willing to publish Dirk Pitt for the first time. A little third-level paperback publisher called Pyramid printed about fifty thousand copies, sold thirty-two thousand and paid me the magnificent sum of five thousand dollars for The Mediterranean Caper. The book sold retail for seventy-five cents.

 

    One Saturday morning, as I was going to the lumber yard for some material to finish the basement, the mailman handed me the mail. I sorted through it and found a letter from the Mystery Writers of America. I opened the envelope and found a printed form letter.

 

    Thinking it was an invitation to join the club, I merely glanced at it, then froze and read it more carefully. It was notification that The Mediterranean Caper had been nominated as one of the five best paperback mysteries of 1973. My peers, no matter how deluded, thought I could write. I didn't win, nor have I ever been nominated again.

 

    But I've always owed the MW of A for that shot in the arm when the skies were gray.

 

    Less than a year later, Dodd Mead bought Iceberg for five thousand dollars. I was coming up in the world. They printed five thousand hardcovers and sold thirty-two hundred. To collectors, a pristine book and jacket can now pull as high as a thousand dollars. Even an old copy of The Mediterranean Caper by Pyramid can bring three hundred dollars, providing you can find one. I finished Raise the Titanic! and sent it off to Peter, who read it, approved and relayed it to my editor at Dodd Mead. A rejection came back within ten days.

 

    Oh, the shame of it all. Rejected by my own editor and publisher. It was me against the world, and the world was winning. Peter sent the renounced manuscript to Putnam, but the editor there wanted a massive rewrite, and I refused to do it. Out of the blue, Viking Press bought it, asked for very few changes and paid me seventy-five hundred dollars.

 

    Then strange forces went to work.

 

    An editor from Macmillan in London was visiting an editor friend at Viking and heard about the story.

 

    Since, as he put it, the Titanic was a British ship, he asked for a copy of the manuscript to read on the plane back to England. He liked it and wanted to buy it. Luckily, Peter had sold Iceberg to Nick Austin at Sphere, a small publishing house in London, for, I believe, about four hundred dollars. Since Sphere had the first option, they put in a bid for Raise the Titanic! that was promptly topped by Macmillan. When the bidding war was over, Sphere owned the book, paying twenty-two thousand dollars, which was rather a healthy sum for Britain in those days.

 

    A week before, I had pulled off one of my craftier moves. Somehow I got the gut feeling that things were falling my way. I called Peter and asked him if I might get the rights back to The Mediterranean Caper. He replied it shouldn't be a problem since it was out of print.

 

    He was right. Pyramid signed over the rights without a protest. At that time, Jonathan Dodd at Dodd Mead notified Peter that Playboy Publications had offered four thousand dollars for the paperback rights to Iceberg. Peter commented that since it was the only game in town, I might as well play. Again, something tugged at my mind. I instructed Peter, "Tell Jonathan that I'll pay him five thousand dollars for the exclusive rights to Iceberg." Peter thought I was crazy. "Authors do not buy back rights," he admonished me. "It just isn't done in the publishing business. Besides, it's a dumb play. You split the four thousand dollars with Dodd Mead, so it would be stupid to offer them three thousand dollars up and above the offered price from Playboy."

 

    Following my instincts and with a mania to own what's mine, I commanded, "Offer Jonathan the five thousand dollars."

 

    Two hours later, Peter called back. "It's a mystery to me why, but Jonathan okayed the deal."

 

    "How can he miss?" I replied. "He's making an extra three thousand dollars."

 

    Talk about guts. Barbara and I had all of four hundred dollars in the bank. We might have tried to borrow from our folks, but I rightly assumed they would think I was crazy, too. So I took out a loan on our aging 1969 Mercury, and Barbara managed to borrow the rest through her credit union at Memorex, where she worked as a secretary. In my enthusiasm, I whisked off a check to Dodd Mead before my deposits had cleared the bank, and the check bounced in New York just as the momentum began building on Raise the Titanic! Jonathan Dodd, being the true gentleman he is, honored the deal when the check finally cleared.

