It is no doubt a pleasant power to be able to interest others in the creations of one’s own mind.—Sir Arthur Conan Doyle1
Like most good writers of fiction, he had a perverse and devious mind.—Valhalla Rising2
Sometime around 1964 Clive Cussler decided to create a hero.
Cussler’s wife, Barbara, was working the graveyard shift for the police department and Cussler wanted something to do after putting their children, Dirk, Teri and Dana, to bed. An award-winning advertising copywriter, Cussler had recently been contacted by a professor at the University of California who needed help writing a textbook on sea farming. Cussler wrote 250 pages for the professor, who apparently never did anything with the manuscript,3 but the experience convinced Cussler that he could write a book in his spare time.
All Cussler had to do was figure out what to write.
* * *
A half century later, Cussler has over 50 books with over 125 million copies in print, but these statistics fail to do his accomplishments justice. Many people get an itch to write a book, but very few scratch that itch and fewer still write anything worth publishing.
There are exceptions, of course.
As a struggling doctor, Arthur Conan Doyle was blessed with more time than patients, so he began writing short stories. Conan Doyle eventually combined his admiration for Edgar Allan Poe, the scientific method, lessons learned in observation and deduction from one of his medical professors, Dr. Joseph Bell, and his love of knights and chivalry to write a detective novel featuring a new type of intellectual adventure hero named Sherlock Holmes.4 A Study in Scarlet (1887) and its sequel The Sign of Four (1890) did not set the world on fire, but when Holmes began appearing in a series of short stories in The Strand magazine in 1891 he went on to become the most popular fictional character in Western literature.
As a struggling telegrapher in Tulsa, Oklahoma, Lester Dent worked the graveyard shift, a job that left him with plenty of slack hours. When Dent discovered another “brass pounder” was selling stories to pulp magazines and earning checks worth more than Dent made in a month, he began submitting his own stories, combining his love of the outdoors, adventure and technology with his ideal of manly morality. Dent’s first dozen or so stories were rejected, but he persevered and eventually became such a prolific contributor to the pulps that Dent caught the attention of the publishers at Street & Smith, who asked him to write the adventures of a new adventure hero the company had created, a two-fisted super-genius named Doc Savage.5 Thanks to Dent, Doc Savage became the pulps’ most popular series hero after The Shadow and is still appearing in books, graphic novels and movies.
These are exceptions, of course.
Extreme exceptions.
Most people who get an itch to write fiction and follow through never experience this kind of success. Even Dent’s co-worker and his stories are forgotten today. Cussler joined a very select fraternity when he became a bestselling writer and created one of the most popular and influential adventure heroes of his generation.
* * *
Cussler used his marketing experience as much as his ingenuity and creativity when it came to deciding what to write.6
First, Cussler researched the publishing industry and discovered that almost no one was writing pure adventures like those he read as a boy. Stories like the novels of Samuel Shellaburger and Thomas B. Costain, the Horatio Hornblower sea tales by C.S. Forester7 and pulp stories about “globe-spanning adventurers, one man facing impossible odds, racing against time to save the world.”8 The classic old-fashioned adventure field was virtually free of competition,9 so Cussler decided to create a little paperback adventure series. Since armchair detectives, private eyes and secret agents had been done to death, the man who helped create the iconic Ajax White Knight advertising campaign (“Stronger than dirt!”)10 decided to create a brand new kind of hero.11
Next, Cussler researched adventure series heroes like Holmes, Bulldog Drummond and James Bond. Cussler also decided he wanted to incorporate the sea into his new series, having noticed that many adventure novels were set aboard ships or on the oceans, including some of MacLean’s best works, including HMS Ulysses (1955) and Ice Station Zebra, but the same could not be said for any modern adventure series. This gave Cussler the hook he needed to make his series and its hero different.12
* * *
Cussler was six years old when he fell in love with the sea.
