There are very few authors that I really enjoy enough to buy their latest book in big-bucks hardcover rather than waiting for paperback, but Clive Cussler is definitely one whose books I buy much sooner rather than later.

Although he also has written a couple of non-fiction books, and recently introduced a new series with new characters, Clive Cussler is best known for his series featuring the exploits of Dirk Pitt and his pals at the National Underwater and Marine Agency (NUMA). The most recent installment, Atlantis Found, is the fifteenth in a long line of can't-put-it-down thrillers.

The basic plot of all of the books in the series is essentially the same, but that doesn't mean the books are all alike. The books usually start by describing a shipwreck or disappearance of a ship from tens or hundreds of years ago, before coming back to the "present" (usually a few years ahead of the actual year of publication). The ways in which Dirk and his buddies or NUMA become interested and involved in the search for the wrecked/disappeared ship varies each time although in more recent books, the search has been almost secondary to other action. The adventures occur all over the globe and involve all kinds of peril, ranging from nuclear detonations in the Far East to explosions in underwater caves near Hawaii to near-drownings in the middle of the sea to finding an old Civil War battleship in the middle of the desert to erupting volcanoes. Dirk even locates and raises the Titanic!

Dirk is also a collector of old vintage cars and other rare... ummm...well, let’s just say mementos of his various adventures (a bathtub...a railroad car...an old WWII plane....). He lives in an old airplane hangar on the far edges of an airport in Washington, D.C. that he’s converted into a showplace for his cars and mementos. Although the other main characters in the books are consistent from time to time, Dirk is the hero around which the stories revolve, and so we know more about him and his personal life than we do the others. One fun thing that Clive Cussler does is add himself as a very very minor character in most of the later books.

I don’t want to give away a lot of details of the various books, which may make this seem like an incomplete review, but I think this category is more for talking about the author rather than specific details of the books he authors - the books have their own place. Clive Cussler is an adventurer in his own right. He does actually collect vintage cars, many of which are incorporated into the books as Dirk’s “car-de-jour”. He also searches for lost aircraft himself and leads expeditions to find famous shipwrecks. There really is a company/agency called NUMA (not sure if it’s government or private), and he and his NUMA volunteers have discovered more than sixty ships with historical significance. So when he writes fiction about a daring-do adventurer, he knows whereof he speaks!

I highly recommend Clive Cussler’s books to anyone who enjoys a good action-adventure-thriller. While I know that his Raise the Titanic! book was made into a movie many years ago, I can’t help but wonder who of the current crop of movie stars could best play the 6-foot-3, 185 pound, black-haired, vivid-green-eyed Dirk Pitt...



Recommended: Yes