The next day, it was Putnam’s turn. He asserted Clive received “the largest payday ever” based on the misleading claim he sold 100-million copies of his books. It was the numbers, and only the numbers, that led to the film’s failure at the box office. “Sahara,” Putnam exclaimed, was a “big beautiful popcorn movie . . . Everybody got paid except Crusader.” As far as Anschutz’s failure to appear, Putnam explained, “He had no reason to be here because he wasn’t sued . . . It’s an easy shot to make him sound like a cigar-chomping Daddy Warbucks in his luxury penthouse, but he didn’t do anything except say, ‘I’ll give you the money because you sold 100 million books.’”
Dirk, who was in the courtroom for the closing arguments, contrasts the two attorneys. “Marvin Putnam was showy and theatrical, playing for an emotional response from the jury. It was extremely difficult to sit there and listen to the baseless attacks on my father. Putnam tried to paint the entire process as a planned effort by Clive and Peter to never honor the deal and pocket the money.”
“Bert Fields,” Dirk continues, “was calm and rational in his delivery and argued his points in a thoughtful manner, but I don’t think I was alone in wishing he would have defended Clive’s integrity more in the closing. We were all anxious, not only because Clive was visibly worn down, he could have been hit with a huge adverse judgment.”
On May 15, 2007, following eight days of deliberation, the jury returned their verdicts. Clive had breached his contract and must pay Crusader Entertainment (now Bristol Bay Productions) $5 million. Clive also fraudulently misrepresented the number of books he sold, but no actual harm had been done, and Anschutz was not awarded the $115 million in punitive damages he was seeking.
Crusader, the jury found, owed Clive for the second book and he was awarded $8.5 million. Both sides claimed victory. Putnam declared the verdict was “a complete victory . . . It was a complete finding of liability, just not a finding of damages.” Fields saw it differently. “We feel like Cussler is the clear winner. We’re $3.5 million ahead, and Clive got his book rights back.” The jury foreman, Anthony Villa, told reporters the complex contract between Clive and Crusader played a major part in the jury’s deliberations. “The contract was a nightmare,” Villa said. “There were problems on both sides and both parties were at fault. We didn’t stick to one side.” He added the jury never considered awarding the huge damages each side sought.
Outside the courtroom, Clive, hugged Janet. “I’m relieved that it’s over,” he said, smiling. “Now we can go home. If I knew the trial was going to turn into a personal attack, I would have passed, but it wasn’t over the money. I just wanted my book back.” When a reporter asked him if Dirk Pitt would return to the big screen, Clive declared, “There won’t be another Clive Cussler film, at least not during my lifetime.”
After three months in California, Clive was finally back in his office. In addition to the final editing of his western, he was putting together another list for a new co-writer. Gamay and Paul Trout’s introduction in the Numa Files had been so well received, Clive had proposed a new series featuring a professional husband and wife team who travel around the world searching for treasure.
In early spring, 2007, Putnam gave the green light for The Fargo Adventures. Tom Golden, an executive editor at Putnam, contacted Grant Blackwood, who had written three thrillers published by Berkeley Books and was high on Clive’s list. “Tom asked me,” Blackwood recalls. “How would you feel about throwing your hat in the ring for a chance to work with Clive Cussler? I doubt if it was more than a nanosecond before I said yes.”
A year earlier, Blackwood attended the first ThrillerFest in Phoenix (the annual event has since moved to New York). Founded by David Morrell (First Blood) and Gayle Lynds (Masquerade), the three-day ThrillerFest attracts anybody interested in the genre – authors, agents, publishers, and fans.
Clive was on hand to accept the first ThrillerFest award for lifetime achievement. Before the emcee introduced Clive, she asked anybody in the audience who had been inspired or helped by him to stand. “I looked around the room,” Blackwood recalls. “There wasn’t anybody sitting down, including me. To influence a community by being great at what you do, that’s fine. To influence a community because of how you treat people, that’s a whole different thing.”
