Welcome to the book show A Celebration of Reading and Writers.
I'm Joe Donaue.
When Clive Cusler published his first novel in 1973, he knew he didn't want to write
a familiar kind of character, no spy or detective or undercover investigator.
His hero would have grand adventures set on or underwater.
Cusler named him Dirk Pitt and his organization The National Underwater and Marine Agency,
or Numa, became a beloved literary series and character and they were born.
The first book was the Mediterranean Caper.
It's now being published in a hardcover 40th anniversary edition with a new preface
by the author and it is a great pleasure to welcome Clive Cusler to the book show.
Thank you very much for being with us, sir.
Oh, Joe, it's a pleasure.
Thank you.
Thank you very much.
It's always a delight to speak to you.
Is it hard for you to believe or can you put in context 40 years?
No, it's really.
I can't put it into a good context, but I'm still astounded.
I just, you know, when I started writing, I had no idea where it was going to go and
as I'd be around all these years, you know, comes as a surprise also.
What led you to want to write?
You had a strong background in much of what you write about, but at what point did you
say, okay, this is going to be the day job?
My wife decided to take, go back to work and she took an interesting job with a local
police department working nights in uniform, but you know, dispatch your secretary.
So I'd come home, feed the kids, put them to bed, and then nobody would talk to you and
just just popped into my mind, gosh, I think I'll write a book.
And not having the great American novel, you know, inside me, I thought, be fun to do
a paperback series, which was popular at the time.
And so I studied all the series heroes beginning in Spectre DuPont, who was the first
Edgar Allen Poe, and Sherlock Holmes and James Bond and Travis McGee and all of them.
And after four months, I thought, well, what can I do that's different?
So I took my hero and put him in and around water and we went from there.
And your background was not naval, it was the Air Force.
Yes, I know, but and that's funny.
I should have made pit coming out of the Navy, but I hadn't come out of the Air Force because
I was familiar with that end of it.
You write in the preface to the Mediterranean, Kaper, and the new edition that you vividly
remember telling your first story at like four years old?
Yes, my parents used to take me to the library and leave me when they went to town on Saturday
night.
And so it was just, I was very young, but I could read really well.
And so I turned in a book report on Gone with the Wind and the teacher, of course, she said
you couldn't have possibly read this book.
And I said, well, I did, I did.
She called my mother, who of course backed me up.
And she was quite surprised on that.
And I said to review on one called Hell in the Foreign Legion and they sent me home because
that was an nasty in those days.
When you started to write and which fueled the other in the sense of your, was it a fascination
with a maritime history that you wanted to explore and your novel writing allowed that
or it was through the novel writing that you became fascinated with the subject?
It was through the novel writing because I'd always been like the challenge of going out
with my friend of mine and I used to go out in the desert and look for old lost gold
mines and ghost towns and what have you.
And when I read a book that said the Bon Am Richard John Paul Jones ship had never been
found, it just intrigued me.
So I put together an expedition which was kind of a disaster.
And then put together another one which was much bitter.
And then some years later, every so often I'd go out and look.
Now we've covered about 1,100 square miles and we still haven't found it.
You look at the Mediterranean paper.
The book comes out 40 years ago.
It was followed by iceberg and they were well received but really it wasn't until the
third book raises the Titanic that you really hit.
That was the breakthrough book as they call it.
I remember the, I got $7,500 for the hard cover and then they were going into the paperback
auction which my agent described how that works.
So my wife was working at Memorix and she walked out the door.
I said, oh, when it gets up to 250,000, I'll call you and you can quit.
And we had a hardy laugh over that.
At 10 o'clock I called her and said, you can quit and she walked right in, gave two
weeks notice.
Well, and there's no figuring that out, right?
As to what hits with the public of what it is that it was about that novel.
Oh, no, it's hard to say.
Well, the Titanic of course was with even a school child was very well known and everyone
was deepened in the mystery and there was like kind of goofy talk about raising it.
I thought, well, what if they did?
So I just put together a story and raised the Titanic.
Moving back to the Mediterranean paper, when you read the book now and looking at this
new edition, to me, it's still, it's so vibrant and it holds up so well and being a fan
of the character and of the series, it's wonderful.
