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Prolific author of fast-paced thrillers, including Raise the Titanic!, featuring the adventure hero Dirk Pitt
The prolific and popular novelist Clive Cussler, who has died aged 88, combined adventure and technology into fast-paced thrillers. Ubiquitous and easily recognisable on airport bookshelves, his books sold more than 100m copies, with 20 novels cracking the bestseller lists.
Cussler’s writing was unusual in the way he wove it and his own life together. His recurring hero, Dirk Pitt, named after his son, was a marine engineer who worked for a government agency, the National Underwater and Marine Agency (Numa), an ocean-going version of James Bond. After Cussler’s third Pitt novel, Raise the Titanic! (1976), became an unexpected hit, he founded his own organisation called Numa, and led more than 60 underwater missions that located wrecks. Continue reading...