"& Dirgo, Craig - Dirk Pitt - Clive Cussler and Dirk Pitt Revealed (b)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Cussler Clive)

Pacific Vortex 137
The Mediterranean Caper 147
Iceberg 156
Raise the Titanic! 166
Vixen 03 188
Night Probe! 213
Deep Six 242
Cyclops 271
Treasure 308
Dragon 345
Sahara 382
Inca Gold 417
Shock Wave 451
Flood Tide 485
Answers to Advanced Pitt Trivia 515
Prologue to Atlantis Found 517 vi

Foreword

"Nobody does it better than Clive Cussler, nobody.

Quote by Stephen Coontz for Cyclops Though I knew that authors rarelyresemble their protagonists, I could not help but wonder if CliveCussler would look like Dirk Pitt when I met him. He didn't exactly.

Unlike the hero of his books, Cussler had hair and beard of a pewtergray. He stood tall, but the years had added a few inches to hiswaist. The bluegreen eyes were bright, and he moved with the quicknessof a much younger man. His face bore the weathered wear of someone whospent half a lifetime in the great outdoors and gave him the look of anexplorer who had just returned from the jungles of the Congo or the icymountains of Antarctica. It didn't take much imagination to picturehim thirty years ago when he might easily have passed for Dirk Pitt'selder brother.

Hailed as the grand master of adventure novels, Cussler is about asdown-home as you can get. Although he writes in an incredible officethat he built in a Taos chapel style to match his adobe home, hedresses like the neighborhood handyman. He answers all his fan mail byhand, addressing fans by their first names as if they were old friends,often inserting a page from the original draft of his latest book as asouvenir. He's never hired a secretary, and his wife has never had apart-time housekeeper. "She cleans the house before the cleaning ladycomes," he explains.

It all goes with the Cussler image of an author who was once describedas following the beat of a drummer who was playing in a field on theother side of town. He does things few authors ever attempt. He oncebought one of his books back from the publisher.

He injects himself into his own stories as did Alfred Hitchcock in hismovies, except that Cussler utters dialogue to his hero, who neverrecognizes him. And he writes wild, far-fetched adventure tales withthe same cast of characters. A feat few writers attempt in this dayand age.

He and his agent, Peter Lampack, have negotiated book deals withpublishers that have been copied by the trade as models of ingenuity.

And, unlike all too many writers who peak after one or two books,Cussler incredibly seems to improve. Strangely, he never uses anoutline or writes more than one draft of a novel, and yet hiscomplicated plots have hit the best-seller lists in both fiction andnonfiction no fewer than fourteen times.

Relying on his many years of experience as a creative director inadvertising, he personally directed the design and layout of thejackets of his books, insisting on the same illustration for thehardcover as for the paperback for the sake of continuity. Instead ofthe pretentious black-and-white studio portraits that portray mostauthors on their book jackets, Cussler figured that since the frontillustration was in four colors, the author photo on the back might aswell be printed in color, thereby adding very little to the cost of thepublisher in the print run. He has his own photographer shoot the photoof himself with the Dirk Pitt classic car featured in the book and hashis illustrator set the type and do the overlay before sending it to thepublisher's production department.

When asked why the photos focus on the car while he stands in thebackground, Cussler responded, "I'm sure the reader finds an exoticautomobile of more interest than me."

What also sets Cussler apart is that he has a genuine fondness for DirkPitt. Both Conan Doyle and Ian Fleming hated their protagonists andtried to kill them off but were later forced to resurrect them after anoutcry by their reading public.

"He's a likable guy," Cussler says of Pitt. "I doubt whether he'll dieso long as I'm alive. Even then, I'm certain my agent and publisherwill find some other writer to pick up the flag and carry on after I goto the great beyond. As an adventure hero, Pitt is as timeless as theycome. Stories about lost treasure, like a bouquet of flowers to apretty girl, never go out of style."

Cussler has been called America's Jules Verne, but, unlike the famedFrench novelist of Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea, he doesn't sitand write day in and day out. As soon as he sends in the manuscript ofa Dirk Pitt adventure to his publisher, he heads for the water andsearches for a lost shipwreck. And when he isn't on the rolling deck ofa survey boat with his search crew, he collects, restores and maintainsa warehouse filled with more than eighty classic cars.

Several of the models and makes he owns are driven in his novels by DirkPitt. He also collects paintings by Southwest artists for his adobehome, while his office is filled with maritime paintings and models ofshipwrecks he and his crew have discovered.

It can be said that Cussler is a man for all seasons.

He is certainly in a class by himself apart from most writers I haveinterviewed. He is genuinely an interesting guy, down-to-earth,approachable, with a Rodney Dangerfield self-deprecating humor. Amodest man, he mounts his many achievement awards and certificates onthe walls of his office bathroom. Unlike more vain people who display asea of photographs of themselves standing with famous celebrities, thereare only two photos of Cussler to be found in his home or office.