 

    The British interest in Raise the Titanic! then boomeranged back to America, with Peter officiating over an auction among the American paperback publishers. Never having experienced a book auction before, I was in the dark until Peter explained the procedure. A floor price is set, and the publishers bid up from that amount, the high bid being the winner.

 

    CRAIG DIRGO: Were you confident this would finally allow you to write full-time?

 

    CLIVE CUSSLER: When Barbara walked out of the house on the morning of the auction to drive to her office, I said jokingly, and I swear to God I truly was being facetious, "When the bidding gets to two hundred fifty thousand, you can quit."

 

    At 10:00 A.M. Rocky Mountain Standard Time, I called her at work and told her to quit. Barbara walked right in and gave her boss two weeks' notice.

 

    "the bidding ultimately went to eight hundred forty thousand dollars, with Bantam Books as the winning bidder. Friends and acquaintances often came up to me and said, "Congratulations on your overnight success."

 

    My reply was, "Yeah, eleven years," the time that had elapsed since I first sat down at that old portable Smith Corona typewriter at a desk in my son's bedroom in that little tract house in Costa Mesa, California.

 

    Later, when the dust from the auction had settled, the management at Bantam was stunned to learn that Raise the Titanic! was the third book in a series.

 

    Fearful that I would sell The Mediterranean Caper and Iceberg to another publisher and thereby cut into their sales of Raise the Titanic! they paid me forty thousand dollars apiece for both books, with the express purpose of simply keeping them off the market.

 

    Fortunately, an editor took them home over the weekend and read them.

 

    On Monday, having become a believer in Dirk Pitt, he sold the editorial committee on publishing them both. The Mediterranean Caper and Iceberg since have gone on to sell many millions of copies around the world.

 

    My first and only review from the New York Times was a classic. The reviewer wrote, "If good books received roses and bad books skunks, Cussler would get four skunks." With depth of understanding. This had to be a reviewer who took almost sensual pleasure from his craft. I called Peter and grumbled. "They didn't have to be that nasty."

 

    And Peter came back with the classic reply. "Listen," he said seriously, "when we start getting good literary reviews, we're in big trouble."

 

    He was right, of course. The highly touted literary books seldom sell big-time. My own observation of the self-congratulatory establishment writers is that although they create worldly-wise prose, most of them can't plot worth a grunt.

 

    My favorite sinister review came out of the Christian Science Monitor.

 

    It took up nearly two-thirds of a page and was very tongue-in-cheek.

 

    The reviewer criticized and nitpicked every page of Inca Gold.

 

    When I reached the end of the review, I broke up in fits of laughter.

 

    It seems it had been written and sent to the Monitor by the superintendent of sewers for the city of Muncie, Indiana. I've saved that one for posterity.

 

    CRAIG DIRGO: So it would seem at this point you had it made.

 

    CLIVE CUSSLER: Things were better, that's for sure.

 

    When the first royalty check came in, Barbara, the kids and I celebrated by buying a new refrigerator and a used Fiat sports car.

 

    Then I went back to my corner of the basement and started Vixen 03, but not before Barbara and I flew to New York to meet my new editor and publisher. Our arrival in the Big Apple was timely. Peter had just concluded negotiations to sell Raise the Titanic! to Lord Lew Grade and Martin Stagger of Marble Arch Productions to be made into a motion picture.

 

    To celebrate, Peter and his lovely wife, Diane, and Barbara and I went out to dinner at a restaurant called Sign of the Dove. While waiting for dessert, I turned to Barbara and said, "I think the time has come."

 

    Peter and I had now been together for six years, and he had persisted through all the rejections, believing in me, until we finally achieved a breakthrough. He has always possessed a ton of integrity, and I had been reluctant to tell him about Charlie Winthrop for fear he might drop me. But now I was his biggest client and knew he would think twice before making such a decision. I confessed my scam to get him to read my manuscripts with great trepidation.

 

    When I finished, Peter looked blank for a moment and then laughed himself under the table.

 

    When he recovered, he said, "Oh my God. I always thought Charlie Winthrop was some guy I met when I was drunk at a cocktail party."

 

    Peter and I have been together now for twenty nine years. We have the second-longest-running agent-author relationship behind the thirty-one-year association of Henry Morrison and Robert Ludlum.

