Get away from your computer
Go see a Play
Get away from your computer
Go see a Play
By Carl Hilliard, Associated Press writer
TELLURIDE, Colo. -- Clive Cussler looks from the front window of his mountainside home, sees the noon sun highlight patches of summer wildflowers carpeting the Uncompahgre Range, and thinks about violent death.
The best-selling author envisions Dirk Pitt, the daring hero of Cussler novels, and Pitt's buddies, Rudi Gunn and Al Giordino, surrounded by the villains.
"They're all shooting away, and they're hit, and Giordino is sagging, and Pitt's holding him, and finally they go down in a big blaze of glory.
"That won't happen, of course," he chuckles.
It shouldn't happen.
Pitt, the tall, craggy-faced superhero of 13 novels who has subdued fiends of every stripe, has made Cussler millions of dollars. There are more than 70 million copies of his adventures in circulation.
Cussler, a lanky 6-footer with a beard and hair more white than gray, says he's a researcher who happens to be a writer, and isn't lofty enough to be "an author."
He punctuates his conversation with explosions of laughter, often directed at himself.
His new novel, "Flood Tide," matches Pitt and Gunn and Giordino against Qin Shang, a Chinese businessman who wants to undermine the U.S. economy by flooding the country with illegal immigrants. And Qin Shang also wants to find a sunken treasure that contains the bones of the ancient Peking Man.
It's wild and violent, and Cussler is weary of writing about it.
If he abandons Pitt, he might turn in another direction -- children's literature.
"I always wanted to do what Ian Fleming did, with 'Chitty Chitty Bang Bang,' the children's book about a magical racing automobile based on a real car," he says.
"Only I'd do a children's story based on the airplane flown in the first transcontinental flight in 1908. And I always wanted to do a Civil War epic."
His thoughts also turn to finding the wreckage of the Bonhomme Richard, the fighting vessel skippered by John Paul Jones in the War of 1812. It is somewhere in the North Sea. The search would be challenging but not impossible for Cussler, who's found many Civil War wrecks.
He'd also like to find the remains of the Paris-to-New York airplane that crashed in Maine, before Charles Lindbergh finally made it.
But Cussler also has a fine appreciation for the absurd. He'd like to write about rumored scandals involving, of all things, the Lawrence Welk band; the disappearance of Glenn Miller; what really happened to PT-109; and why Americans didn't really land on the moon.
His eyes twinkle. There is the hint of a smile.
"It's fun to speculate," he says. Speculation feeds imagination, and that generates cracking good fiction.
"I always wondered why nobody ever wrote a book about the Lawrence Welk band and the scandals involving the musicians and singers and all that wholesome entertainment," he says.
As for the Miller disappearance during World War II, he doesn't think the bandleader actually crashed in the English Channel. He thinks Miller actually died of cancer in an Army hospital in London.
He has been told John Kennedy's PT-109 wasn't sliced in half by a Japanese destroyer while patrolling at night in the South Pacific. "I've talked to some people who were in the South Pacific, and they say you could hear a destroyer for miles. I think those jokers aboard PT-109 were asleep when it happened.
"The PT boat's stern, with the engines and tubes, sank, but the bow was afire and floated around for quite a while. I'll bet you could find some wreckage there."
As for the space program, he thinks the Apollo mission was a hoax.
"Rocket scientists I talk to say we didn't have the technology then, and we don't have it now," he says. "Here we have this Saturn rocket that puts out zillions of pounds of thrust, and it throws this huge weight into space, goes to the moon, circles, this little thing comes out of it, goes down and lands, comes back up, connects, returns -- and it worked right every time. And we still have rockets blowing up, and destroying a shuttle?
"It's lots of fun to speculate. You can study the photographs -- no stars in the background, nothing like that. If there's one-sixth the gravity on the moon, why couldn't the astronauts jump higher, instead of doing those little crow hops?"
But admittedly, Cussler knows more about the sea, and sea hunts and long-lost wrecks than he does the mysteries of flight and aviation.
He once had an airplane, when he was in the Air Force during the Korean War. He bought it for $150, soloed, had three hours of flight time, then ground-looped on a country road in Hawaii, tearing up a sizable patch of pineapples. He eventually sold it -- for $150.
Then there are the automobiles. His first was a used Auburn limousine, bought while he was still in high school in Alhambra, Calif., in the late 1940s, when old cars were cheap. He and his pals would play gangster in it and drive to football games, dressed in dark overcoats and fedoras, and carrying a violin case packed with beer and booze.
Now he has 83 vintage automobiles warehoused throughout the country and soon to be photographed for an elegant coffee-table book.
He reserves an old Allard at his Arizona home for his own driving pleasure.
No Jaguars, though.
"I bought a new Jaguar XK-120 when I got out of the Air Force. I picked up my girl and drove to the Hollywood Hills and proposed, and she accepted. But she nearly backed out of the deal when I sold it and bought a Nash Rambler station wagon, rented a house, and bought a stove, refrigerator and washing machine.
"That's my depression-era mentality."
Cussler is passionate about topics other than cars, airplanes and boats. He rails against politicians ("I don't like them. You could have a school for con men, in a sense, to be politicians"), and laments the educational system ("I believe it all begins in the elementary schools. They're not teaching the basics. For kids today, there's so much out there").
As for research, he loves it.
"I've said if my wife weren't sleeping with me I'd take a cot and move into the basement of a library," he says.
"I stress myself. I pushed 'The Sea Hunters' between books. ... Everybody loved that book. But when I first hit Simon & Schuster about it, after I had approached them 10 or 12 years ago, they just brushed me off. ...
"Finally, they capitulated and printed 50,000. Sales went nuts, and orders came in for 250,000, and it hit No. 1 in paperbacks."
Cussler has the reputation of being something of a curmudgeon in the publishing world and has had his share of run-ins with editors.
"When I went with a new publisher and sent a manuscript, they sent it back from New York. It was terrible. They changed characters, dialogue, description ... I was appalled. I took 600 pages and scribbled STET, STET, STET (meaning 'let it stand') on every change. The editor and I had lunch, disagreed, and I left.
"I got to the airport, and a message was waiting for me to call back. I did, and he insisted we talk.
"'Don't leave,' he said, 'You can't leave. Come back.'
"I said I couldn't."
"'Why not?' he asked.
"I thought for a minute and said, 'Because it's inconvenient.'
"There was long silence, and I had them. They knew Cussler is the curmudgeon of publishing, and don't mess with him. ...
"Actually I'm a pussycat."
So what's next for the curmudgeonly pussycat?
"I wish I could retire, but now, next year, they're coming out with a juvenile series on Pitt, and a spinoff paperback, 'The NUMA Files,' a kind of 'Star Trek Generation II,' with a different cast, but keeping Pitt and Giordino, who will show up like Kirk and Spock."
| -Top- | -Home- | -Top Stories- | -Headlines- | -Staff- |  |