Clive Eric Cussler

Background

Ethnicity: His mother Amy's ancestors were from England and his father Eric was from Germany.

Clive Eric Cussler was born on July 15, 1931, in Aurora, Illinois, and grew up in Alhambra, California. He is the son of Eric E. and Amy (Hunnewell) Cussler.

Education

Clive attended Pasadena City College for two years and then enlisted in the United States Air Force during the Korean War. He received the Doctor of Philosophy in Maritime History from New York State Maritime College in 1997.

Career

After the military, Cussler worked in advertising for 15 years and began writing fiction only after his first wife, Barbara (who died in 2003), started working nights. Cussler decided to play with what he knew or could imagine about underwater exploration. Pitt was cast as the troubleshooter and ultimately the director of an organization Cussler imagined: the National Underwater Marine Agency, which discovered and conserved shipwreck artifacts.

It took him three years to find a publisher. He didn’t hit the bestseller until his third Pitt adventure, Raise the Titanic!, was released in 1976. It imagines Pitt and his crew actually raising the remains of the Titanic, which may contain a rare mineral sought by the CIA and Soviet spies.

Three years later, Cussler turned a fictional device into fact. He organized a nonprofit agency aimed at finding and preserving maritime history. As in his novels, he called it the National Underwater Marine Agency. It has found more than 60 underwater wrecks, including the remains of the Carpathia, which had rescued Titanic survivors and the Confederate submarine, the H.L. Hunley, sunk in Charleston Harbor. “We are not treasure hunters,” he says. “We go after shipwrecks and artifacts and donate them to museums or government agencies.”

In 1997, Cussler’s first nonfiction book about underwater exploration, The Sea Hunters, triggered what he thought was going to be an honorary doctorate from the State University of New York Maritime College in the Bronx. But in an unprecedented surprise, the college awarded Cussler an actual doctorate, accepting his book as the equivalent of a Ph.D. thesis.

His past international bestsellers include Pacific Vortex, Mediterranean Caper, Iceberg, Raise the Titanic, Vixen 03, Night Probe, Deep Six, Cyclops, Treasure, Dragon, Sahara, Inca Gold, Shock Wave, Zero Hour, Ghost Ship and Clive Cussler Dirk Pitt Revealed.

His 2001 novel Valhalla Rising featured a sci-fi Viking mythology set in Tarrytown and other locations of the Hudson River Valley of Westchester County, New York. Valhalla, New York is famous for its sea of graveyards near Kensico where many famous personalities are buried. The name of the community came from a 19th Century fan of Richard Wagner and her own interest in Norse mythology. In 1994, Mark Guglielmo drew attention to the connection between Vikings and Valhalla, when he murdered his wife in Florida and then disposed of her bisected corpse twenty miles apart in the Hudson River and at a location near Bedford while attempting to imitate portions of a Viking funeral.

Cussler is also the author, with Paul Kemprecos, of the first in a new Dirk Pitt spinoff series - The NUMA files. He is represented by the Bartholomeaux Agency.

Paramount Pictures released Sahara on April 8, 2005, starring Matthew McConaughey as Dirk Pitt, Steve Zahn as Al Giordino, William H. Macy as Admiral Sandecker, and Penelope Cruz as Eva Rojas. Cussler and the studio have filed lawsuits against each other in a disagreement over whether the film departs too severely from the novel.

Cussler has sold over 100 million copies of his Dirk Pitt Adventures. He continues to write Dirk Pitt adventures while living a life that nearly parallels that of his action hero. Like Pitt, Dr. Cussler enjoys discovering and collecting things of historical significance. With NUMA (National Underwater & Marine Agency, a non-profit group begun by Cussler) he has had an amazing record of finding over 60 shipwrecks, one of which was the long-lost Confederate submarine, Hunley. And recently discovered the rescue ship Carpathia who picked up the Titanic survivors. Dr. Cussler also has a renowned and extensive classic car collection, which features over 80 examples of custom coachwork.

Achievements

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  Cussler's books have been published in more than 40 languages in more than 100 countries. Past New York Times and international bestsellers include Pacific Vortex, Mediterranean Caper, Iceberg, Raise the Titanic, Atlantis Found, and Trojan Odyssey; more recent bestsellers include Piranha (written with Boyd Morrison), The Assassin (written with Justin Scott), Ghost Ship (written with Graham Brown), The Eye of Heaven (written with Russell Blake), Crescent Dawn, Poseidon’s Arrow and Havana Storm (the last three written with his son Dirk Cussler).
  
