NEW YORK — Clive Cussler, the million-selling journey author and real-life thrill-seeker who wove private particulars and spectacular fantasies into his page-turning novels about underwater explorer Dirk Pitt, has died, his writer stated Wednesday.
Cussler died Monday at his dwelling in Scottsdale, Arizona, stated Alexis Welby, spokeswoman for writer Penguin Random House. He was 88. The trigger was not disclosed.
Cussler dispatched Pitt and pal Al Giordino on unique missions highlighted by shipwrecks, treachery, espionage and exquisite ladies, in standard works together with “Cyclops,’’ “Night Probe!” and his industrial breakthrough, “Raise the Titanic!”
Cussler was an Illinois native who was raised in Southern California and lived in Arizona for many of his remaining years, however he despatched Pitt across the globe in plots that ranged from the daring to the unimaginable. “The Treasure” options an aspiring Aztec despot who murders an American envoy, the hijacking of a aircraft carrying the United Nations secretary-general and troopers from historical Rome looting the Library of Alexandria. In “Iceberg,” the presidents of French Guiana and the Dominican Republic are those at risk, throughout a go to to Disneyland. In “Sahara,” a race throughout the desert one way or the other results in new details about the assassination of Abraham Lincoln.
“Again and again, Dirk Pitt, working for the fictional National Underwater and Marine Agency, must find a sunken vessel and retrieve some artifact,” Mark Schone, summarizing Cussler’s novels, wrote in The New York Times in 2004. “Evil forces, be they Commies or Blofeldian madmen, try to stop him. Along the way Pitt saves himself, the world and the damsel of the moment.”
Cussler has a brand new novel, “Journey of the Pharaohs,” set to be launched March 10, with a number of extra awaiting posthumous publication.
In actual life, Cussler based his personal National Underwater and Marine Agency and took part in dozens of searches for previous ships, together with one which turned up a steamship belonging to Cornelius Vanderbilt. He additionally had a protracted historical past of questionable claims — some admitted, some denied.
“He can definitely spin the tall tales and is a master of fiction. But that doesn’t mean I buy into his alleged discovery claims,” Dr. E. Lee Spence wrote on his weblog in 2011. Spence, a distinguished underwater archaeologist feuded with Cussler over which ones recovered a Confederate submarine.
Born an solely little one in 1931 in Aurora, Illinois, and raised in Alhambra, California, Cussler’s title and writing persona have the air of a pseudonym, however he was born along with his moniker, named for the British actor Clive Brook. He studied for 2 years at Pasadena City College earlier than enlisting within the Air Force and serving as a mechanic and flight engineer in the course of the Korean War.
In 1955, he married Barbara Knight, with whom he had three youngsters. Through a lot of the 1960s, he labored in promoting, as a copywriter and artistic director. Among the higher recognized slogans he helped coin — “It’s stronger than dirt,” for an Ajax laundry detergent marketing campaign.
In his free time, he was writing fiction and moonlighting at a skin-diving tools store, the place his spouse instructed he work to assist collect materials for his novels.
“When creating advertising, I had always looked at the competition and wondered what I could conceive that was totally different,” Cussler stated in an interview included in “Dirk Pitt Revealed,” a nonfiction e-book launched in 1998. “(James) Bond was becoming incredibly popular through the movies, and I knew I couldn’t match Ian Fleming’s style and prose. So I was determined not to write about a detective, secret agent or undercover investigator or deal in murder mysteries. My hero’s adventures would be based on and under water.”
Cussler completed manuscripts for “Mediterranean Caper” and “Iceberg,” however had no literary agent: so he created one. He bought a thousand sheets of…