Born July 31, 1931, in Aurora, Illinois, Cussler lived in Kentucky and Minnesota before his family moved to the Los Angeles suburb of Alhambra in 1938. Soon after, his parents, Eric and Amy, took Cussler to see the Pacific Ocean and the captivated boy ran all the way into the water. Eric fished Cussler out and, soon afterwards, Amy signed her overzealous son up for swimming lessons.13
Cussler was not so enthusiastic when it came to school and class work. A bright and competently athletic boy, his report cards were often littered with Cs and Ds, much to Eric’s concern, but away from school Cussler demonstrated the work ethic that would sustain him as a struggling writer, making Eagle Scout by age 14 and working several jobs before and after high school to earn the money to buy cars, which he loved to restore.14
Another thing Cussler loved was exercising his imagination. Cussler recalls his boyhood as “Tom Sawyer meets The Little Rascals,” with the friendships he made in those days continuing through high school and afterwards.15 Cussler’s boyhood was filled with tree houses, make-believe battles waged in backyards, and pirate ships sailing in vacant lots. Later in life, Cussler turned his imagination towards finding angles to achieve his goals, a skill he honed until it was on par with Quentin McHale and Ernie Bilko. During high school football games, Cussler and his friends often arrived in his black 1925 Auburn limousine, dressed like Prohibition-era gangsters, with Cussler toting a violin case, which he used to smuggle beer and wine into the stands past security guards. While in the Air Force, Cussler bought a medical book in an antique store and whenever work got too boring he would wrangle some time off by pretending to have symptoms of diseases like Borneo Jungle Incepus.16
* * *
Convinced that everyone is fascinated with the mysteries that lie in the deep, Cussler decided his hero’s territory would be the sea, his challenge the unknown,17 but Cussler’s daring, drive, passion for cars, fidelity for friendships and con man’s audacity also became a part of the character.
All Cussler had to do was figure out what to call this hero.
Many writers give a hero a name that reflects the character’s nature, like Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe,18 but Stout proves, with Archie Goodwin, that an effective name does not have to reflect anything about a hero. A memorable name is also preferable, but while it is hard to imagine Conan Doyle’s greatest hero going by either of his creator’s less memorable first choices, John Reeves or Sherrinford Holmes,19 Fleming gave his dashing secret agent hero “the most plain sounding name I could find”20 by lifting James Bond from the author of the book Birds of the West Indies (1936). Cussler decided to give his hero the memorable name Dirk Pitt, taking “Dirk” from his own middle child and “Pitt” from William Pitt, the Elder.21 Then Cussler made Pitt a blond as a contrast to other series adventure heroes (most of whom had black hair), until his research revealed female readers preferred heroes with dark hair.22 Cussler also lent Pitt some of his own physical traits, such as height (six-foot-three), weight (185 pounds), eye color (green … though Pitt’s eyes are greener) and approximate age.23 Both, likewise, served in the air force, however Pitt is an officer and remains on active duty into his forties. In the ensuing years, Cussler incorporated more similarities. When Cussler quit smoking, so did Pitt. When Cussler switched from Cutty Sark Scotch to Bombay Gin, so did Pitt. And when Cussler developed a taste for tequila, so did Pitt,24 but Cussler concedes that Pitt attracts more ladies than he ever did.25 Neither Cussler nor Pitt are handsome in the classical Errol Flynn or Cary Grant tradition, but like the more rugged-looking Gary Cooper or Humphrey Bogart, women are drawn to Pitt, and he and Cussler have no problem with that.
* * *
Cussler met Barbara Knight on a blind date in 1951 while on leave from the air force. Four months after Cussler was discharged in 1954, the couple married and moved into a duplex in Alhambra. Over the next few years Cussler worked a variety of jobs, including pumping gas for Union Oil Company, leasing a Mobile Oil station with friend and partner Dick Klein, and working as an advertising manager for Richard’s Lido Market, a major independent supermarket in Costa Mesa. Prior to this, Cussler had never worked in advertising, but he was a born promoter who took to his new job like the proverbial duck to water.26
After winning several local advertising awards, Cussler teamed up with a young illustrator named Leo Bestgen to open their own advertising firm. Cussler supplemented his income with a night job at a liquor store during Bestgen & Cussler’s first three years, but, just as the firm was starting to prosper, the two partners decided to sell it. Bestgen wanted to pursue his dream of becoming an illustrator, while Cussler accepted a copywriting job with a large Los Angeles advertising firm. Cussler ended up working for three different firms during the sixties, including D’arcy, where he helped create the Ajax White Knight campaign. Cussler also continued winning industry prizes, including four CLIO Awards, six International Broadcast Awards and an award at the Venice Film Festival.27 Cussler “enjoyed writing and creating original concepts and transferring them into visual images that sold a product and made everybody happy,”28 but he also got that itch to write fiction and, over a period of a couple of years, he finished the first Dirk Pitt novel, originally titled “The Sea Dwellers” but eventually renamed Pacific Vortex.29
