A Review of the Review
I may surprise you.—Dirk Pitt1
Women loved him; enemies respected him; associates idolized him.—Robert Sampson2
When it comes to adventure heroes Cussler gets it, and the Pitt archetype hero is proof of this.
The Pitt archetype hero is a Boy Scout who fixes a stranger’s flat tire on a rainy night, or sticks his neck out for them when no one else will, and he is a patriotic hero in the southwestern American folk tradition, brave and cool under pressure, ready to save civilization while treasuring the time he spends away from it.
The Pitt archetype hero can be a grand adventure hero, accomplishing Herculean tasks, an action hero going toe to toe with brutal and merciless enemies, and a wisecracking hero, à la Groucho Marx or Bugs Bunny, capable of cutting smarmy know-it-alls down to size with the right remark at the right moment. He is also a human hero capable of poor judgment calls. Boneheaded plays make the Pitt archetype fallible and more believable than intimidating and less-accessible heroes, like Holmes and Doc Savage. Cussler’s adventures may be incredible, but his heroes are never larger than life.
The Pitt archetype hero lives in a world where anachronisms can reach out from the past to affect the present, like a World War I German airplane strafing an air force base, a treasure ship rotting away in the green hell of a South American jungle, or the remnants of a Viking colony turning up inside a New England cavern.3 And while other action heroes occasionally do the least predictable thing to escape death or save the day, Pitt will almost always do something totally unpredictable. As he himself confesses in Sahara, “I have an aversion to pursuing the expected.”4
Dirk Pitt is a hero in the best pulp tradition, a wonder of accomplishment, financially well to do and physically astounding, although these attributes are tempered when compared to the likes of Zorro, The Shadow and Doc Savage,5 and that is no accident. Pulp adventures were “rooted in the immediate past” and “influenced by Stevenson and Kipling, [Conan] Doyle, Old Sleuth, Haggard, [and] Buffalo Bill,”6 but they also evolved to suit their times. Pulp heroes became a little more adult, the settings a little more exotic, and the action a little more violent. Today, when Cussler creates a thrilling story with a modern setting and contemporary characters in the old fashion adventure tradition, he is changing the adventure story to suit his times. Adventure stories are the oldest type of story, and Cussler’s novels are the most recent development of this perennial genre that has been “polished by accumulated centuries of story telling.”7
One can find traces of Pitt in classic films and B-movie serials from Hollywood’s Golden Age. People respond to Cussler’s novels because his adventures feature many of the same components that Gianetti lists as hallmarks of American movies:
[They are] profoundly democratic … overtly hostile toward rank, privilege, and authority. Almost invariably its sympathies are with the underdog and the oppressed. Conflicts between the individual and society are usually resolved in favor of the individuals.… [Protagonists] are often rebels, outsiders, and inner-directed loners … and their morality is often based on a private code rather than a consensus.… A romantic yearning for the extraordinary is the rule rather than the exception, and this theme is frequently expressed with lyrical fervor … encumbered by few traditions of restraint, decorum, or “good taste”; genres are mixed with casual nonchalance; the fantastic and the real are fused with matter-of-fact facility. Impatient of nuances, our filmmakers prefer bold, sweeping themes and strident clashes.8
That said, Cussler’s best and most famous hero, Dirk Pitt, is unique among Cussler’s other creations, a knight-errant and a defender of the realm, unafraid to stray from the highroads to bring back secrets from lost places, as well as an indefatigable nemesis and a merciless manhunter. Sometimes, Austin will stray from the highroads and bring back a secret, but, as head of NSAT, he is primarily a defender of the realm. The same is true for Cabrillo, an EMT for a troubled world. Bell is a manhunter who will occasionally defend the realm, as will Sam and Remi Fargo, but the Fargos are primarily looking to take any detour they can that strays from the highroads. As for the nice folks twins, they are after pure adventure in their own fantasyland, although in the process they do learn one secret (the machine that turns toys into life-size anthropomorphic vehicles) and they have been known to do a little realm defending.
This archetype has been popular for over 40 years, but, as stated in the preface, critics ignore the adventures of Pitt and Cussler’s other heroes in spite of this success because Cussler writes popular fiction.