It's been quite some time since I had read it.
So it's nice to revisit it and see how this character was born.
Did you go back and read it and what were your thoughts?
Yes, about a year ago was the first time I'd gone back and read it in 39 years and I was
surprised.
I said it was better than I thought it was.
So, but yeah, it was, it was just, I knew then I could write, but it just still was,
you know, almost a wonderment to me that I could type a prologue and then type the epilogue.
So it was great fun.
You write in the preface that you like to create different situations that most authors
don't attempt instead of pit becoming immortal like James Bond.
I've added years to his existence.
We grew older together, although I age must faster than he did when we started out together.
We were both 34.
Now he's around 46 and you are 82 now.
So having just had a birthday.
So from the beginning and I alluded to this in the introduction, from the beginning,
there were things that were very stationary within the fiction world of this genre that
you wanted to avoid.
Well, I wanted to make it entertaining.
I wasn't thinking of making it some big area diet, you know, book.
I've always considered myself more as an entertainer than just a writer.
And my job is to entertain the reader in such a manner that when they reach the end
of the book, they feel they got their money's worth.
The classic cars were there from the very beginning.
Yes, I was collecting and then after about, I guess, the fifth book I thought, gosh,
Pit and I should be driving the same car.
So I had the picture taken on the back of the jacket and I'd be standing behind whatever
car that the pit drove in the book.
And that distance, you know, nobody ever could recognize me, which was kind of fun.
And it worked out very well.
So it's fun to pick a car out, you know, an old car, a dozen bird or whatever and have
Pit driving in the book.
It's great fun.
And you're in the book.
Yes, I did that as well.
I was writing a chapter where Pit was at a concourse with his, you know, a stud's
car with a barricade.
And he walked over to this old white hair fellow with a beard and he said, oh, my name's
Dr. Pit.
And I just typing away and I said, hi, I'm Clive Cusler.
And I thought, well, that was dumb.
So, but the more I thought about it, I thought, oh, the readers would get a laugh out of it.
So I left it in.
And my God, I got 600 letters on that.
So I have to have my little walk on every pit book.
That Hitchcockian moment where you show up.
Exactly.
What was the original thought from the publisher?
He wasn't happy about it, but I said, oh, what the heck, you know, that's going to hurt
anything.
So, yeah, I left it in.
It's just become a tradition now.
Is it possible for you to analyze success in the sense of, we touched on this with the
Titanic book, but as far as understanding what strikes accord with readers, what it
is they like about you and what it is they like about the stories that you tell?
Well, I never thought about liking me, but the stories there again, I try to make it stories
that are fascinating and interesting that the reader can really get into.
And I've 15 years in advertising, I couldn't write Hemingway or Duff Scheske or any of them,
but I could write so that it was very easily, oh, my writing is very easily understood and
read by children as young as eight, I know.
So it's been kind of a fun time to really just try to, you know, not thinking of money
or anything else, but just trying to turn out a fun book for the reader.
Clive Kusler is our guest, the 40th anniversary edition of his first Dirk Pit novel, The
Mediterranean Caper, has been re-released by Putnam in Hardcover.
When you think of your career and you look at the stories that you tell, you frequently
do take on an alternative history perspective, how did you arrive at that of basically a curiosity
that would say what happens if they went right instead of left?
Well, trying to come up with something unique like Mediterranean Caper, where this old
world war one airplane shows up and then strafes the hell out of American jet base.
So it was just the incongruity there and the fun part.
And so I think that got me started on the history in the prologue.
And one side situation is I had an old school chum by the name of Lee Hunt.
In every prologue, you know, they'd find the body or there'd be a ship embedded nice
in the dead sailors or something.
But there was always a Lee Hunt.
And the old buddy Lee said, you know, why can't I stay in the book as a hero or something?
And he always killed me off.
And I said, don't complain.
I made you famous.
As I mentioned in the introduction, there are five series that you do.
And that gives you a lot of leeway, I would think, to work with different characters.
And sometimes have them interchange and show up in books and not show up in books.
But even for a writer of series fiction, you do perhaps have more latitude than most,
who write in that genre.
Yeah, well, that's true.
