Clive and Barbara’s second daughter, Dayna Gayle Cussler, was born in March 1964. Seven months later, Barbara was hired by the Costa Mesa police department. Working from six in the evening until two in the morning, she filled in for the dispatcher and female prisoner’s matron.

“Before she left for work,” Teri says, “Mom would prepare dinner. When Dad got home from work, he would warm it up and the four of us, with Dayna in her high chair, ate dinner. After supper, we would get into our pajamas, and once we were tucked in, Dad would tell us fantastic bedtime stories. He has always been a fabulous father because he was like a big kid himself.” She laughs, “He still is.”

After the children were asleep, Clive had nobody to talk to. Weary of spending his evenings on the couch watching mind-numbing television programs, he decided to try his hand at writing fiction. “I didn’t have the great American novel burning inside me,” he says, “or an Aunt Fanny who came across the prairie in a covered wagon to chronicle. I just thought it would be fun to produce a little paperback adventure series. I have always been partial to old-fashioned blood-and-guts adventure and wanted to write the same kind of tales.”

Clive grew up during the heyday of pulp fiction and the Saturday matinee serials. The pulps (named for the cheap paper on which they were printed) and serials featured a wide range of larger-than-life heroes, ravishing femmes fatales, fiendish villains, exotic locales, and non-stop action. Doc Savage dominated the pulps. Known as “The Man of Bronze,” Doc combined a mixed bag of talents - surgeon, scientist, inventor, musician, master of disguise, and philanthropist - with a statuesque physique and a steadfast pursuit for justice.

Residing on the eighty-sixth floor of a Manhattan skyscraper, he maintained a fleet of automobiles, airplanes, and boats in a secret hanger on the Hudson River. Aided by a troupe of trusted sidekicks, Doc’s sworn duty, as summarized by his creator, Lester Dent, was to “right wrongs and punish evildoers.”

Saturday movie serials were divided into ten or fifteen episodes, each running approximately twenty minutes. Episodes would always end with the hero in a perilous situation, a cliffhanger, with no apparent avenue of escape. This guaranteed the youthful audience would return the following Saturday and plunk down another fifteen cents to watch the hero somehow manage to stay alive until the next climax. Popular serials during the 1930s and 1940s included Flash Gordon, Dick Tracy, Secret Agent X-9, Captain Marvel, The Green Hornet, and Don Winslow of the Coast Guard.

Searching for a writing style to emulate, Clive gravitated to the work of bestselling novelist Alistair MacLean, the author of H.M.S. Ulysses, The Guns of Navarone, Where Eagles Dare, South by Java Head, and Ice Station Zebra. Clive considers MacLean to be “the master” of the genre and credits the writer for the format and success of his first books.

One critic described a MacLean plot as, “A hero, a band of men, hostile climate, a ruthless enemy . . . The pace of the narrative consists in keeping the hero or heroes struggling on in the face of adversity.” MacLean’s heroes are calm, cynical, multitalented men who, in their single-minded quest to complete the mission, are pushed to the limits of their physical and mental endurance.

McLean provided Clive with an archetype, but, with one exception, he did not use his characters in more than one book. In an effort to discover the secret of sustaining an ongoing cast of characters, Clive analyzed Edgar Allan Poe’s Parisian detective Auguste Dupin, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, Herman McNeile’s Bulldog Drummond, Raymond Chandler’s wisecracking Philip Marlowe, Mickey Spillane’s hard-boiled Mike Hammer, and Ian Fleming’s dashing James Bond.

“I used my experience in marketing to design my protagonist,” Clive explains. “What would be different about him? What can I do that nobody else has done? Since James Bond was really hot, I knew any similarity to him would be a dead end. I was also determined not to write about a private detective, cop, or secret agent.”

Clive drew upon his real-life diving experiences and fascination for the sea to create a marine engineer working for the fictional National Underwater and Marine Agency (NUMA) who is, according to Clive, “Cool, courageous, and resourceful - a man of complete honor at all times and an absolute ruthlessness whenever necessary.” Having created his hero’s identity, Clive had to give him a name.

Flipping through an encyclopedia, Clive came upon an entry for William Pitt. “Pitt the Elder,” as he was known, served as England’s prime minister during the 1700s and is considered the architect of the British Empire. In his book, The Adventure Writing of Clive Cussler, Wayne Valero explains, “‘Pitt not only has a nice ring to it, he [Clive] also wanted a one-syllable name because it was easier to say something like, ‘Pitt jumped over the wall,’ rather than ‘Shagnasty jumped over the wall.’”

Having settled on Pitt, Clive needed an equally strong first-name. “Pitt’s first name was right there in front of me,” Clive says, “sleeping in the crib. My desk and typewriter were in my son’s room, and Dirk likes to tell the story how he fell asleep listening to the sound of my typewriter.”

Laboring nights and the occasional weekend for three years, Clive finished writing his first novel, The Sea Dweller (later published as Pacific Vortex) in 1967. On the opening page, he introduces the character who has gone on to entertain millions of readers in a series of bestselling novels featuring state-of-the-art technology, sojourns to the past, dastardly villains, classic automobiles, and beautiful women. The non-stop action is set against the world’s oceans and the search for sunken ships and the secrets they embrace in their underwater graves.

 . . . A six-foot-three-inch deeply suntanned man, clad in brief white bathing trunks, lay stretched on a bamboo beach mat. The hairy, barrel chest that rose slightly with each intake of air, bore specks of sweat that rolled downward in snail like trails and mingled with the sand. The arm that passed over the eyes, shielding them from the strong rays of the tropical sun, was muscular but without the exaggerated bulges generally associated with iron pumpers. The hair was black and thick and shaggy, and it fell halfway down a forehead that merged into a hard-featured but friendly face.

Dirk Pitt stirred from a semi-sleep, and raising himself up on his elbows, stared from deep green glistening eyes at the sea. Pitt was not a casual sun worshipper; to him, the beach was a living, moving thing, changing shape and personality under the constant onslaught of the wind and waves . . .

Even the most stalwart hero needs a sidekick, and Pitt’s is Al Giordino, a character based on Clive’s air force partner-in-crime. Providing a stoic and burly contrast to Pitt’s lean sophistication, Giordino made his first appearance in chapter fourteen of The Sea Dweller.

. . . Giordino held his hands aloft and stretched. He was short, no more than five feet four in height, his skin dark and swarthy, and his Italian ancestry clearly evident in his black curly hair. Complete opposites in appearance, Pitt and Giordino were ideally suited to one another: one of the primary reasons why Pitt had insisted that Giordino became his Assistant Special Projects Director.

The plot kicks off with Pitt discovering a communication capsule containing pages from the logbook of the Starbuck, a missing nuclear submarine. The last time the sub was heard from, it was in the Pacific Vortex, an area near the Hawaiian Islands with the same ominous reputation as the Bermuda Triangle - thirty-eight ships have vanished in the Pacific Vortex since 1956. The search for the answer to the missing ships leads Pitt into a life-and-death struggle with Delphi, a giant madman with “bestial yellow eyes.” Convinced the world is headed for nuclear destruction, Delphi has been praying on Pacific shipping to finance an underwater fortress where he plans to avoid the apocalypse. During the attack on Delphi’s lair, Giordino sacrifices his pinky finger, jamming it into the barrel of a gun to save Pitt’s life.