Culture Books Tom Clancy
Tom Clancy obituary
Bestselling novelist whose military thrillers, including Patriot Games, were made into hit films and spawned video games
Michael Carlson
The Guardian, Wednesday 2 October 2013 20.19 BST
Novelist Tom Clancy
Tom Clancy's contracts set publishing records and 17 of his books topped the New York Times bestseller chart. Photograph: Steffen Thalemann/Corbis
Tom Clancy, who has died aged 66, dominated the bestseller lists of the 1980s, with a series of novels that thrust his appealing CIA analyst Jack Ryan into situations that combined the intricacies of cold-war politics with precise details of modern military operations and equipment. With the end of the cold war, Clancy moved seamlessly into the era of terrorism, with no decline in sales; only JK Rowling and John Grisham joined him in meriting first printings of more than 2m copies.
Seventeen of his books topped the New York Times bestseller chart, and his income as a novelist may have been matched only by Stephen King. He also became one of the first writers to recreate himself as a brand-name, helped by astute use of video games. His company Red Storm produced a string of games, often based on novels that had his name as co-writer but whose actual writing was not his.
He also became a spokesman for right-wing political causes, and a frequently quoted pundit on terrorism, especially after 9/11 repeated aspects of his 1994 novel Debt of Honor, in which Ryan becomes US president after a Japanese terrorist crashes a airliner into the Capitol Dome during the president's state of the union address. Clancy took this role seriously, producing 11 non-fiction books on military hardware and command, the best-known of which is Battle Ready (2004), a collaboration with the marine general Anthony Zinni, like Clancy a critic of the Bush administration's policy on Iraq. But he took his prophetic reputation lightly, once saying: "Osama bin Laden has never sent me any fan mail, and I haven't really sold that many books in Afghanistan ... But no, if I could predict the future, I'd be down on Wall Street."
The springboard for Clancy's success was his first novel, The Hunt for Red October (1984), in which Ryan, then a lowly analyst, realises a rogue Soviet submarine captain is actually trying to defect. The cat-and-mouse game between Ryan and Captain Ramius is mirrored by each man's battles with his own side, creating a thriller framed by intimate knowledge of submarine technology.
It was largely that technological awareness that allowed the book to find a publisher, the obscure Naval Institute Press, but the New York publishing legend Robert Gottlieb read it in proof, and as word of mouth and a plug from the then president Ronald Reagan sparked sales, it went into the mainstream. It was turned into a 1990 hit film, with Sean Connery as the submarine captain and Alec Baldwin as Ryan; Ryan would be played in subsequent hit adaptations of Clancy's novels by Harrison Ford and Ben Affleck.
Clancy himself had been rejected for military service because of extreme myopia. He was born in Baltimore, Maryland, and attended Loyola high school where, he said later, he was a "nerdy but totally normal kid". He moved on to Loyola University, graduating after switching from physics to English. He worked as an insurance agent in Hartford, Connecticut, and then in Baltimore, before joining a firm in Owings, Maryland, and writing in his spare time.
After Red October had made him a millionaire, his next novel, a non-Ryan thriller, Red Storm Rising (1986, co-written with Larry Bond) was less successful; he returned to Ryan with Patriot Games (1987) and Cardinal of the Kremlin (1988), teaming Ryan with John Clark, who became a recurring character, in Clear and Present Danger (1989), which was the bestselling hardback book of the 1980s in the US. Ford played Ryan in the films of Patriot Games and Clear and Present Danger, but Clancy was unhappy with his characterisation. In the 2002 film of Sum of All Fears (1991), Affleck took on the role. A new film, Jack Ryan: Shadow One, starring Chris Pine as Ryan and directed by Kenneth Branagh, is due for release later this year.
Between 1984 and 2003, Clancy wrote 13 novels with Ryan and/or Clark. One of them, Rainbow Six (1998) was published to coincide with the release of his highly successful video game of the same name. He had previously published SSN: Strategies for Submarine Warfare (1996), a non-Ryan book, to similarly launch another game. In 2003 the series appeared to end with The Teeth of the Tiger, which introduced Jack Ryan Jr and two of his cousins as protagonists. But those stories resumed in 2010 with four more novels, all written by collaborators; the last, Threat Vector (2012), written with Mark Greavy, opened at No 1 on the bestseller lists. A fifth, Command Authority, also written by Greavy, is due out in December.