 

    He is my dearest friend, and since he left William Morris to launch his own agency almost twenty years ago, our, only contract has been a handshake.

 

    Ninety percent of what I have achieved through Dirk Pitt and his pals I owe to Peter Lampack. He is an honest but tough negotiator who is widely respected throughout the publishing field.

 

    The following year, I finished Vixen 03 and mailed it off to Peter in New York. Tom Ginsberg, whose family had run Viking Press for several decades, also bought the new book and paid a generous advance, perhaps believing I might become a popular author. Unfortunately, Tom sold Viking to Penguin, a foreign publisher that overturned the old management. Two young hotshots (there's that word again) were put in control and commenced to change the entire face of Viking Press. They alienated everyone in sight. Established authors fled the house, including Judith Guest and Saul Bellow. The new corporate chiefs felt that since Vixen 03 had been purchased by the previous management, it wasn't their personal property. They sent me out on a book tour with little or no advertising under less budget than Willie Loman had selling neckties out of cheap hotel rooms. Ebenezer Scrooge spent money like a lottery winner next to these guys. They put me on night flights so the airline would feed me. They booked me in cheap hotels. The entire tour was chaos and confusion.

 

    The smart thing after this kind of treatment was to flee the publishing house for another. But how?

 

    They had dibs on my next book. A manifestation of Cussler's law is that everybody in their life has accomplished something that will pay dividends eventually. It turns out I had knocked out a silly manuscript on the Denver advertising follies right after Raise the Titanic! as a catharsis to being fired.

 

    It must have taken all of sixty days to write the farce before I threw it in a closet. The tale was called I Went to Denver but It Was Closed. Off, it went to Peter, who submitted it to Viking's editors.

 

    The rejection was incredibly prompt, and, having satisfied our option agreement, we were free to take the next Dirk Pitt book to another publisher. In this case, it was Bantam, which wanted to get into the hardcover market. They bought Night Probe! which I always consider as one of my better plots.

 

    CRAIG DIRGO: So you landed at Bantam.

 

    CLIVE CUSSLER: Luckily, it worked out OK. One day, as I talked to my new editor about minor changes in the manuscript, he asked where Night Probe! came in sequence in relation to the earlier books. I casually mentioned Pacific Vortex as being the first book to introduce the characters, but it was never published. He sounded stunned. "What?" he gasped. "There's another Dirk Pitt manuscript out there? How soon can you get it to me?"

 

    By now, since all the books were high on the bestseller list, all the publishers saw were dollar signs. I called Peter and told him Bantam wanted to have a look at Pacific Vortex. "Not on your life," he came back. "Publish that rag, and you're ruined."

 

    Curious after not having looked at the manuscript in almost fifteen years, I took it off the closet shelf where it was living under I Went to Denver but It Was Closed, blew off the dust and began reading.

 

    The story was pretty good. It was just that my early style of writing left much to be desired. I spent about three months rewriting it, then sent it to Peter with instructions to pass it along to Bantam. Peter wasn't a happy camper, but to make me happy, he gave it to my editor, who received it enthusiastically.

 

    Months later, when Pacific Vortex was ready to be distributed, Peter said he was going on vacation to Jamaica because he didn't want to be around when the book bombed. I have to give Bantam credit, they did a terrific job on the book jacket, designing a double cover with a circular die cut on the outer one that opened to reveal a diver inside.

 

    A week after the book hit the stands and the shelves, I sent Peter a telegram at his hotel in Jamaica. It read, "Screw YOU, Pacific Vortex just went number two on the New York Times paperback list."

 

    Not long afterward, I had lunch with the president of Bantam. I revealed that I was happy at last to have all my paperback books under one house and that I'd have taken less money to be there. He looked at me in shock, dropped his fork and muttered, "Well, I'll have you know that I was willing to pay more."

 

    One-upmanship lives.