  Also, Cussler is an internationally recognized authority on shipwrecks and the founder of the National Underwater and Marine Agency, (NUMA) a 501C3 non-profit organization (named after the fictional Federal agency in his novels). He and his crew of marine experts and NUMA volunteers have discovered more than 60 historically significant underwater wreck sites including the first submarine to sink a ship in battle, the Confederacy's Hunley, and its victim, the Union's Housatonic; the U-20, the U-boat that sank the Lusitania; the Cumberland, which was sunk by the famous ironclad, Merrimack; the renowned Confederate raider Florida; the Navy airship, Akron, the Republic of Texas Navy warship, Zavala, found under a parking lot in Galveston, and the Carpathia, which sank almost six years to-the-day after plucking Titanic's survivors from the sea. He has been honored with the Lowell Thomas Award for outstanding underwater exploration.

Works

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  • Night Probe!

    (In the midst of an international crisis, Heidi Milligan, ...)

    1981
  • The Gray Ghost

    (In 1906, a groundbreaking Rolls-Royce prototype known as ...)

    2018
  • Sea of Greed

    (After an explosion in the Gulf of Mexico destroys three o...)

    2018
  • The Rising Sea

    (An alarming rise in the world's sea levels - much larger ...)

    2018
  • Odessa Sea

    (Dirk Pitt, the director of the National Underwater and Ma...)

    2016
  • Raise the Titanic!

    (The President's secret task force has developed an unprec...)

    1976
  • Treasure of Khan

    (Oceanic explorers Dirk Pitt and Al Giordino find intrigue...)

    2006
  • The Emperor's Revenge

    (When a bank heist during the Monaco Grand Priz decimates ...)

    2016
  • Pirate

    (When husband and wife treasure hunters Sam and Remi Fargo...)

    2016
  • The Mediterranean Caper

    (First novel in Dirk Pitt series introducing this heroic p...)

    1973
  • Nighthawk

    (When the most advanced aircraft ever designed vanishes ov...)

    2017
  • Typhoon Fury

    (Hired to search for a collection of paintings worth half ...)

    2017
  • Shadow Tyrants

    (Nearly two thousand years ago, an Eastern emperor charged...)

    2018
  • Blue Gold

    (From deep within the Venezuelan rain forest emanates the ...)

    2000
  • The Titanic Secret

    (A century apart, NUMA Director Dirk Pitt and detective Is...)

    2019
  • Treasure

    (391 AD: Fanatics destroy the greatest storehouse of knowl...)

    1988
  • The Romanov Ransom

    (In 1918, a ransom of enormous size was paid to free the R...)

    2017
  • Ice Fortress

    (A high-octane, fast-paced, action-packed Jack Coulson thr...)

    2017
  • Poseidon's Arrow

    (It is the greatest advance in American defense technology...)

    2012
  • Mayday!

    (Major Dirk Pitt picked up the frantic distress call as he...)

    1988
  • The Gangster

    (It is 1906, and in New York City, the Italian crime group...)

    2016
  • Final Option

    (Juan Cabrillo and his team of expert operatives return in...)

    2019
  • Untitled Fargo 12

    (Clive Cussler comes to a new adventure featuring the husb...)

  • Inca Gold

    (Nearly five centuries ago a fleet of boats landed mysteri...)

    1994
  • Journey of the Pharaohs

    (In 1927, a daredevil American aviator vanishes on an atte...)

  • Vixen 03

    (Dirk Pittman sets out to stop terrorists who want to blow...)

    1978
  • The Secret of the King's Tomb

    (A deep secret that only one man knew… until the whole wor...)

    2019
  • Serpent

    (Kurt Austin is the courageous leader of the NUMA explorat...)

    1999
  • Celtic Empire

    (A deadly collision in the waterways off the city of Detro...)

    2019
  • Piranha

    (In 1902, the volcano Mt. Pelée erupts on the island of Ma...)

    2015
  • The Cutthroat

    (The year is 1911. Chief Investigator Isaac Bell of the Va...)

    2017
  • The Oracle

    (In 533 A.D., the last Vandal ruler in North Africa consul...)

