The Bug was the giveaway.
On a warm summer afternoon in 1968, my father pulled up to the house in a new car. Well, new to us anyway. At its heart, it was a used Volkswagen Beetle, the ubiquitous road dog of Southern California in the day. This one had been chopped and diced, however, by a local hot-rodder bent on making it an off-road desert rambler. They were called Baja Bugs back then, weekend playthings for the semi-adventurous. My father’s selection was not for the faint of heart. Painted red and yellow, it had a flattened snout covered in silver mesh and an exposed rear engine compartment complete with a roaring open exhaust.
The first time my father pulled up to the house in it, my sisters and I piled in with glee. I remember it had a folding sunroof, and we took turns standing on the front seat with our arms extended like British royalty, buffeted by rushing air as we got a quick ride around the block. It was a crazy car, and my sisters and I absolutely loved it.
I suppose it was only in my subconscious that I realized all my friends’ fathers were driving nondescript sedans or station wagons. I am quite certain that none of my playmates ever saw their father leave the house in the morning dressed in a three-piece suit, only to climb into a hot VW for the commute to work. Yet that was my father.
In hindsight, that Baja Bug says a lot about Clive Cussler. He’s a man who’s never been keen on conformity and, in fact, relishes rattling the gates of authority. He’s always had a high regard for having fun and still carries a childlike joy about him. The Bug was certainly an intimation of his lifelong love affair with the automobile, as well as his thirst for adventure. But most of all, I think that car represented the mark of his irrepressible creativity.
My father has always shined in the creative department, whether it was spray-painting the family Christmas tree gold, just to be different, or inserting a hand-carved totem pole in the living room of his mountain home. Yet it was in his professional life where his creativity paved the way to success. His first real enterprise, running a two-bit gasoline station in suburban Los Angeles in the 1950s, was a marvel of creative marketing. Old family photos show a tiny gas station emblazoned with signs and promotions that would have impressed P.T. Barnum. His subsequent years in advertising revealed his clever knack for humor in product promotions for print, radio, and television. My sisters and I fondly recall watching him produce TV commercials for a local Denver bank in the 1970s, where he hired classic Hollywood character actors and inserted them into humorous situations for memorable effect.
But he has left his most indelible mark in fiction writing. He started with a minor thriller about an apocalyptic cult living in a seamount near Hawaii, introducing a lanky protagonist named Dirk Pitt. Rather than create a prototypical sleuthing detective or undercover spy, my father made Pitt a marine engineer and pilot who operated in and around the seas. When he completed the manuscript for Pacific Vortex, I’m sure he had no inkling Pitt would still be sailing the literary seas some forty-five years later.
Pitt, of course, is the quintessential American hero, a tough and intelligent man’s man who also makes the women swoon. But there’s a little more to the heart of the character. Like his creator, he stands six feet three inches and has wavy black hair. He has a like fascination with historical mysteries and a passion for antique cars. And he charges through life on his own terms. I always thought it a bit redundant when my father started writing himself into the books, à la Hitchcock, as his alter ego was already swashbuckling through the nearby pages.
Though Pacific Vortex was not initially published, my father was undaunted, writing two more adventure stories featuring the heroic Pitt that did make it to print. They were similar to Pacific Vortex in structure, linear mysteries that followed Pitt from beginning to end. But things changed with his next book, Raise the Titanic! The story featured a historical prologue, followed by multiple subplots that ultimately intertwined in a tense climax. It became his patented form of writing adventure fiction and has since been copied by dozens of successful writers.
The book was written when nobody knew what the wreck of the Titanic looked like, and there were serious doubts about it ever being located. Yet in typical creative boldness, my father didn’t just rest at fictionally locating the Titanic; he raised it to the surface and completed its maiden voyage to New York. Raise the Titanic! was the breakthrough novel that secured his career as a writer and paved the way for his dominance in the genre of adventure fiction. In the dozens of books written since, he’s held to a common theme: creative stories that are fun to read. A similar theme has followed his personal life. He’s often said over the years that if it ain’t fun, then it ain’t worth doing. It’s a mantra that describes both his life and his work. Since his days as a youth, he’s blazed a path of fun and creativity that few men can match.
