Lazy Self-Indulgent Book Reviews

I have read all of Cussler’s atrocious and diverting books, mostly because I have an extremely large, aging Irish Catholic family.  You spend enough time in hospitals and airports on the way to hospitals, you’re eventually going to buy a Dirk Pitt (tm) novel. 

The L.A. Times has run a series of fun snipey pieces about how Clive Cussler managed to completely hose the filmmakers who brought “Sahara” to the screen, and you should absolutely check a few of them out.  Essentially, he pretended that many, many millions of Americans bought his books, whereas in actual fact, Cussler apparently just buys millions and millions of copies at cost and keeps them in a massive aircraft hangar next to his antique car collection. 

I have selected “Raise the Titanic!” as my archetypal Clive Cussler work (though “work” seems a misnomer for a man who writes books in which he is James Bond, but a James Bond who shares all of his own sort-of boring hobbies and sexual preferences - redheads!  Jugs!  Slightly-dated deep tans!), as it’s my favourite (except for the one where Dirk Pitt intentionally pushes an elderly Japanese woman in a wheelchair into an empty elevator shaft). 

We discover that there was a whole lot of a super-important super-rare metal in one of the cargo holds of the Titanic, and bad guys are trying to get it, and so Dirk and the rest of his crew at NUMA (the lamest object of heroism since Kevin Costner tried to make the Coast Guard sexy) must….God, do I have to say it?….RAISE THE MOTHERFUCKING TITANIC.   And there’s sabotage, and craziness, and brainwashing, and the exorbitantly awful Dirk Pitt sex scenes.

I did most of my Clive Cussler reading BEFORE sexual maturity (not that sexual maturity stopped me from reading shitty books), and I honest-to-God believed, as Cussler informed me, that sex basically consisted of being viciously penetrated until you eventually got so tired that you passed out, and then you wake up all fulfilled and happy the next morning, and the guy makes you breakfast.