In 1967, Cussler enrolled part-time at Orange Coast Community College, in Costa Mesa, to study creative writing and oceanography. A short-story assignment that became the first chapter of The Mediterranean Caper won a second-place trophy from the college and, as of this writing, remains Cussler’s only literary award.30 In 1968, D’arcy laid Cussler off, but he was soon offered a $2,500-a-month job with another firm. Cussler instead decided his sea adventures might benefit from his taking a sabbatical from advertising to accept a $400-a-month job as counter salesman at the Aquatic Dive Center in Newport Beach. Cussler was a lifelong bodysurfer31 but the shop’s owners, Don Spencer, Ron Merker and Omar Wood,32 were respected members of the diving community, and, over the next year, Cussler earned his scuba diving certification. Whenever business was slow, Cussler worked on his next Pitt novel,33 and when The Mediterranean Caper was finished, Cussler quit the dive shop to return to advertising. Spencer, Merker and Wood gave Cussler a Doxa dive watch with an orange dial as a farewell gift, and Cussler appreciated it and his time at the shop so much that the Doxa became a standard piece of equipment for Pitt34 and Newport Beach became Pitt’s hometown.35
* * *
Following the tradition of post-war adventure heroes like Drummond and Bond, Pitt is an officer and combat veteran.36 Like Bond, Pitt works for the government, but not in any enforcement capacity. Pitt is a bureaucrat, a new wrinkle for an adventure hero in the sixties.37 Officially, Pitt is a marine engineer on loan from the air force to Admiral James Sandecker (retired) to serve as special projects director for NUMA. Pitt’s primary duties are searching for shipwrecks and leading salvage operations, but if an ancillary project like raising the Titanic or neutralizing a lost cache of virulent neuro-toxins drifts into NUMA’s purview, it usually gets assigned to Pitt.
Another innovative wrinkle Cussler incorporates into Pitt is the blurring of class lines. Prior to Pitt, the average adventure hero tended to associate with his own class. Holmes, for instance, belongs to London’s upper class. Bond is a British club man. John D. McDonald’s Travis McGee is American middle-class38 as is Dashiell Hammett’s Continental Op, who may investigate well-to-do people but only when the underworld of crime they inhabit manages to slop over into the higher stratum of society. Cussler wanted Pitt to be different: “Someone with rough edges, yet a degree of style, who felt equally at ease entertaining a gorgeous woman in a gourmet restaurant or downing a beer with the boys at the local saloon. A congenial kind of guy with a tinge of mystery about him.”39 Pitt comes from America’s privileged class, the heir of a wealthy California family and the son of a senior senator. Pitt is also a pilot, scuba diver, gourmet cook and classic automobile collector, not typical middle-class pursuits, but he never attended private school (unless you count the Air Force Academy); his best friend and surrogate brother is the working class Al Giordino (whom he met during a playground fight in elementary school), and few things make Pitt happier than getting greasy while working with his hands.40 When it comes to rough edges, Pitt can be disrespectful to authority figures or anyone he dislikes, and selfish with his emotions to the women he loves, although he has mellowed and matured as he has grown older. When it comes to being congenial, Pitt is a hopeless Good Samaritan, an echo of Cussler’s days as an Eagle Scout,41 although Pitt takes this to extremes when he risks his life to defend strangers like Eva Rojas in Sahara and Julia Lee in Flood Tide. In contrast, the savagery Pitt rains down upon villains like Qin Shang in Flood Tide and Min Koryo in Deep Six contributes to his tinge of mystery. Not that savagery in a hero is a bad thing. As the late pulp historian Robert Sampson points out, “The only difference between a popular hero and a criminal is that the hero strikes on the side of the right.”42 Further adding to Pitt’s tinge of mystery, he can be intensely private, shielding a part of himself from everyone he knows, including Giordino.
All in all, Pitt is a patriotic defender of the realm and knight-errant willing to put his life on the line for his country and his fellow man, as well as a merciless nemesis and manhunter against his adversaries. Pitt is also an adventurer unafraid to stray from the highroads traveled by most people to uncover the secrets that can be found in places lost to history.
* * *
After Cussler completed The Mediterranean Caper, he submitted his manuscript to several publishers. When he got no takers, Cussler realized he needed a literary agent.
All Cussler had to do was figure out how to find one.
Aware that literary agents receive hundreds, if not thousands, of unsolicited manuscripts each year, Cussler knew he had to find a way to make his submission stand out from the slush pile. First, Cussler solicited the names of 25 New York literary agents from casting agencies with whom he had worked. Next, he ordered a thousand sheets of stationery (with matching envelopes) for the nonexistent “Charles Winthrop Agency” and sent a letter from Winthrop to the first name on his agent list, Peter Lampack of the William Morris Agency in Manhattan:
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?