I’ve been blessed to be able to carry on the literary adventures of Dirk Pitt and introduce him to a new generation of readers. It’s a daunting challenge to add to another’s lavish body of creative work, but I do have a slight advantage. When it comes to writing about Pitt, at least, I’ve got a ready source of inspiration into the heart and soul of the character. One that started, perhaps, with a long-ago ride in a Baja Bug.
- Dirk Cussler
Six-year-old Clive Cussler stared wide-eyed at the placid blue Pacific Ocean. It was the boy’s first encounter with the Southern California shoreline since his family’s recent move from the frozen suburbs of Minneapolis. Stretching as far as he could see, the dazzling tableau of sand, water, and azure sky were interrupted only by the Huntington Beach Pier and a smudge of smoke trailing behind a haze-blurred liner.
Suddenly, as if commanded by an inner voice, Clive began to run towards the water. His parents, busy unpacking beach gear, looked up in astonishment. Clive’s mother, Amy, called after him, “Wait, Clive, wait!” But her son, his lanky legs churning like pistons, continued his mad dash across the sand. Splashing into the water, he was ambushed by a foaming breaker and dumped back onto the beach.
Undaunted, the youngster jumped up and charged back into the pounding surf. On his second attempt, Clive’s timing was better, and he soon found himself in over his head. Opening his eyes, Clive was transfixed by his first glimpse of the underwater world. Peering at several tiny fish darting across the sun-dappled bottom, he momentarily forgot he didn’t know how to swim. Suddenly, a large hand plunged through a froth of bubbles. Eric Cussler had sprinted into the water and after a few frantic thrusts, managed to grab his son’s arm and haul him back to the beach. A few days later, Amy enrolled Clive in swimming lessons.
That abbreviated dip in the Pacific Ocean at Huntington Beach marked the beginning of Clive Cussler’s life-long love of the sea. Growing up in Southern California he spent long, lazy days on the beach, body-surfing and swimming. Stationed in Hawaii during the Korean War, Clive and his air force buddies strapped on an aqualung when few amateurs would venture into the depths. During the late 1960s, Clive managed a dive shop for a year, an experience that expanded his knowledge of the underwater world and honed his diving skills.
The allure of the sea beckoned again when Clive slid behind a typewriter one night and dove into writing action adventure tales. Clive’s first novel’s action is set against a backdrop of the world’s oceans - mysterious, beautiful, unpredictable, uncharted, and treacherous. His hero, a marine engineer, works for the fictional National Underwater and Marine Agency (NUMA), an oceanographic research organization. Little did he realize the “pot boiler,” as he called his first effort, would spawn a globally popular adventure series still going strong more than forty years later.
In 1979, Clive joined a select group of “aquanauts,” spending three days in Hydrolab, an underwater habitat on the sea floor, fifty feet below the surface ne
ar St. Croix. Providing Spartan accommodations for four divers, the habitat served as a research station from 1970 to 1985. “We dove in the morning, noon, and in the evening when it was dark,” Clive recalled. “I felt like a true denizen of the deep.”
The same year he visited Hydrolab, Clive elevated his fascination with the sea to a new level when he founded the real-life NUMA, a nonprofit organization dedicated to preserving maritime and naval history. Funded primarily by Clive’s book sales, NUMA’s crew of dedicated marine experts and volunteers have discovered more than 100 significant underwater wrecks, including the Civil War submarine, H.L. Hunley.
Jacques Cousteau was the first explorer to provide the general public a glimpse into the underwater world. Educating and inspiring with his films and books, Cousteau was a staunch believer in marine conservation. Clive, through the adventures of eco-warrior Dirk Pitt and his associates, communicates the same message - the oceans are not a convenient dumping ground or an infinite source of food and energy. They are a priceless, fragile resource and it is crucial for all of us to understand how our activities affect the sea.
Today, Clive is the keystone of a publishing empire Forbes described as, “the literary equivalent of a theme park.” In addition to the flagship Dirk Pitt novels, co-written since 2004 with his son, he oversees four spinoff series, co-written with a team of outstanding authors. In the pages of his bestselling novels, Clive’s intrepid heroes fight injustice and punish those who would exploit and pollute the world’s oceans, while NUMA’s dedicated explorers continue to search for the mysteries hidden beneath their restless waves.