“After Tom called and told me I had the job,” Blackwood says, “I was walking on air.” Clive provided Blackwood with the background for his fictional couple - Sam and Remy Fargo - how they lived, worked, and thought. Clive also suggested Blackwood should watch The Thin Man, a classic film inspired by Dashiell Hammett’s novel of the same name, published in 1934. In the book, Hammett replaced his usual hard-boiled private detectives with Nick and Nora Charles, an urbane couple who solve murders while exchanging witty banter and consuming vast amounts of alcohol. Hammett’s novel inspired six films starring William Powell and Myrna Loy. Nick and Nora’s sophistication, irreverence, and sex appeal were extremely popular and became the prototype for a radio show and a host of contemporary television series featuring crime-fighting couples.
“Clive explained,” Blackwood says, “Nick and Nora Charles’s relationship and urbane style was the kind of dynamic he had in mind for our heroes. I rented the DVD that night, and when I sent Clive the first third of the book, he said I hit it right on the head.”
Grant Blackwood grew up in Texas, California, and Minnesota. After graduating from high school, he attended a community college before joining the navy. Trained as an Operations Specialist and Pilot Rescue Swimmer, he spent three years aboard a guided missile frigate. “I was discharged on May 23, 1987. Walking off the ship with my sea bag over my shoulder I thought, ‘What now?’ I knew it was time to go back to school, but I had read Clive’s books since I was a teenager. It was a long shot, but I would try to write my own story that would pin someone in their seat.”
During the next eleven years, Blackwood earned an associate’s degree, majored in history at the University of Missouri in St. Louis, labored at a string of mundane jobs, and wrote his first thriller, End of Enemies. The novel’s hero, Briggs Tanner, takes on an assortment of evildoers including a renegade Japanese industrialist and Arab terrorists. “My agent, Christie Cardenas, sold the book to Berkley on May 23, 1999, exactly twelve years after I walked down that gangplank.”
Seeking a cover blurb, Blackwood, asked his editor, Tom Colgan, if they dared ask Clive. Colgan sent the manuscript to Putnam and Clive graciously responded. “Pure fun, pure adventure. The action and intrigue keep accelerating.” Blackwood wrote Clive a thank you note, and a few weeks later, he says, “I was astonished when he called to thank me for my thank you note. We chatted for fifteen minutes and I remember calling him Mr. Cussler. I wrote on my calendar, ‘Chatted with Clive.’”
Blackwood wrote two more Briggs Tanner novels but soon discovered getting published, even with good reviews, was only half the fight. “Your books are published, and you think, okay, I’ve made it. But the sad truth is you’ve come up against a bigger wall - selling enough books to pay your bills.” Blackwood turned to ghostwriting. “I liked the work, but you serve a lot of masters and have to accept the fact your name won’t be on the cover. Everybody involved with the book has an opinion. Clients can be difficult, and it’s imperative not only to find a middle ground, but to do it in a diplomatic way. You come up with a plot, write the book, they give you a flat fee, and you walk away. After I signed on with Clive, I was fortunate to be able to quit ghostwriting and concentrate all my energy on the Fargo Adventures.”
While Blackwood focused on Sam and Remi Fargo, Clive finished the western he had started before the trial. Now called The Chase, the book Clive dismissed as, “fun . . . but nothing like a bestseller,” was published by Putnam on November 6, 2007. Two weeks later, Clive was proved wrong when The Chase appeared on The New York Times hardcover bestseller list, ranked a very respectable number three.
Instead of Clive’s familiar historical prologue, the story ope
ns in 1950, when a rusted steam locomotive is salvaged from a Montana lake, and then shifts to the past. The relic is soon tied to events that took place in 1906, when a bank robber, known as the Butcher Bandit, was terrorizing the western U.S. After brutally murdering any witnesses, he manages to escape without a trace. Issac Bell, a handsome, charismatic, well-educated detective, is hired to solve the case. The epic Cussler climax features a rip-roaring race between two fire-breathing steam locomotives.
The Chase’s unexpected strong sales convinced Clive and Putnam there was a market for a series following the adventures of Issac Bell and the Van Dorn detective agency. Needing yet another co-writer, Clive was about to make one of his time-honored lists when Barbara Peters came to the rescue.
When Barbara Peters was informed Clive was looking for a co-writer for a western series, she suggested he should consider Justin Scott. Peters originally met Scott in 1996, at a conference in Phoenix hosted by the Poisoned Pen. Some authors were invited to speak about their favorite mystery writer, and Scott gave a presentation on Robert Louis Stevenson that Peters called “brilliant.” Two years later, Peters edited the collected works of the authors in the book, AZ Murder Goes . . . Classic.