And then the trick is, after 40 years, 55 books, it gets harder to come up with a plot
I haven't used before.
I mean, writing a line of, you know, dialogue and I'll say, oh, hell, I use that same line's
six books back.
So it's trying to, you know, make it always interesting.
And as you see, I like the historical part that started off with.
And hopefully, it's interesting about my writing.
And like other authors that I have my beginning, my historical end, the first third of the
book.
And I have an ending to work towards, but very often I don't have a middle when I start.
And it just seems to develop.
Robert B. Parker, the great mystery novelist used to tell me that the thing that keeps
you honest is the fans that if you write that line that perhaps you wrote six books ago,
it could go past you, it could go past the people who read it the first couple of times,
it could go past an editor, but invariably would not go past the readers.
Well, it's hard to say because I think it was night probe.
I ended the book by having pits, you know, the situation at the end, develop in the
Delus airport.
And then I thought, no, Kennedy works better.
So I made him, you know, the end varies Kennedy.
And at the very, very last sentence in the end, he gets in his Ford Cobra and drives off
towards the lights of Washington.
Now, that's only 400 miles.
And hopefully he ever picked me up on that.
But you know.
And so it makes you more cautious, I assume, in the future.
Yes, it does.
Well, there again, I remember in iceberg, I referred to a boy and the girl as identical twins.
And it doesn't hardly work that way.
The national underwater and marine agency that you write about, Numa, became real and
became a nonprofit organization, which was dedicating to, dedicated to locating these
long lost vessels and obviously to help preserve maritime and naval history.
What was it that said, okay, I can, that you could achieve this and, and to make it real?
Well, I started, because it intrigued me when I found out that John Paul Jones, the
Bon Arm, Bon Arm Richard had never been found.
And so that started it.
And it just, I was hooked.
Yeah, I went back the next year.
And then I started looking for the Confederate submarine, the Hunley, and eventually found
that one.
I still haven't found the Bon Arm Richard and we've covered 1,200 square miles.
But it just became a challenge.
And so many of the ships had such a great history.
I thought, Philip called me and he said, you said, would you like to go down in the Titanic?
And I said, I'm kind of tired of the Titanic.
And he said, it only cost you 30,000 dollars.
And he said, and I know it would, I'm not going.
And I got the thinking, all this stuff about Titanic, what about the Carpathia, this marvelous
story of the ship that race to pick up the survivors.
And I thought it was probably scrapped.
And then I researched it out and found it was torpedoed in World War I off Ireland.
So we nailed it on the third try.
And so it's the Mary Celeste, the great ghost ship that was found floating with nobody
on board.
We found that one and that was a great thrill.
So sometimes you're lucky, sometimes you're not.
Shipwrecks are never found when they want to be found.
And when they are found, they're never where they're supposed to be.
And I guess a lot of times it has to do with the motive behind finding it.
I mean, you're a nonprofit organization, which is different than many other groups that
are out looking for this stuff.
Yeah, I know my accountant thinks I belong in a rubber room under restraint because I've
never looked for treasure.
So no, it's history with me.
And I just enjoy it.
And I'm the only one that's out there for nonprofit, I guess.
Everyone else wants to find a treasure chest of gold.
So let's take the Hunley for example.
1995 you discover it.
It's this Confederate submarine that had been lost since 1864 in the Charleston harbor.
Looking at what does that, what do we learn from that?
Oh, there's so much in the Hunley.
Number one, that was the first submarine in history to ever sink a warship when it blew
up the frigate who's atomic, but it never came back.
It was lost and nobody knew what happened to it.
And we finally started searching in areas, which didn't seem likely.
And that's when we really stumbled onto it.
My director there, the Expeditions' Ralph Wilbanks, I had to go home and write another book
to pay for all this foolishness.
And he called me at 5 a.m.
He said, well, we're not going to look for the Hunley anymore.
And I said, oh, are you giving up?
And he said, no, we found it.
Quite a surprise.
And then a fellow by the name of Warren Lash really got behind it.
Like millions and they build a conservation lab.
And then in 2000, they raised it.
And she's now sitting in a tank being conserved.
And does that help inform future books and add to your knowledge base in writing about
this character and writing about all the characters?