Clancy's book and entertainment contracts set numerous publishing records, but he had a well-publicised public break-up with Gottlieb, ostensibly over his dissatisfaction with film rights and the casting of his film adaptations, and switched to the controversial Hollywood agent Michael Ovitz. It may have been coincidence, but the concentration on collaborative tie-ins to video-game work increased at that time. The series, usually billed with the preface "Tom Clancy's" included Net Force, Net Force Explorers, Op Center, Ghost Center and Power Plays; his co-writers included Steve Pieczenik, a former deputy assistant secretary of state in the Reagan administration, Jeff Rovin and Martin H Greenberg, who also produced the Tom Clancy companion. Film adaptations were of a lesser quality; the first Net Force novel became a TV movie starring Scott Bakula in 1999, and the first Op Center a miniseries with Harry Hamlin in 1995. Eventually, Clancy sold Red Storm to the company Ubisoft Entertainment.
The Ops Center series became a bone of contention between Clancy and his first wife, Wanda Thomas King, whom he divorced in 1999 after 28 years of marriage. As part of the settlement, she had received part of Clancy's share in the Op Center series, and she sued Clancy, claiming he deliberately stopped promoting the series out of spite, though Clancy said the books, of which he simply took a percentage himself, competed with his other books. Clancy married Alexandra Llewellyn in 1999; the couple had been introduced by the former US secretary of state Colin Powell. She survives him, along with their daughter, and a son and three daughters by his first wife.
When asked about the luck of Reagan receiving The Hunt for Red October as a Christmas present, helping propel it to the bestseller lists, Clancy pooh-poohed the coincidence, insisting he would have been successful regardless. "There's an old saying in the navy," he said. "Never trade luck for a skill."
• Thomas Leo Clancy Jr, writer, born 12 April 1947; died 1 October 2013
Guardian book club
Tom Clancy obituary
Bestselling novelist whose military thrillers, including Patriot Games, were made into hit films and spawned video games
Michael Carlson
The Guardian, Wednesday 2 October 2013 20.19 BST
Novelist Tom Clancy
Tom Clancy's contracts set publishing records and 17 of his books topped the New York Times bestseller chart. Photograph: Steffen Thalemann/Corbis
Tom Clancy, who has died aged 66, dominated the bestseller lists of the 1980s, with a series of novels that thrust his appealing CIA analyst Jack Ryan into situations that combined the intricacies of cold-war politics with precise details of modern military operations and equipment. With the end of the cold war, Clancy moved seamlessly into the era of terrorism, with no decline in sales; only JK Rowling and John Grisham joined him in meriting first printings of more than 2m copies.
Seventeen of his books topped the New York Times bestseller chart, and his income as a novelist may have been matched only by Stephen King. He also became one of the first writers to recreate himself as a brand-name, helped by astute use of video games. His company Red Storm produced a string of games, often based on novels that had his name as co-writer but whose actual writing was not his.
He also became a spokesman for right-wing political causes, and a frequently quoted pundit on terrorism, especially after 9/11 repeated aspects of his 1994 novel Debt of Honor, in which Ryan becomes US president after a Japanese terrorist crashes a airliner into the Capitol Dome during the president's state of the union address. Clancy took this role seriously, producing 11 non-fiction books on military hardware and command, the best-known of which is Battle Ready (2004), a collaboration with the marine general Anthony Zinni, like Clancy a critic of the Bush administration's policy on Iraq. But he took his prophetic reputation lightly, once saying: "Osama bin Laden has never sent me any fan mail, and I haven't really sold that many books in Afghanistan ... But no, if I could predict the future, I'd be down on Wall Street."
The springboard for Clancy's success was his first novel, The Hunt for Red October (1984), in which Ryan, then a lowly analyst, realises a rogue Soviet submarine captain is actually trying to defect. The cat-and-mouse game between Ryan and Captain Ramius is mirrored by each man's battles with his own side, creating a thriller framed by intimate knowledge of submarine technology.