Growing up on Long Island, Justin Scott was surrounded by writers. His father, Alexander Leslie Scott, wrote 250 Western novels and reams of poetry under a variety of pen names. Scott’s mother, Lily K. Scott, was also a prolific author, writing novels, romances, and short stories for magazines and pulps. After graduating from Harper College with a master’s degree in American history, Scott drove trucks, built beach houses, tended bar, and edited an electronics engineering journal. “I started to write seriously in 1973,” Scott says. “That first year I produced four novels. The first was not literate, the second, barely, but it managed to attract a literary agent, Henry Morrison, who sold the third. When I handed him the fourth, Henry explained one hardcover novel a year was considered a stately pace.”
Unwilling to bide his time, Scott came up with a pen name, and Morrison went shopping for a new publisher. What originally seemed like a good idea turned into a can of worms when Justin Scott’s Many Happy Returns, and “J.S. Blazer’s,” Deal Me Out, were both nominated as Best First Mystery Novel by the Mystery Writers of America. “I had to call the Mystery Writers and explain I was Justin Scott and J.S. Blazer,” Scott says, laughing. “That proved a lot easier than coming clean with two publishers.”
After writing two more mysteries under his own name, and another by J. S. Blazer, Scott decided to shift gears and take a crack at thrillers. Between 1978 and 1994, Justin Scott wrote eight novels, including his biggest hit, The Shipkiller. The plot follows a sailor’s quest to avenge the death of his wife after the Leviathan, a million-ton supertanker runs down their sailboat. Reviewing The Shipkiller in Time magazine, Michael Demarest wrote, “As heady as Francis Chichester’s narrative, with a draught of Melville and a slosh of Joshua Slocum.”
In addition to his thrillers, Scott was also busy with a mystery series centered around Ben Abbott, a small-town Connecticut real estate agent who alternates between selling center-staircase Cape Cods and freelance sleuthing. After four Ben Abbott books - the series was twice nominated for the Edgar Allen Poe Award - Scott wanted to write a sequel to The Shipkiller. Concerned publishers would be hesitant to buy a thriller since Scott was now considered a mystery writer, so Morrison suggested another pen name. When Scott pointed out the book was a sequel and the main characters, although ten years older, were the same, Morrison assured him, “Don’t worry, everyone you ever met in publishing has been fired.”
“Suddenly,” Scott says, “I was also ‘Paul Garrison,’ an international businessman based in Hong Kong whose seagoing grandfather wandered the South Seas in the last of the square-rigged trading vessels.” Morrison sold Fire and Ice to HarperCollins and the book was published in March 1999. Although the reviews were glowing, one astute reader questioned the author’s originality. “As an avid sailor, I appreciate the accuracy of Garrison’s portrayal, but he obviously read and enjoyed Justin Scott’s The Shipkiller.”
Everything was fine until Hollywood showed an interest in Fire and Ice. Scott and Morrison, remembering their earlier problems with J. S. Blazer, went to see a copyright lawyer. “We registered Paul Garrison as a ‘real’ person,” Scott says. “The Library of Congress needed a birthday, and the lawyer asked me how old I wanted to be.” Scott laughs, “Shamelessly, Paul Garrison bounded down that narrow staircase ten years younger than Justin Scott was when he plodded up them.”
Scott produced four more sea tales under Paul Garrison’s name, but the pen-name game occasionally caused problems. Editors who asked to meet Garrison were politely informed the author’s high-power business dealings in the Orient made it impossible for him to fly to New York, much less go out on book tours. While Scott was writing Paul Garrison’s thrillers, the Ben Abbott mysteries had been moved to the back burner. “Small talk among old acquaintances,” Scott says, “began to touch upon the question of my death. Those I occasionally bumped into at a party would suddenly exclaim their glass was empty and flee to the bar, afraid to ask where my career had gone.”
When the elusive Paul Garrison was invited to attend an important book event at London’s Barbican Performing Arts Centre, Scott initially declined. “Too many people in British publishing knew me,” he says. “My cover would be blown. But after some thought, I decided it was too important to miss, and contacted the event’s organizers. I told them I would be having lunch with the writer Justin Scott and his fiancée. Could they come too? They said, ‘Why not?’”
