Clive Cussler and Dirk Pitt Revealed By Clive Cussler with Craig ...

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But what book? I didn't have the great American novel burning inside me or an Aunt Fanny to
chronicle who came across the prairie in a covered wagon.
After mulling the idea over in my mind for a few nights, I thought it would be fun to produce a little
paperback series. No highfalutin schemes to write a best-seller entered my mind.
Thanks to my marketing experience, I began researching and analyzing all the series heroes, beginning
with Edgar Allan Poe's Inspector Dumas. Next came Conan Doyle and Sherlock Holmes and all the
other ensuing fiction detectives and spies. Bulldog
Drummond, Sam Spade, Phillip Marlowe, Mike Hammer, Matt Helm, James Bond, I studied them all.
When creating advertising, I had always looked at the competition and wondered what I could
conceive that was totally different. I thought it foolish to compete on the same terms with already-famous
authors and their established protagonists. Bond was becoming incredibly popular through the movies,
and I knew I couldn't match Ian Fleming's style and prose.
So I was determined not to write about a detective, secret agent or undercover investigator or deal in
murder mysteries. My hero's adventures would be based on and under water. And thus, the basic
concept for Dirk Pitt the marine engineer with the National Underwater and Marine Agency (NUMA)
was born.
CRAIG DIRGO:So, unlike a lot of writers, you started writing with a definite plan in mind.
CLIVE CUSSLER:Correct. The days of Doc Savage and Alan Quartermain were long past, yet I
found it interesting that almost no authors were writing pure, old-fashioned adventure. It seemed a lost
genre.
After taking a refresher course in English, I launched the first book that introduced Pitt and most all of
the characters who appeared in the following thirteen novels. The first book was namedPacific Vortex ..