 

    This little conversation came back to haunt me when I turned in my next book, Deep Six. After entering contract negotiations, Peter was stunned when the head of Bantam offered less money for the new book than they had paid for Night Probe! which was their first hardcover to make the bestseller list and made them a considerable sum of money. Peter told them in no uncertain terms their train had jumped the track. Then they came back with the same royalty payment as before. I knew deep down inside that this ridiculous petty haggling was due to the lunch.

 

    CRAIG DIRGO: So it was time to switch publishers again?

 

    CLIVE CUSSLER: It was time. Peter and I decided to throw the book on the open market. Michael Korda of Simon & Schuster offered a much higher amount than Bantam, and I changed publishing houses.

 

    CRAIG DIRGO: Let's talk about the layout of your books and your habit of featuring your cars.

 

    CLIVE CUSSLER: I've always had fun with the author photos on the books.

 

    On Iceberg, I was pushed by a deadline, and since I was into diving but living in Colorado, I put on an old wet suit and talked a friend into shooting a black-and-white photo of me from the waist up surrounded by water. What nobody knew was that I was standing in a pond in the middle of a golf course. On the jacket of Raise the Titanic! I wore an Irish knit sweater that was about two sizes too large and was taken up in the back by seven or eight clothespins.

 

    It wasn't until Deep Six that I began displaying the cars depicted in the books as driven by Dirk Pitt, when in fact they were owned by me.

 

    I thought, and still do, that readers would rather see the car while I stood in the background than some enhanced photo of my ugly mug taken when I was ten years younger. When they were doing the cover design for Dragon, it occurred to me that since they were printing four colors on the front of the jacket, it would cost them hardly any more to print the back photo in color because it would be on the same print run. You learn these things in advertising.

 

    To make certain the photo is first-rate quality, I've always had Denver photographer Paul Peregrine shoot the photo, while Errol Beauchamp, who owns a commercial art studio, does the overlays and has the type set that reads, "Clive Cussler with Dirk Pitt's ... year and make of car."

 

    All the photos on all the jackets were shot on a lawn across the street from my warehouse. On two occasions, we were lucky because it snowed the night before, allowing the colors of the cars really to burst forth. I damn near got frostbite standing beside the cars for three hours because I couldn't walk around and make footprints. As far as I know, I'm one of the few authors who oversee the print and layout of their book jackets.

 

    CRAIG DIRGO: Let's talk about your cars.

 

    CLIVE CUSSLER: I'm often asked if Pitt and I own the same cars. In most cases, yes. In the earlier books, he drove a Maybach-Zeppelin and an AC Cobra, which I do not own. He also has a Ford Trimotor aircraft and a Messerschmidt 262 jet fighter that I lack.

 

    Unlike Pitt, I own no airplanes. I tried to buy an old Ford Trimotor one time, but the elderly fellow who owned the aircraft wanted two million dollars for it, and I barely had enough to buy the landing wheels.

 

    Nor do I own an old aircraft hangar to store my car collection like Dirk Pitt. My cars are stored in a warehouse near Denver. They are maintained by Keith Lowden and Ron Posey, who operate a restoration business on one end of the building. The cars are taken out and driven occasionally, then stored with all gas and batteries removed.

 

    Beginning with Deep Six, I loaned Pitt the blue Talbot-Lago. I blew this car up in the book and was amazed at the five letters I received asking if I really demolished the car. I assured the readers by answering that the car was alive and well and living in a warehouse in Colorado.

 

    I've been a car nut since I was eight and saw my first town car, a body style where the chauffeur used to sit in the open while the passenger was enclosed.

 

    The first car in my collection is a 1946 Ford Deluxe that my wife spotted for sale in the front yard of a farm during a Sunday drive.

 

    "Oh, look," she said, "there's a '46 club coupe like I had in high school."

 

    I turned around and bought it, and my son, Dirk, and I restored it in the street in front of our little house in Arvada, Colorado. I recall using spray cans to primer the body.

 

    When I could afford it, I began collecting foreign classics and American town cars. The classics, however, have become so horribly expensive to restore because parts are all but extinct. After paying sixteen hundred dollars for a twelve-cylinder Packard enerator and another eight hundred dollars just to restore it, I began concentrating on the late-1950s convertibles. Those few short years became an era of huge cars with 300-horsepower engines and tons of chrome, an era we'll never see again. They used to say that when you bought one of those big chrome barges, you received your own zip code.

