Clive Cussler

Cussler ran two careers at once and refused to keep them apart. In one he wrote adventure novels, starting in 1965 and finding his lead in 1973 with Dirk Pitt, a marine engineer employed by a government ocean agency who keeps discovering things at the bottom of the sea. In the other he went looking for actual shipwrecks, founding and chairing the National Underwater and Marine Agency, which has located more than sixty wreck sites. He named the fictional agency first and then built the real one to match it.

The novels are pulp of a very sturdy kind. There is a lost object, a rich lunatic with a plan, a set piece involving deep water and heavy machinery, and a hero whose competence is never in doubt. Nobody reads them for the sentences. What Cussler had was a genuinely rare commodity, salvage and marine engineering knowledge deployed as plot, so the raising of a wreck or the flooding of a compartment carries a specific weight the villains never do. He also wrote himself into his own books as a walk-on character named Clive Cussler, a joke he never dropped, and he turns up in exactly that spirit in the credits here, as an uncredited bearded reporter in the film of Raise the Titanic.

He died in 2020 as the sole or main author of more than eighty books, by which point most of the output was co-written across several parallel series.