A week later a letter arrived from Lampack agreeing to look at the manuscripts. Two weeks after Cussler mailed the manuscripts 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?
Cussler signed the contract, threw away the list of literary agents, and started writing the third Pitt adventure, Iceberg, on the back of the Winthrop stationery.43
* * *
It was the summer of 1970 and Cussler decided it was time to find out if he could make writing his career. The Cusslers sold their house and belongings, deposited the earnings in the bank, and traveled the western United States until they landed in Estes Park, Colorado, so the children could start school in the fall. Cussler finished Iceberg in 1972 and sent it off to Lampack, but Lampack had no more luck selling it than he did The Mediterranean Caper. Lampack’s bosses were suggesting that he dump Cussler, but Lampack refused. Meanwhile the Cusslers’ savings were nearly depleted, so Cussler finagled a copywriter job from the tiny Hull/Mefford Agency in Denver, and the family eventually moved to the bedroom community of Arvada.
Before long, Cussler was winning awards for Hull/Mefford, but success came at a price. As the little agency’s reputation grew so did its client list and Cussler was soon too busy to write fiction. Fate or coincidence (take your pick) stepped in when Cussler was also offered a promotion to become a vice president. Cussler refused. He wanted to stay in the agency’s creative area. So Hull/Mefford hired an executive from a New York agency. This new hire and Cussler did not get along and, within three months, Cussler was let go. Swearing never to work for anybody ever again,44 he went home and started writing the fourth Pitt novel, Titanic.
* * *
The trademark of a great hero is that he comes when he is needed.
A knight-errant arrives to rescue a damsel in distress.
A wandering cowboy moseys in from the wilderness to rid a town of gunslingers before riding out again.
A world-weary private detective braves shadowy mean streets to right a wrong ignored by a society grown callous to injustice.
During the sixties and seventies, America was in trouble. Since 1961 the country had suffered through the Bay of Pigs fiasco, the erection of the Berlin Wall, the Cuban Missile Crisis and the assassinations of President Kennedy, the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., and Senator Robert Kennedy. By 1973 politicians and bureaucrats in Washington, DC had micromanaged the Vietnam War into a disaster, and the Watergate scandal dominated the national news. America and many Western Allies were also facing a collapse of confidence in traditional cultural values that extended to Christianity, which had undergirded various Western civilizations since medieval times. Much of Christianity’s moral authority had been shattered when large numbers of white Christians sat on the sidelines during the civil rights struggles even as liberal-leftist elements in the Church increasingly associated with communist dictators.45
During troubled times, people turn to tales of heroes for comfort and reassurance. Conan Doyle wrote his greatest historical romance, Sir Nigel, in 1904, while England was beginning to confront problems caused by postindustrialism. Like Shakespeare’s histories, Sir Nigel champions the notion “that the heroism of the past must serve as an example and inspiration for the present-day Englishmen and women,”46 but America’s past was being assaulted by revisionists in the entertainment industries, the mainstream media and academia, and anyone who disagreed with them was disparaged, insulted and attacked.47 As John Wayne was making his final movies, and anti-heroes like Dirty Harry Callahan and Paul Kersey were taking the Duke’s place, heroes became increasingly hard to find on the big screen, TV screen and in print.48
* * *
It was about this time that Lampack sold The Mediterranean Caper to Pyramid Books for five thousand dollars. Pyramid sold only 32,000 copies, but the novel received a Mystery Writers of America nomination for Best Mystery of 1973, Cussler’s only major literary nomination to date. Soon after, Dodd, Mead paid five thousand dollars for Iceberg; they then printed five thousand hardcover copies, and sold 3,200. Lampack next sold the British rights to Iceberg to Sphere for four hundred dollars along with British first-refusal rights to Cussler’s next novel. In the United States, Dodd, Mead held the American first-refusal rights to Cussler’s next novel, but when Lampack sent Dodd, Mead the manuscript for Titanic, the publisher passed. So did Bantam Books, on the grounds that the book was too heavy at a time when paper costs were high.49 Putnam expressed interest, but wanted massive rewrites. In the end, Viking Press purchased Titanic for $7,500.
