After his discharge from the military, Cussler went to work for the advertising industry, first as a copywriter and later as a creative director for two of the nation's most successful advertising agencies. After the publication in 1996 of Cussler's first nonfiction work,
The Sea Hunters, he was awarded a
Doctor of Letters degree in 1997 by the Board of Governors of the
State University of New York Maritime College who accepted the work
in lieu of a Ph.D. thesis. This was the first time in the college's 123-year history that such a degree had been awarded. Cussler was a fellow of the
Explorers Club of New York, the
Royal Geographical Society in London, and the American Society of
Oceanographers.
Literary career Clive Cussler began writing in 1965 when his wife took a job working nights for the local police department where they lived in California. After making dinner for the children and putting them to bed, he had no one to talk to and nothing much to do, so he decided to start writing. His most famous character is marine engineer, government agent and adventurer
Dirk Pitt. The Dirk Pitt novels frequently have an alternative history premise—such as What if
Atlantis were real?" or "What if
Abraham Lincoln wasn't assassinated but was kidnapped?" The first two Pitt novels,
The Mediterranean Caper and
Iceberg, were relatively conventional maritime thrillers. The third,
Raise the Titanic!, made Cussler's reputation and established the pattern that subsequent Pitt novels would follow: a blend of adventure and advanced technology, generally involving
megalomaniacal villains, lost ships, beautiful women, and sunken treasure. Cussler's novels almost always begin with a chapter set in the past. These contain none of the novel's main characters and often seem disconnected from the plot until the main characters discover a mystery or secret relating the events of the first chapter to the rest of the story. This is almost always in the form of a long-lost artifact that is important to the villain's or hero's objectives. Often in the first chapter, a ship or airplane carrying a top-secret, important, or dangerous cargo is lost and never found, until it is recovered by a modern character later in the book. Cussler's novels, like those of
Michael Crichton, are examples of
techno-thrillers that do not use military plots and settings. Where Crichton strove for scrupulous realism, however, Cussler prefers fantastic spectacles and outlandish plot devices. The Pitt novels, in particular, have the improbable quality of the
James Bond or
Indiana Jones movies, while also sometimes borrowing from
Alistair MacLean's novels. Pitt himself is a super-hero reminiscent of
Doc Savage and other characters from
pulp magazines. Cussler had seventeen consecutive titles listed on
The New York Times fiction
best seller list. In 2014,
McFarland Publishing released
The Clive Cussler Adventures: A Critical Review by Steven Philip Jones, the first critical review textbook of Cussler's novels.
NUMA As an underwater
explorer, Cussler discovered more than 60
shipwreck sites{{cite book| last =Cussler| first =Clive| title =Valhalla Rising| publisher = Berkley Trade Important finds by NUMA include: • , the ship famed for being the first to come to the aid of survivors. • , the first ironclad of the civil war, formerly the icebreaker
Enoch Train. A visual and interactive depiction of Cussler's NUMA Foundation Expeditions has been made available as an extension of NUMA's original website that has since been deleted. Finds formerly believed to be important include: •
Mary Celeste, the famed ghost ship that was found abandoned with cargo intact (the identification of this wreck as the
Mary Celeste has since been placed into a state of question after one researcher disputed the claim's authenticity).{{cite web ==Adaptations==