“Nobody does it better than Clive Cussler, nobody.”
Quote by Stephen Coontz for Cyclops. Though I knew that authors rarely resemble their
protagonists, I could not help but wonder if Clive Cussler would look like Dirk Pitt when I met him.
He didn’t exactly.
Unlike the hero of his books, Cussler had hair and beard of a pewter gray. He stood tall, but the
years had added a few inches to his waist. The bluegreen eyes were bright, and he moved with the
quickness of a much younger man. His face bore the weathered wear of someone who spent half a
lifetime in the great outdoors and gave him the look of an explorer who had just returned from the
jungles of the Congo or the icy mountains of Antarctica. It didn’t take much imagination to picture him
thirty years ago when he might easily have passed for Dirk Pitt’s elder brother.
Hailed as the grand master of adventure novels, Cussler is about as down-home as you can get.
Although he writes in an incredible office that he built in a Taos chapel style to match his adobe
home, he dresses like the neighborhood handyman. He answers all his fan mail by hand, addressing
fans by their first names as if they were old friends, often inserting a page from the original draft of
his latest book as a souvenir. He’s never hired a secretary, and his wife has never had a part-time
housekeeper. “She cleans the house before the cleaning lady comes,” he explains.
It all goes with the Cussler image of an author who was once described as following the beat of a
drummer who was playing in a field on the other side of town. He does things few authors ever
attempt. He once bought one of his books back from the publisher.
He injects himself into his own stories as did Alfred Hitchcock in his movies, except that Cussler
utters dialogue to his hero, who never recognizes him. And he writes wild, far-fetched adventure tales
with the same cast of characters. A feat few writers attempt in this day and age.
He and his agent, Peter Lampack, have negotiated book deals with publishers that have been
copied by the trade as models of ingenuity.
And, unlike all too many writers who peak after one or two books, Cussler incredibly seems to
improve. Strangely, he never uses an outline or writes more than one draft of a novel, and yet his
complicated plots have hit the bestseller lists in both fiction and nonfiction no fewer than fourteen
times.
Darklady's Occult