The seeds for Clive’s accomplishments may well have been planted on that brilliant summer day at Huntington Beach in 1937 when six-year-old Clive Cussler hit the water running. More than three-quarters of a century later, he is still diving headfirst into adventure.
In January 1973, Clive retreated to his unfinished basement and took stock. It was not a pretty picture. Forty-one years old, he had a wife, three children, a mortgage, and was unemployed. As far as his writing career, all Clive had to show for nearly ten years of labor were three unpublished manuscripts.
Common sense suggested he should concentrate his efforts on finding another job, but Clive was determined to follow his dream. Surviving on unemployment, occasional freelance jobs, and Barbara’s salary, he spent the majority of his time in the basement working on his new novel. “Thing’s might have been tight,” he recalls, “but nobody was looking over my shoulder while I worked on a boring campaign, adding their two cents, bitching at me to control costs and trying to stab me in the back. I was now doing what I loved to do - write.”
On Clive’s desk, made of two sawhorses and an unfinished door, the pages of his next book were piling up - the working title: Titanic. Although Clive cannot pinpoint the moment of his inspiration, he realized an attempt to raise the world’s most famous shipwreck would provide a thrilling challenge for Dirk Pitt and his NUMA associates. “My original inspiration was based on fantasy and to see Titanic brought up from the seabed and towed into New York Harbor, completing her maiden voyage begun three quarters of a century before. Fortunately, it was a fantasy shared by millions of her devoted fans.”
Raising the Titanic was not a new idea. Only a few months after the ship went down, the wealthy Astor, Widener and Guggenheim families (all lost relatives in the disaster) contacted the Merritt and Chapman Derrick and Wrecking Company (MCD&W) to investigate the feasibility of locating and raising the ill-fated liner. With headquarters in New York City, MCD&W was one of the world’s largest marine salvage operations. Since the technology did not exist to find the wreck, much less hoist the 46,000-ton ship from a depth of two and a half miles, MCD&W graciously declined.
The entire world was stunned by the Titanic disaster. Within days of the liner’s sinking, films, poems, books, songs, plays, postcards and memorabilia commemorated the liner and her tragic end. Released only twenty-nine days after the disaster, Saved from the Titanic was a silent film starring Dorothy Gibson, an actress who was aboard the ship and left on the first lifeboat. Gibson appeared in the same outfit she was wearing on the night of the catastrophe.
During the years after the sinking, there were more urgent issues than a shipwreck lying in the frigid depths of the North Atlantic. World War I, the Great Depression, and another world war demoted the Titanic to a footnote. Interest in the Titanic began to gather momentum in the mid-1950s, with the publishing of Walter Lord’s highly successful book, A Night to Remember, followed by the film adaptation in 1958. Over the years, dreamers and crackpots had proposed a series of outlandish schemes to resurrect the Titanic involving electromagnets, balloons, turning the ship into a giant ice cube by freezing the water around the hull with liquid nitrogen, millions of Ping-Pong balls, 180,000 tons of molten wax, and manned deep-sea submersibles.
During the early 1980s, flamboyant Texas oilman Jack Grimm, who had already hunted for Noah’s Ark, the Loch Ness Monster, Bigfoot and the hole in the North Pole providing access to the mythical hollow earth, sponsored three serious expeditions to locate the Titanic. Several prominent scientists were hired as consultants, but the expeditions came up empty due to bad weather and technical problems.
In 1985, a joint French-American venture set sail for the North Atlantic. Led by oceanographer/engineer Jean-Louis Michel and Dr. Robert Ballard, a marine geologist working for the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute and the U.S. Navy, the secret expedition was funded by the Navy to photograph the wreckage of a sunken nuclear submarine. Once the primary mission was completed, the Navy said Ballard and his team could spend twelve days searching for the Titanic.
During the early morning of September 1, 1985, a boiler appeared out of the gloom on one of the search ship’s monitors, followed moments later by port holes and pieces of a ship’s hull and railings. It was the RMS Titanic. Instead of being intact, the stern and bow sections lay almost 2,000 feet apart, facing in opposite directions.