 

    My day-to-day cars are a 1995 Jeep Cherokee in Colorado and a 1959 Austin-Healey in Arizona.

 

    CRAIG DIRGO: So the car collection is one of your hobbies, and finding shipwrecks is the other?

 

    CLIVE CUSSLER: My interest in shipwrecks is another story that is covered in The Sea Hunters, in which I tell the story of meeting an old wharf rat in a waterfront saloon who told me, "If it ain't fun, it ain't worth doing." My sentiments exactly, especially since my philosophy of LIFE falls somewhere to the right of whoopee.

 

    CRAIG DIRGO: Let's get back to the books for a moment.

 

    CLIVE CUSSLER: I try very hard to make my books fun and different from those of other authors by introducing the elements of old cars, shipwrecks and, yes, even an old derelict like me. I wrote myself into a brief scene in Dragon where Pitt and I meet at a classic car concourse When we are introduced to each other, I couldn't resist inserting a line of dialogue when I look at him and say, "The name is familiar, but I just can't place the face." I wrote the interlude as a bit of fun, truly believing my editor, Michael Korda, was going to demand it be removed.

 

    When he left it in, I was surprised and asked him about it. He said, "I must admit I found it unconventional, but knowing you as an unconventional guy, I thought, oh well, it's pure Cussler. , One time was all I intended, but after receiving three hundred letters saying it was great fun, I became a regular member of the cast. Pitt and I never do recall meeting in the previous stories. We both have lousy memories.

 

    CRAIG DIRGO: What do you like to read?

 

    CLIVE CUSSLER: I remember meeting James Michener when he was in Colorado writing Centennial. The fellow who set up the luncheon, Mike Windsor, who knew Michener during the war, asked him jokingly, "Have you read any good books lately, Jim?"

 

    Michener smiled. "Actually, I don't read." Then he explained by saying that he had little time to read fiction, as most of his waking hours were spent either in writing or research. Most writers have been there, done that. When you're in the middle of writing a book, it's almost impossible to read another's tale of fiction. Authors are plagued by people who always ask if you've read so-and-so and seem puzzled when you say no. They can't understand why we have no time for recreational reading.

 

    The only fiction books I try to read in the evening rather than watch TV are review copies sent from agents and editors and written by new, first-time authors. I always try to give a newcomer a helping hand, even though I seriously doubt an endorsement from me would buy them a cup of coffee.

 

    I did have the honor of writing an endorsement for Tom Clancy's first effort, The Hunt for Red October, and Stephen Coontz's Flight of the Intruder.

 

    Clancy called not long after his book hit the top of the best-seller list and asked what I thought of his idea to keep using Jack Ryan as a continuing protagonist in his next novels. All I could tell him with any accuracy was that Dirk Pitt hadn't hurt me, and go for it.

 

    When it comes to writing, it's fun to be different and do things other authors wouldn't think of doing.

 

    Overseeing the book jackets, appearing in story lines, using plots that haven't been used before, shying away from the old hackneyed story lines using the nasty Russian KGB and Arab terrorists, old Nazi criminals, CIA conspiracies and military espionage. It's definitely more fun to be original.

 

    I do admit to writing a vague formula.

 

    My first two books were basic potboilers, what I call formula A. This is where the readers walk beside the protagonist from chapter one to the end.

 

    In Iceberg, I began to drift into convoluted plots or what I call formula B. Now I have subplots going on that Pitt and Giordino are never aware of, even at the end. Raise the Titanic! was really the first in the series where I had several plots going on at the same time.

 

    The trick is always to thread the needle at the end.

 

    I'm often amused by calls I receive from friends and relatives at all hours who are reading my latest book. The conversation usually goes, "You son of a bitch, I'm halfway through such-and-such a book, and there's no way you're going to pull this off."

 

    Often it's not easy, but I never cheat the reader in the end. My readers mean everything to me. When writing, I frequently ask myself, "What would they like to see at this point?" It's not easy getting inside the head of the public. I learned that in advertising.