Soon after this, an editor from London’s Macmillan Books, who was in New York visiting a friend at Viking, heard about Titanic and asked to read the manuscript during his flight home. The Macmillan editor liked Titanic so much he encouraged his company to submit a bid, but Sphere had already acted on its first-refusal right and put in its own bid. Macmillan went ahead and submitted a bid, and that kicked off a bidding war. When it was over, Sphere purchased Titanic for $22,000, an unusually large amount for a British publisher in 1974.
A week before Sphere won the bidding, Cussler played a hunch and asked Lampack to see if Pyramid would give him back the rights to The Mediterranean Caper since the book was out of print. Pyramid agreed. Then Jonathan Dodd at Dodd, Mead contacted Lampack to let the agent know that Playboy Books was offering four thousand dollars for the paperback rights to Iceberg. Lampack was delighted to see his faith in Cussler beginning to reap dividends, but Cussler refused the Playboy deal and offered to pay Dodd, Mead five thousand dollars to get back the exclusive rights to Iceberg. Dodd, Mead accepted, but the Cusslers only had four hundred dollars in the bank, so the family was forced to take out loans to cover the other $4,600.50
When news about the British bidding war for Titanic reached America it got enough publishers interested in the book’s paperback rights that Lampack decided to hold an auction. As Barbara left for work on the morning of the auction, Cussler joked that if the bidding reached $250,000 she could quit. Bantam Books won the auction with a bid of $840,000, and Barbara handed in her two-week’s notice later that morning. When Bantam discovered Titanic was the third book in the Pitt series—Cussler had long ago tossed the unpublished Sea Dwellers on a closet shelf next to his lone attempt at nonfiction humor, I Went to Denver but It Was Closed—it offered an additional eighty thousand dollars for The Mediterranean Caper and Iceberg.51
Back at Viking the sales department was assembling the jacket for Titanic when some anonymous employee suggested that the title Raise the Titanic! might sell better.52 There is no way to know how much this suggestion affected sales, but by the spring of 1978 Viking had sold over 145,000 copies of Raise the Titanic! and the book had owned the number-two spot on bestseller lists for 26 weeks. Lampack also sold the motion picture rights to Marble Arch Productions, netting Cussler nearly half million dollars.53
* * *
America got more than Cussler’s breakout novel with Raise the Titanic!. It got an old-fashioned adventure hero and would not get another one like him until The Hunt for Red October was published in 1984.
Pitt is imperfect, but he is also brave, resourceful and identifiable, the kind of hero who would fit right in in most John Ford films. It is not a stretch to see Pitt admirably filling in for Captain Kirby York in Fort Apache (1948) or “Guns” Donavan in Donavan’s Reef (1963) or Sean Thornton in The Quiet Man (1952).54 Would Pitt really be anywhere else during World War II but the Philippines, bringing the PT boat into prominence like The Duke does in They Were Expendable (1945), with James Sandecker filling in for Robert Montgomery’s John Brickley? And when Pitt’s blood is on the boil is he any less indefatigable and ruthless than Ethan Edwards from The Searchers (1956)?
This was just the type of hero America was looking for when Pitt appeared on the bestseller list. Ford had stopped making films and Hollywood was putting the western into mothballs. Not only love of country but love of adventure was falling out of favor in the popular media, but not so with the American public, who responded enthusiastically when given a chance to see a film with real heroes like Patton (1970), Star Wars (1977), Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) and Die Hard (1988), or read a book like Raise the Titanic!
* * *
Cussler’s next nine books—Vixen 03, Night Probe!, Deep Six, Cyclops, Treasure, Dragon, Sahara, Inca Gold and Shock Wave—are all Pitt adventures and all bestsellers, but in 1996 Cussler began to expand his publishing empire with The Sea Hunters, a nonfiction book written with Craig Dirgo. Each chapter of The Sea Hunters recounts the historical circumstances surrounding a shipwreck or lost train, followed by details of the search by Cussler’s real-life National Underwater and Marine Agency (NUMA), a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization dedicated to the preservation of maritime history.55 In spite of the phenomenal success of the Pitt adventures, The Sea Hunters paperback is Cussler’s first book to reach the top of The New York Times bestsellers list.56 New York Maritime College also accepted The Sea Hunters in lieu of a thesis and presented Cussler with the college’s first honorary PhD in 1997.57 In 1998, Dr. Cussler and Dirgo released another nonfiction book, Clive Cussler & Dirk Pitt Revealed, a companion text to the Pitt series that included an original story, “The Reunion,” in which Cussler meets various characters from the Pitt novels, up through Flood Tide. In 2002 came The Sea Hunters II, another Dirgo collaboration, and that same year Canadian television broadcast the inaugural season of The Sea Hunters, a documentary series produced by Eco Nova Productions. The series ran three seasons, with Cussler hosting six episodes and concluding each segment with the incentive: “And now it’s your turn to get up off the couch and go into the deserts, go into the mountains, go under the lakes, the rivers and the seas, and search for history. You’ll never find a more rewarding adventure.”