Since Clive wrote his book ten years before the wreck was discovered, Dirk Pitt’s fictional Titanic is in one piece. Wayne Valero, co-founder of the Clive Cussler Collector’s Society has been reading and writing about Clive’s work for almost forty years. In his book, From the Mediterranean Caper to Black Wind, Valero describes the process Clive uses to make the raising of the Titanic believable. “Cussler will take a premise like what if you could raise the Titanic? . . . How would they do it? Who would do it and for what purpose?”
Known as alternate or counterfactual history, the “what if” style of writing first appeared during the 1880s. Based on actual historical events, writers presume a few alterations could result in a significantly different world. Ward Moore’s Bring the Jubilee depicts a United States in which the Confederacy has won the Civil War. In Len Deighton’s SS-GB, Operation Sea Lion is successful and England is occupied by Nazi Germany. When big game hunters travel back in time to hunt Tyrannosaurus rex in Ray Bradbury’s “A Sound of Thunder,” one of them accidentally kills a butterfly. Returning to the present, the adventurers are dismayed to discover a number of disconcerting changes.
In his adventure thriller, Clive recounts the disaster in a short, but stirring prelude. He also provides clues as to why the U.S. government would want to raise the liner. The action shifts to the 1980s when U.S. and Soviet relations have reached a low point. Byzanium, an extremely rare element, is desperately needed to complete the “Sicilian Project,” a defensive system designed to destroy attacking missiles before they reach North America. When a search for the element on a Russian island runs into trouble, Dirk Pitt comes to the rescue, but it turns out the mine had been played out in 1911. Believing the only Byzanium in the world is in the Titanic’s vault at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean, the government commissions NUMA to raise the ship.
While American and Russian spies and counterspies go about their clandestine business, Pitt and his NUMA team find the Titanic. Robots are sent down to seal the damaged hull with “Wetsteel
.” Pliable until it comes in contact with water, the substance “can bond itself to a metal object as though it were welded.” When the hull is sealed, compressed air is pumped in and the Titanic “leaps out of the waves like a modern submarine blowing its ballast tanks.”
Once the Titanic is refloated, Clive lulls the reader into believing the novel is headed for a happy ending, but a hurricane threatens to send the resurrected ship back to the bottom. When the Titanic finally reaches New York, Pitt opens the vault. Nothing! A surprising climax connects the dots of the multiple story lines, and Pitt locates the missing Byzanium. America is safe until the next Dirk Pitt novel.
Clive finished the novel on June 25, 1974. While he carefully packed the manuscript, his mind was racing. Titanic was not only an exciting story, it was his best writing so far; still, there was no guarantee Peter Lampack could find a publisher. And, if he did, would the advance be enough for him to pursue a career as a writer? He drove to the post office and sent the parcel to New York. After a quick stop for a quart of milk, Clive was back in the basement, launching Dirk Pitt’s search for Vixen 03.
During the early twentieth century, Aurora, Illinois, was home to a vigorous collection of industries, including three corset factories, six manufacturers of heavy equipment, numerous foundries and machine shops, and the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy Railroad’s car works, a sprawling, smoky complex employing more than 1,200 men. Located forty miles west of Chicago, the “City of Lights” - Aurora was one of the first Midwest cities to illuminate its downtown with electric lights - could also lay claim to the title, “World Center for Steel Cabinetry.” Seven businesses, including Lyon Metal, Aurora Metal, All-Steel, Equipto, and The Durabilt Steel Locker Company fabricated steel shelving, desks, lockers, and cabinets.
When Eric Cussler reported for work at the Durabilt factory on the morning of July 15, 1931, he was exhausted. The twenty-nine-year-old German immigrant had spent the night in the waiting room at St. Joseph’s Hospital, managing at most an hour of fitful sleep. At a little after 2 a.m., a nurse woke him with a gentle tap on the shoulder. He was the father of a healthy baby boy who would be named Clive Eric Cussler. The newcomer’s mother, Amy, was enamored with Clive Brook, the suave actor whose smoldering good looks made him a matinee idol in both his native England and the United States. Best remembered for playing opposite Marlene Dietrich in Shanghai Express, his film credits also include The Return of Sherlock Holmes and John Huston’s The List of Adrian Messenger.