 

    But you do develop a rapport after a time and know what it takes to deliver a fast-paced story that keeps the book in the hands of the reader at all hours.

 

    That's why I've always considered myself an entertainer more than a writer. Many writers try to cram their stories down their readers' throats. Others try to get their stories across on philosophy, on the environment or anarchy in the streets of Copenhagen.

 

    I feel my job is to entertain the readers in such a manner that when they reach The End, they feel they got their money's worth. No message, no inspirational passages, no political ideology, just old-fashioned enjoyment.

 

    A Pitt book begins with a basic "what if' concept.

 

    For example, what if they raise the Titanic? Why?

 

    There is something of extreme interest on the wreck. Who could afford the enormous salvage cost? The government. Why would the government spend the enormous amount of money required?

 

    They might to perfect a defense system. And so it goes.

 

    I like to create a historical prologue, sometimes even using two, such as in Sahara. Then lead the reader through a myriad of plots that usually involve four different sections that take place in different locations and using separate events. The trick is to wind them like a cable toward what I call a successful conclusion. It sounds complicated, but surprisingly the scenario unreels inside my head. I never do an outline, never write more than one draft. For a guy whose wife sends him to the store for a loaf of bread and returns with a jar of pickles, it is truly amazing how I can juggle a multitude of characters and events in my head. The hard part is visualizing ships exploding and sinking into the depths, volcanoes erupting and tidal waves sweeping over the South American jungle, and then translating the fantasy into those little black letters on white paper Dirk Pitt has changed through the years. He's mellowed quite a bit. When we first started out together, we were both thirty-six. Now he's hovering near forty, and I'm sixty-seven. I tell you, it ain't fair. Fans and media interviewers often inquire if I'm Pitt. I originally made him my weight and height when I was younger. Six foot three and a hundred and eighty-five pounds. His eyes are greener than mine, and he certainly attracts more ladies than I ever did. But then, he hasn't been in love with the same sweetheart for forty-three years, either. We've had other similarities. When I quit smoking years ago, Pitt quit smoking.

 

    When I went from drinking Cutty Sark scotch to Bombay Gin, so did he.

 

    When I developed a. taste for tequila, he followed right along. I suppose there's more of me in Pitt than he cares to admit.

 

    He is named after my son, who came first. Just before Dirk was born, my wife and I fought like pit bulls over a name. She wanted Scott or Glenn, and I wanted Dirk or Kurt. As it turned out, Dirk was born late in the evening. In the morning, I was stepping out of the elevator with a vase of flowers as the nurse was walking past. She stopped upon recognizing me, held up an official-looking piece of paper and said, "Oh, Mr. Cussler, I was just going into your wife's room to fill out the birth certificate."

 

    I quickly grabbed the nurse by the arm, hustled her into the nearest office and filled in the birth certificate before my poor wife had a chance. Good girl that she is, she let it slide, much to the delight of my son and my fans. I can't imagine Glenn Pitt.

 

    It sounds like a bottle of cheap scotch.

 

    CRAIG DIRGO: What about Pitt-any marriage plans?

 

    CLIVE CUSSLER: Will Pitt ever marry? Probably not. I find it hard to imagine Giordino coming to Pitt's house and asking his wife if Dirk can come out and play. He's come close a couple of times. Two of the women he was in love with died in the last chapter.

 

    He asked Congresswoman Smith, but she turned him down. Pitt does not have great luck with women.

 

    Loren Smith, by the way, came about in an unusual fashion. I was casting for an important female character in Vixen 03. I had no problem creating someone with style and elegance. Someone lovely with a quick mind and wit. My hang-up was her occupation. Pitt's women are never harsh, stupid bimbos.

 

    They've all made it in the world and carry their own weight. A few days previously, I had won an award from the Colorado Authors League for Iceberg and now received a letter with the heading, "From the desk of Congresswoman Patricia Schroeder." She wrote: "Dear Olive, congratulations on winning the best book award from the Colorado Authors League."

 

    All my life, I've been cursed by people unfamiliar with the name Clive, who think the C is an 0.