Oh, I suppose one rubs off on the other a little bit.
I've never really used very well.
I haven't used much at all on the actual history and putting in my books.
I'll refer to something.
I did use the Titanic in one.
But so many of the restrooms, I just took a ship and maybe dreamed it up from what I
knew about other wrecks.
And it's fun to come up with a twist.
Just like, I forget the day of the book so many.
But the ship sinks in this horrendous storm.
And in the end of the book, it turns out it's not in the ocean.
It sank in Lake Superior, which has storms that are equal and worse to the ocean.
Sailors, water sailors will say that the great lakes are worse because in the ocean, the
storm and the wind come from one direction.
And like the great lakes, it can come from one direction, ten minutes and ten minutes
later, it's from another direction.
And that's like what sent the Edmund Fitzgerald to the bottom.
Numa was also responsible for discovering the remains of the General Slokum, the worst
maritime disaster in New York City history.
Yes, yes, we did.
We studied that one.
An amazing thing about that.
And same thing with a book called the Sultana that sank off Memphis and killed, they figured
maybe 2000 was the fact that people would rather burn alive than drowned.
It was just like they wouldn't jump in the water to be rescued.
They just stayed on the ship and were burned.
So we did find the remains of the General Slokum down off New Jersey later on.
You mentioned, of course, all of the series and the Mediterranean caper is being re-released,
but the brand new book, A Novel from the Numa Files is Zero Hour, which is a Kurt Austin
adventure.
And it's written with Graham Brown.
You have taken to write with co-authors.
Has that come with age at a point where you like to be more of the idea guy?
No, it was the publisher that came after me.
They said, can you do another book?
Look, a couple of characters like Dirk Pitt and El Jardino.
I said, well, I guess.
So I got another author and we worked together and came up with Kurt Austin and Joseph
Ollum.
And then pretty soon they asked another one and the Oregon, which was this ship.
It's a tramp steamer, but underneath it's this exotic weapons and then go paintings
hanging on the bulkheads.
And then I always wanted to do a western, but I didn't want to do one of the stagecoaches,
cowboy's bandits and all that.
I made it in 1906.
So I could use old automobile, sold motorcycles through in the San Francisco earthquake.
And that was an Isaac Bell detective series.
And then I thought there was no husband and wife series out there.
So then we created a couple that goes around and they look for treasure.
The phargos are remy and sand.
So it's kind of a fun thing to have these various avenues to try other things.
And in the more recent Dirk pet novels, you write with your son?
Yes.
He was, oh, he had an MBA and then he was a financial expert there for 13 years, analyst,
analyst.
And he got tired of it.
He just said after 13 years, he couldn't do it anymore.
So I said, okay, why don't you write a Dirk pet book?
He said, well, I can't do that.
And I said, sure, you can.
I'll help you.
And so he did a really nice job on Black Wind, which was the first one, in which showed
that he could write.
So he's written, I think the next last, next four.
And now he's on the fifth.
Genetics, right?
Well, I think actually basically is a better writer than I was, but I like to think there
is some genetics there.
When you look at your career as a whole and this body of work that you have currently,
what are you proud of?
Oh, I guess the perseverance more than anything because in the beginning, I just, you know,
a year went by and another year went by three.
But my agent took in three years to get me published, blesses, so Peter Lampack.
And so that was it was the perseverance of hanging in because people after raise the Titanic,
they say, congratulations on your overnight success.
And I'd say, yeah, 11 years.
So it's real he is.
Where I am, it's just amazing to me, probably more than anyone.
Well, the reissue of the first Dirk Pit novel is the Mediterranean Caper.
It is published by Putnam.
The newest new book is zero hour.
A novel from the Numa files, a Kurt Austin adventure, also published by Putnam, Clive
Custler.
Thank you so much for being with us.
It's a real pleasure to have you.
Thank you, Joe.
I really get it.
I'm thankful.
Thank you very much.
We enjoy hearing from our listeners about the show.
You can email us at book at wamc.org.
You can listen again to this or find past book shows at wamc.org.
Sarah Laduke produces our program book markets for next week.
And thanks for listening for the book show.
I'm Joe Donaue.