    2019
  • Sahara 1992

Views

Cussler's novels, like those of Michael Crichton, are examples of techno-thrillers that do not use military plots and settings. Where Crichton strove for scrupulous realism, however, Cussler prefers fantastic spectacles and outlandish plot devices. The Pitt novels, in particular, have the anything-goes quality of the James Bond or Indiana Jones movies, while also sometimes borrowing from Alistair MacLean's novels. Pitt himself is a larger-than-life hero reminiscent of Doc Savage and other characters from pulp magazines.

Like the filmmaker Quentin Tarantino, or, perhaps more relevantly, beloved author Kurt Vonnegut, it’s not uncommon to find Cussler making a cameo in his own works. What began as a sort of joke during the writing of his 1990 novel Dragon took on a life of its own when Cussler’s editors neglected to remove his inclusion of himself as a minor character. Since then, his roles within his own work have grown more frequent and more significant, often involving the fictionalized Cussler providing his protagonist with a crucial piece of information at a climactic plot moment.

Quotations: “The biggest challenge usually is not the beginning or the end,” Clive says, “but the middle, keeping the action moving.”

“After I put the kids to bed, I had nothing to do and no one to talk to, so I thought I’d write an adventure story. But it’s not like I had the great American novel burning in me.”

"In a way, I don’t really see myself as an author. I feel I’m more an entertainer than anything else. It’s my job to entertain the readers so when they reach the end of the book, they feel they’ve gotten their money’s worth."

"If you have some natural talent and really want to write, you should read the books of someone who’s very successful in your genre. You don’t want to plagiarize, but you want to learn from that author. You study the structure, style, and characterizations he employs. Hemingway always said he studied Dostoyevsky. There’s a great story about Thomas Wolfe when he was in the Merchant Marines. He came ashore, went to an old bookstore and bought James Joyce’s Ulysses, which is about the size of a telephone book. He went back to the ship and over the next few months, copied Ulysses down in a notebook, word-for-word. When he finished, he threw the notebook off the ship’s stern. His shipmates couldn’t believe what he’d done after spending months copying the book. They asked why he’d thrown it overboard. His answer, "Because now I know how to write a book."

Membership

Clive Cussler is a member of the National Society Oceanographers, the New York Explorers Club (Lowell Thomas Underwater Explorers award), of the Royal Geography Society London, and of the Classic Car ClubAm.

Personality

Cussler’s own life and career is a blend of imagination and reality, art that imitates life and life inspired by art. As an Air Force mechanic in Hawaii during the Korean War, he discovered a passion for scuba diving when it was so new, “we had to send to France, to (Jacques) Cousteau for the tanks.”

He enjoys two other passions: collecting antique guns and antique cars, which often are mentioned in his novels. (In The Assassin, Bell drives a red Locomobile, an early luxury vehicle.) Cussler’s daughter, Teri, turned his collection of 100 classic cars, including a 1911 Locomobile, into the Cussler Museum in Arvada, Colorado.

Interests

• retro cars

• Sport & Clubs

  scuba diving

Connections

Clive Cussler was married two times. His first wife was Barbara Knight, whom he married on August 28, 1955 (deceased 2003). They had three children: Teri, Dirk, and Dayna. His second wife's name is Janet, whom he met in 2005.

Father:

Eric E. Cussler

Mother:

Amy (Hunnewell) Cussler

co-author:

Graham E. Brown

late wife:

Barbara Knight

Daughter:

Dayna Gayle Cussler

Son:

Dirk Cussler

Dirk was born in 1961. He is an American author. He is the son of best selling author Clive Cussler and a co-author of several Dirk Pitt adventure novels, as well as being the namesake for the Pitt character.

Son:

Teri Cussler

Wife:

Janet Cussler

co-author:

Boyd Morrison

He is an American thriller novelist, actor and former Jeopardy! champion. He has co-authored two books with The New York Times fiction best-seller Clive Cussler.

co-author:

Justin Scott

Scott has written fourteen books under his own name, including the Ben Abbott Mystery series. He has written seven books under the pseudonym Paul Garrison and two under the pseudonym J. S. Blazer. He has coauthored ten books with Clive Cussler. These are the Isaac Bell series.

References

• Author Clive Cussler's Official Website