Scott prevailed upon an old friend, John Mincarelli, to play the part of Paul Garrison. The trio, Scott and Amber Edwards (she and Scott are now married), along with “Paul Garrison,” spent the night hobnobbing with England’s publishing elite. Mincarelli, a professor of fashion merchandising at New York’s Fashion Institute is, according to Scott, “strikingly handsome. He was dressed like a million bucks and my British editor fell completely in love with him - not me.”
In 2006, Scott revealed the truth about Paul Garrison’s real name in an article in The Boston Globe. “Paul has gone sailing,” he admitted. “Justin has reemerged with a new novel in the Ben Abbott series, [McMansion, Poisoned Pen Press]. I’m turning the Garrison website into the Garrison/Justin Scott website. It’s really nice to be able to meet my editor’s face-to-face and have dinner.”
Barbara Peters was not alone in recommending Scott for the new series. Peter Lampack and Henry Morrison were old friends, and with Clive’s approval, Scott was signed on to write the sequel to The Chase. “When we were going through the process,” Scott says, “somebody wanted to know if I thought it would be a problem to write in a western voice. I explained I doubt it. I’ve been reading my father’s westerns since I was a kid.”
Scott’s role as Clive’s collaborator has had a major impact on his career. “There were two reasons to accept. Obviously, collaborating with a mega-bestselling writer offered the opportunity to clamber aboard The New York Times bestseller list. I had done very well for myself, but when it comes to selling lots and lots of books, he has done it better. Collaborating with Clive is like winning a fellowship to do graduate work at any Ivy League university. He knows how never to be boring - even for one sentence. Every sentence must serve the story and nothing but the story. Clive will go through a scene, identify what Georges Simenon called ‘the beautiful sentences,’ and skewer them ruthlessly. Entire scenes must also prove their right to exist, as must asides, writer’s observations, mental dithering, and authorial thinking out loud - if they serve the story they stay, if they don’t, they’re out.”
Co-writing the Isaac Bell series has made Scott realize he “is more collegial than I thought, and less the gnarly lone wolf I fancied myself to be. Looking back on the early days of my career, I realize editors were still at the center of publishing and there was a lot of collaboration in the writing of books. Clive has revived that atm
osphere of making things together, and for that I am grateful.”
Clive and Janet were married at the Royal Palm Spa in Scottsdale on June 29, 2008. After a simple ceremony, the bride, groom, and fifty family members and friends were directed to an adjacent, elegantly decorated room where they enjoyed dinner and celebrated the couple’s union. During the ceremony, the music included Heaven’s Rain, a song composed by Nils Lofgren. Janet had no idea what to get Clive for a wedding present, so she had asked Lofgren to write a song for the ceremony.
“My wife Amy and I are grateful for Clive and his family’s friendship,” Lofgren says. “I was honored to work up a tune for the wedding.”
“I have always been a fan of Dirk Pitt,” Lofgren says “In 1989, I was touring with Ringo Starr’s All-Starr Band. In Denver, I did some friendly stalking and invited Clive and his family to the concert. We’ve been friends ever since.”
Lofgren moved to Scottsdale in 2003, and one evening Clive confessed he had, “always wanted to write a corny country song.” With Clive providing the vocals, and Lofgren the music, the duo came up with What Ever Happened to Muscatel?, a song “with humorous reminiscences to liquors gone by.”
Four months after they were married, Clive and Janet flew to Denver for Cussler Con 2008, an event celebrating all things associated with the “Grand Master of Adventure.” On the evening of October 5, a crowd gathering in front of the Ramada Plaza Hotel “oohed and aahed” as a dashing 1932 Auburn V-12 Boattail Speedster glided to a stop. At the wheel was Dirk Cussler, accompanied by his sister Dayna. A few moments later, a 1933 American Austin pulled in behind the Auburn. After unfolding his lanky frame from the diminutive car, Clive stood and waved at the cheering throng.
For three days, attendees socialized with Clive and four of his co-writers - Dirk Cussler, Paul Kemprecos, Jack Du Brul, and Grant Blackwood - toured the Cussler Museum, and enjoyed a banquet and address by author Steve Barry. Members lined up afterward to have the authors sign their towering piles of books.