 

    Schroeder apparently thought I was a woman and sent her congratulatory note. It had to be female bonding, because I didn't live in her district. But at least I had the occupation for Loren Smith, congresswoman from a district on Colorado's western slope.

 

    CRAIG DIRGO: When are they going to make another Dirk Pitt movie?

 

    CLIVE CUSSLER: People often wonder why I've never sold another book to Hollywood. My response is, "Not after the way they botched up Raise the Titanic!" The screen writing was simply awful, the direction was amateurish and even the editing was pathetic. Only John Barry's musical score and the special effects were first-rate. I'm not looking for a blockbuster motion picture, but I am hoping for a production of quality, more of a classic than a run of-the-mill car chase with special-effects explosions every five minutes.

 

    I recall seeing Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark a year after Raise the Titanic! came out in the theaters. I almost cried.

 

    The manner in which Spielberg produced a fast-paced, nail-biting adventure was how I had envisioned the Pitt movie I never got. .

 

    Peter and I have had many, many offers, but the producers in Hollywood are more interested in the art of the deal than the art of creating a movie with scope and depth. We've turned down many millions of dollars because I refuse to cheat my readers with another sloppy production. I don't need the money that badly. I wish to have scnpt and casting approval, but from what I hear from the studio bosses, that's nonnegotiable. A number of actors have approached Peter about making a deal, but most of them are not my image of Dirk Pitt, or they are too well known. If a big box-office star plays Dirk Pitt, you don't see Pitt, only the star. That's why I prefer an actor who is not well known who can become Pitt, much like Sean Connery became James Bond.

 

    None of the producers and studios gets it. They think any author would sell his soul to have his book made into a movie. Once was enough for me.

 

    Actors see a chance to increase their fans; producers look only at the money angle. I've yet to be contacted by a director who has read the books, enjoyed them and asked to sit down with me and discuss how a movie on Pitt should be made. Not a likely event, considering the egos in Tinsel town, but who's to say? Someday someone will come along and sell me. But until then, I'll keep writing about Dirk Pitt, Al Giordino and the NUMA gang and be happy in my ignorance.

 

    CRAIG DIRGO: Tell us about what your life is like now.

 

    CLIVE CUSSLER: Teri raised a family and gave us two terrific grandchildren. Dirk received his master's degree and works as a financial analyst in Phoenix.

 

    Dana moved to Los Angeles, where she works in the movies. Years ago, the family began spending time in Arizona when Barbara, Dirk and I began attending the classic car auctions promoted by Barrett/Jackson and the Kruse brothers. After Dirk entered Arizona State University at Tempe, we bought a condo in Scottsdale to enjoy the warmer climate during the Colorado winters. Always wanting a Southwestern adobe home, I looked for two years before I finally found one that reached out and grabbed me. It was slightly run-down, so we remodeled and landscaped the yard, and I built an office off to one side of the house, where I have my library, the ship models by Fred Tourneau and marine paintings by Richard DeRosset of the ships NUMA has discovered over the years.

 

    This has become my domain. I furnished the house in Southwestern furniture and Mexican folk art. When people visit, I'm often asked who did the interior decorating. They seem genuinely surprised when I say it was me. They can't believe that a fiction writer has taste or that my wife didn't have a strong hand in it.

 

    Barbara did, however, get her day in court. For her domain, she built a beautiful log house in Telluride surrounded by aspens with an incredible view of the San Juan Mountains. Here I had no say except for structural conversations with the contractor.

 

    The home is entirely hers from the bottom floor to the top of the chimneys, comfortable, warm and cozy. We have the best of both worlds, spending summers in Colorado and winters in Arizona.

 

    Which brings me to one of the most frequent questions I'm asked: How can someone who writes sea stories live in the mountains and the desert? The answer is that-I get my fix by working on the water searching for shipwrecks at least one month out of the year.

 

    CRAIG DIRGO: One last question. What's the best comment you've ever received on the books?

 

    CLIVE CUSSLER: In the words of a lady journalist who did a review of Inca Gold, "Loren Smith is the woman we all want to be, and Dirk Pitt is the man we all want."

 

    The bottom line is that readers of all ages and both genders enjoy Pitt because there is a little of him in all of us.