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| This 2010 image released by G.P. Putnam Sons shows author Tom Clancy in Huntingtown, Md. Clancy, the bestselling author of "The Hunt for Red October" and other wildly successful technological thrillers, has died. He was 66. Penguin Group (USA) said Wednesday that Clancy died Tuesday in Baltimore. The publisher did not disclose a cause of death. |
NEW YORK (AP)
-- In 1985, a year after the Cold War thriller "The Hunt for Red
October" came out, author Tom Clancy was invited to lunch at the Reagan
White House, where he was questioned by Navy Secretary John Lehman.
Who, the secretary wanted to know, gave Clancy access to all that secret material?
Clancy,
the best-selling novelist who died Tuesday in Baltimore at 66, insisted
then, and after, that his information was strictly unclassified: books,
interviews and papers that were easily obtained. Also, two submarine
officers reviewed the final manuscript.
Government
officials may have worried how Clancy knew that a Russian submarine
spent only about 15 percent of its time at sea or how many SS-N-20
Seahawk missiles it carried.
But his extreme
attention to technical detail and accuracy earned him respect inside the
intelligence community and beyond and helped make Clancy the most
widely read and influential military novelist of his time, one who
seemed to capture a shift in the country's mood away from the CIA
misdeeds that were exposed in the 1970s to the heroic feats of Clancy's
most famous creation, CIA analyst Jack Ryan.
A
number of his high-tech, geopolitical thrillers, including "The Hunt
for Red October," "Patriot Games" and "Clear and Present Danger," were
made into blockbuster movies, with another, "Jack Ryan," set for release
on Christmas.
"Fundamentally, I think of
myself as a storyteller, not a writer," Clancy once said. "I think about
the characters I've created, and then I sit down and start typing and
see what they will do. There's a lot of subconscious thought that goes
on. It amazes me to find out, a few chapters later, why I put someone in
a certain place when I did. It's spooky."
A
tall, trim figure given to wearing sunglasses that made him look like a
fighter pilot, Clancy had such a sure grasp of defense technology and
spycraft that many readers were convinced he served in the military. But
his experience was limited to ROTC classes in college. Near-sightedness
kept him out of active duty.
A political
conservative who once referred to Ronald Reagan as "my president,"
Clancy broke through commercially during a tense period of the Cold War,
and with the help of Reagan himself.
In 1982,
he began working on "The Hunt for Red October," drawing inspiration
from a real-life 1975 mutiny aboard a Soviet missile frigate. He sold
the manuscript to the first publisher he tried, the Naval Institute
Press, which had never bought original fiction.
In
real life, the mutiny was put down, but in Clancy's book, a Soviet
submarine skipper hands his vessel over to the U.S. and defects.
Someone
thought enough of the novel to give it to Reagan as a Christmas gift.
The president quipped at a dinner that he was losing sleep because he
couldn't put the book down - a statement Clancy later said helped put
him on the New York Times best-seller list.
"What
happened to me was pure dumb luck. I'm not the new Hemingway," Clancy
later said in an interview with the American Movie Channel.
"Of
course, fortune does favor the brave. In battle, you forgive a man
anything except an unwillingness to take risks. Sometimes you have to
put it on the line. What I did was take time away from how I earned my
living. My wife gave me hell. `Why are you doing this?' But she doesn't
complain anymore."
Clancy said his dream had
been simply to publish a book, hopefully a good one, so that he would be
in the Library of Congress catalog. His dreams were answered many times
over.
His novels were dependable hits, his publisher estimating worldwide sales at more than 100 million copies.
"He
did help pave the way for a lot of thriller writers," said David
Baldacci, author of "Absolute Power" and many other best-sellers. He
said Reagan "had it right" about "The Hunt for Red October." Baldacci
called it "a great yarn."
"He was able to
balance storytelling with a lot of research," Baldacci said. "Research
often bogs down a story, but that didn't happen with him. He didn't
write a flip book, where authors have all this research they're so proud
of, and they just stick it in somewhere."
Alec
Baldwin, Ben Affleck and Harrison Ford have all played Jack Ryan on
screen. The upcoming movie stars Chris Pine, with Kenneth Branagh
directing. Keira Knightly plays his wife and Kevin Costner his mentor at
the CIA.
Clancy wasn't crazy about the movie
versions of his books. He complained that Ford was too old to play Jack
Ryan, and he regretted the lack of creative control, saying: "Giving
your book to Hollywood is like turning your daughter over to a pimp."
In
his writing, Clancy often played off - and sometimes anticipated -
world events, as in the pre-9/11 paranoid thriller "Debt of Honor," in
which a jumbo jet destroys the U.S. Capitol during a joint session of
Congress.
In 1996, a year before President
Bill Clinton's affair with Monica Lewinsky was revealed, Clancy's
"Executive Orders" imagined a sex scandal that helped lead to Ryan's
becoming president.
He started off writing
about the Russians, but also told stories of Latin American drug
cartels, Irish-British tensions and Islamic terrorism.
He
also wrote nonfiction works on the military and ventured into video
games, including the best-selling "Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon: Future
Soldier," "Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell: Conviction" and "Tom Clancy's
Splinter Cell: Double Agent."
His recent Jack
Ryan novels were collaborations with Mark Greaney, including "Threat
Vector" and a release scheduled for December, "Command Authority." As of
midday Wednesday, "Command Authority" was No. 35 on Amazon's
best-seller list.
Clancy's publisher, Penguin Group (USA), announced his death but did not give the cause.
Born
in Baltimore on April 12, 1947, to a mailman and his wife, Clancy was
fascinated by military history as a child. He entered Loyola College as a
physics major but switched to English as a sophomore. He later said he
wasn't smart enough for the rigors of science, though he clearly
mastered it in his fiction.
After school, he
worked in an insurance office that had military clients. By the early
1980s he had written a piece about the MX missile system that was
published by the Naval Institute. Boredom with his job led him to try
his hand at fiction.
In an interview with The
New York Times in 1987, he explained that unclassified information can
lead to insights about things that are classified.
"One
of the reasons we are so successful is that we have a free society with
open access to information," he said. "If you change that, if you try
to close off the channels of information, we'll end up just like the
Russians, and their society does not work. The best way to turn America
into another Russia is to emulate their methods of handling
information."
Clancy lived in rural Calvert
County, Md., and in 1993 he joined a group of investors led by Baltimore
lawyer Peter Angelos who bought the Baltimore Orioles. Clancy also
tried to bring an NFL team to Baltimore in 1993 but later dropped out.
Clancy
was married twice, to Wanda Thomas and then to Alexandra Marie
Llewellyn, and is survived by his wife and five children, according to
his publisher. The publisher had no immediate details on funeral
arrangements.