It was largely that technological awareness that allowed the book to find a publisher, the obscure Naval Institute Press, but the New York publishing legend Robert Gottlieb read it in proof, and as word of mouth and a plug from the then president Ronald Reagan sparked sales, it went into the mainstream. It was turned into a 1990 hit film, with Sean Connery as the submarine captain and Alec Baldwin as Ryan; Ryan would be played in subsequent hit adaptations of Clancy's novels by Harrison Ford and Ben Affleck.
Clancy himself had been rejected for military service because of extreme myopia. He was born in Baltimore, Maryland, and attended Loyola high school where, he said later, he was a "nerdy but totally normal kid". He moved on to Loyola University, graduating after switching from physics to English. He worked as an insurance agent in Hartford, Connecticut, and then in Baltimore, before joining a firm in Owings, Maryland, and writing in his spare time.
After Red October had made him a millionaire, his next novel, a non-Ryan thriller, Red Storm Rising (1986, co-written with Larry Bond) was less successful; he returned to Ryan with Patriot Games (1987) and Cardinal of the Kremlin (1988), teaming Ryan with John Clark, who became a recurring character, in Clear and Present Danger (1989), which was the bestselling hardback book of the 1980s in the US. Ford played Ryan in the films of Patriot Games and Clear and Present Danger, but Clancy was unhappy with his characterisation. In the 2002 film of Sum of All Fears (1991), Affleck took on the role. A new film, Jack Ryan: Shadow One, starring Chris Pine as Ryan and directed by Kenneth Branagh, is due for release later this year.
Between 1984 and 2003, Clancy wrote 13 novels with Ryan and/or Clark. One of them, Rainbow Six (1998) was published to coincide with the release of his highly successful video game of the same name. He had previously published SSN: Strategies for Submarine Warfare (1996), a non-Ryan book, to similarly launch another game. In 2003 the series appeared to end with The Teeth of the Tiger, which introduced Jack Ryan Jr and two of his cousins as protagonists. But those stories resumed in 2010 with four more novels, all written by collaborators; the last, Threat Vector (2012), written with Mark Greavy, opened at No 1 on the bestseller lists. A fifth, Command Authority, also written by Greavy, is due out in December.
Clancy's book and entertainment contracts set numerous publishing records, but he had a well-publicised public break-up with Gottlieb, ostensibly over his dissatisfaction with film rights and the casting of his film adaptations, and switched to the controversial Hollywood agent Michael Ovitz. It may have been coincidence, but the concentration on collaborative tie-ins to video-game work increased at that time. The series, usually billed with the preface "Tom Clancy's" included Net Force, Net Force Explorers, Op Center, Ghost Center and Power Plays; his co-writers included Steve Pieczenik, a former deputy assistant secretary of state in the Reagan administration, Jeff Rovin and Martin H Greenberg, who also produced the Tom Clancy companion. Film adaptations were of a lesser quality; the first Net Force novel became a TV movie starring Scott Bakula in 1999, and the first Op Center a miniseries with Harry Hamlin in 1995. Eventually, Clancy sold Red Storm to the company Ubisoft Entertainment.
The Ops Center series became a bone of contention between Clancy and his first wife, Wanda Thomas King, whom he divorced in 1999 after 28 years of marriage. As part of the settlement, she had received part of Clancy's share in the Op Center series, and she sued Clancy, claiming he deliberately stopped promoting the series out of spite, though Clancy said the books, of which he simply took a percentage himself, competed with his other books. Clancy married Alexandra Llewellyn in 1999; the couple had been introduced by the former US secretary of state Colin Powell. She survives him, along with their daughter, and a son and three daughters by his first wife.
When asked about the luck of Reagan receiving The Hunt for Red October as a Christmas present, helping propel it to the bestseller lists, Clancy pooh-poohed the coincidence, insisting he would have been successful regardless. "There's an old saying in the navy," he said. "Never trade luck for a skill."
• Thomas Leo Clancy Jr, writer, born 12 April 1947; died 1 October 2013
Guardian book club