Entertaining readers has never been enough to satisfy the dictates of some critics, even when a story has other virtues. The Woman in White is one of the early masterpieces of detection literature,9 an accomplishment deserving of some critical attention. But, when it was first published, a Dublin University Magazine reviewer declared that, without the plot, there “was nothing left to examine,”10 while a reviewer for the Saturday Review dismissed Collins as just an “admirable story-teller” with a line of reasoning that contemporary critics might level at Cussler:
He is … a very ingenious constructor; but ingenious construction is not high art, just as cabinet-making and joining is not high art. Mechanical talent is what every great artist ought to possess. Mechanical talent, however, is not enough to entitle a man to rank as a great artist. When we have said that Mr. Wilkie Collins succeeds in keeping up our excitement by the happy way in which he interweaves with mystery incident just sufficiently probable not to be extravagant, and that he is an adept at administering continual stimulants to our attention, we have said all.11
Collins’s critics considered novels to be manufactured products, and a “sensation novel,” like The Woman in White, carried “the scent of industry and trade” and “blurred stylistic distinctions” by drawing “on melodrama, the new journalism, penny dreadfuls, blending ‘high’ and ‘low’ art to create a wider audience for the novel.”12 Times change, however, and today most reviewers no longer consider the novel to be a manufactured product, but Cussler does. He is, in fact, a proud commercial writer who believes he is creating a product that relies as much on his marketing experience as it does on his writing talents to succeed.13 To accomplish this, Cussler draws on the same sources that Collins and other Victorian sensation writers did, along with dime novels, pulp magazines, motion pictures and B-movie serials, and in the process he has created a worldwide audience of fans that are as enthusiastic as Baker Street Irregulars are about Holmes.
These fans demonstrate their enthusiasm in more ways than just reading Cussler’s adventures. Many frequent the numerous websites about Cussler and his works such as:
• clivecussler.com: the official Clive Cussler website
• clivecusslerbestsellers.com: an official website for Clive Cussler’s novels
• clive-cusslerbooks.com: an official website about Cussler and his novels
• www.cusslermen.com: a website for collectors of Cussler’s books and memorabilia
• www.cusslersociety.com: official website for the Cussler Collector’s Society, sponsor of the annual Adventure Writers Competition and Clive Cussler Convention
• www.doxawatches.com: where fans can buy their own Clive Cussler edition SUB 1200T Doxa diver’s watch like Pitt wears
• fanfiction.net: hosts a fan fiction library including many Dirk Pitt pieces
• numa.net: official website for Cussler’s 501(c)(3) non-profit organization dedicated to the preservation of maritime history
Fans can also become friends on Cussler’s Facebook page, and read about the man and his many novels on Wikipedia.
A few fans have even taken to writing books about Cussler and his works. Wayne Valero is the most proficient to date, with The Collector’s Guide to Clive Cussler (2000), From The Mediterranean Caper to Black Wind: A Bibliography of Clive Cussler (2005), The Adventure Writing of Clive Cussler (2007) and Collecting Cussler: An Ethical Approach (2012). Tony Krome and Sean Ellis delve deep into the secrets buried in Cussler’s writing, in The Clive Cussler Code (2005), and, as of this writing, Stuart Leuthner, author of Wheels: A Passion for Collecting Cars (2005), has completed a Cussler biography and is looking for a publisher.
The Clive Cussler Society’s annual convention is a three-day event, where fans have the chance to meet Cussler, members of his family, and his collaborators. During the convention, people can hear guest speakers, attend book signings, purchase books and memorabilia, and enjoy dinners as well as special events. For example, the 2007 convention in Charleston, South Carolina, included a tour of the Hunley. The convention began in 2005 and, except for the 2007 and 2009 conventions in San Diego, it has been held in either Scottsdale, Arizona, or Denver, Colorado.
The Cussler Museum (www.cusslermuseum.com) in Arvada, Colorado, was founded by the author, and is open to the public from May to September. The museum is dedicated to the preservation of classic automobiles and displays more than a hundred cars, built from 1906 to 1965. A few of these have been showcased in Pitt’s adventures and many appear in the coffee-table book, Built for Adventure: The Classic Automobiles of Clive Cussler and Dirk Pitt.
When all is said and done, Cussler’s readers are fans of his adventures and his heroes because Cussler gets it. Cussler gets what people want to read and he gives it to them. Cussler admits as much at the end of Shock Wave when Sandecker tells Loren, “To Dirk, every hour has a mystery to be solved, every day a challenge to conquer.” Sandecker and Loren envy Pitt, and when Loren wonders why that is, Sandecker tells her, “There’s a little of Dirk Pitt in all of us.”14
Cussler tells people that he is an advertising copywriter who got lucky,15 and that is true. There is no denying he was at the right place with the right book like Raise the Titanic! at the right time, but anyone can decide they want to write modern versions of old fashion adventure stories, and anyone can perform market research, but not everyone has the empathy to understand what readers want and the talent to manufacture that product. More than that, not everyone has what it takes to create a hero like Dirk Pitt.
Cussler does.
Cussler not only gets it, he can do it.
Cussler calls that luck, but maybe, just maybe, it is Fate or coincidence (take your pick).