Twenty-six years after Pyramid published The Mediterranean Caper, Cussler released the first spin-off series from the Pitt adventures, the NUMA Files. The premiere adventure, Serpent, introduced Kurt Austin, head of NUMA’s Special Assignments Team, and Joe Zavala, the team’s marine engineer. Four years later a second spin-off, The Oregon Files, was launched with Golden Buddha. Where NUMA Files presents Pitt-style adventures with different characters, the heroes of the Oregon Files are a cast of mercenaries led by former CIA operative Juan Cabrillo (introduced in Flood Tide) who possess a peculiar bent towards capitalism and operates from an even more peculiar vessel called the Oregon. Cussler created both series but restricted further contributions to plotting and some editing.58 Paul Kemprecos, author of the Shamus award-winning mystery Cool Blue Tomb, collaborated with Cussler on the first eight NUMA Files adventures before Graham Brown (Black Sun, Black Rain) took over, while Dirgo collaborated on the first two Oregon Files books before he left and was replaced by Jack Du Brul, creator of the Pitt archetype hero Philip Mercer (Vulcan’s Forge, Charon’s Landing).59 Cussler continued to write the Pitt adventures by himself up until 2004, and all three novels produced during this period include a major change in the hero’s life. In Atlantis Found (1999), Pitt proposes marriage to longtime girlfriend, Congresswoman Loren Smith. In Valhalla Rising (2001), Pitt discovers he is the father of full-grown twins Dirk and Summer. At the end of Trojan Odyssey (2003), Pitt is offered the director’s job at NUMA by Sandecker, and marries Smith. The next adventure, Black Wind (2004), marks the start of Cussler’s collaboration with his son Dirk on the Pitt series.
In January 2003, Barbara Cussler passed away from cancer, and in April 2005 Cussler underwent a quintuple bypass operation on his heart. In February 2005, Cussler filed a lawsuit against Crusader Entertainment, the producers of the film adaptation of Sahara. Through it all Cussler continued to write and, on his own, released a children’s book, The Adventures of Vin Fiz (2006), and the bestselling western adventure The Chase (2007). In 2007, Cussler married his second wife, Janet Hovarth. A third series, Fargo Adventures, written with Grant Blackwood, author of the Briggs Tanner series, debuted in 2009 and was followed later that year by The Wrecker, a sequel to The Chase and the launch of the Isaac Bell Detective series with collaborator Justin Scott, creator of realtor/private investigator Ben Abbott. In 2010, Cussler turned 79 and celebrated with his most productive year yet, with a total of four books, and then followed that up with four more in 2011. Cussler was also a part of a USO tour to Afghanistan, called Operation Thriller II, which included fellow writers Sandra Brown, Kathy Reichs, Mark Bowden and Andrew Peterson. In 2012, Cussler underwent knee surgery and released five new novels, including The Tombs: A Fargo Adventure with new collaborator Thomas Perry (the Jane Whitefield and Butcher Boy series). In 2013, a special 40th anniversary edition of The Mediterranean Caper was released along with a new Fargo adventure, The Mayan Secrets, a new Oregon Files adventure, Mirage, a new NUMA Files adventure, Zero Hour, and a new Isaac Bell adventure, The Striker. Du Brul and Perry also announced in 2013 that they were ending their collaborations with Cussler.
* * *
When Cussler created Dirk Pitt he did a lot of research but he also injected a lot of himself into his hero. Cussler did this because he understands that a successful hero provides a proxy for the reader.60 People enjoy thrills, and imaginative people enjoy picturing themselves participating in adventures,61 so if killers are chasing Pitt in a far faster car, it is we who elude them by driving our classic coach car off a ski jump. If Pitt is lost in the Sahara and happens across the ruins of a lost aircraft, it is we who know how to reconstruct the remnants into a land yacht that can be ridden to civilization. Most of all, though, America needed an old fashion adventure hero in the sixties and seventies.
All Cussler had to do was figure out how to bring this hero to life.
A half century and approximately 50 novels later, the rest, as they say, is history.