No profit motive in diving wrecks, his cash is in cars
It's hard to chart the precise coordinates where fact meets fiction when it comes to best-selling author Clive Cussler: His own expeditions in search of historic lost ships rival the seagoing adventures of his fictional underwater explorer Dirk Pitt.
Cussler was the quintessential California hot rod nut growing up in suburban Los Angeles, where a love of scuba diving, cross-country road trips and dune buggy desert treks in search of lost gold mines eventually led to a fascination with mysteries of the deep.
In the mid-1960s Cussler left his successful L.A. advertising career and moved his young family to Colorado to write a snappy adventure series featuring the towering, handsome Pitt, who solves centuries-old puzzles as chief of the fictitious National Underwater and Marine Agency, or NUMA.
Ten years later, his third novel, "Raise the Titanic!" became a runaway best-seller. (It spawned a film version Cussler would just as soon forget; in fact, he vowed to never sell Dirk out again, even for the princely sum of $10 million.)
Readers were instantly hooked on Cussler's fast-moving plots peppered with equal parts deep-sea suspense and high-seas romance. Through 19 novels, the intrepid Dirk and rotund sidekick Al Giordino have plumbed the depths of such ancient legends as Atlantis ("Atlantis Found"), the Lost City of Gold ("Inca Gold"), Viking runes ("Valhalla Rising") and the trove of Genghis and Kublai Khan ("Treasure of Khan").
Cussler's success allowed him to further blur the line between fantasy and reality when, in 1979, he established his own nonprofit foundation for undersea exploration and named it "NUMA" after his fictional government agency. To date, Cussler and crew have uncovered more than 60 ships of historic significance, including the Confederate submarine Hunley, the first submarine to sink a ship in battle; the U-20 that sank the Lusitania; and the Carpathian, which braved icy waters to rescue survivors of the Titanic.
Fact and fiction continued to merge when, in later books, Cussler gave Pitt a long-lost son named Dirk Jr.; today, Cussler's son Dirk co-writes the Pitt adventures with his 75-year-old dad. Cussler has even taken to writing himself cameo roles in his novels lately, sailing briefly in and out of scene with a nod and a wink to his readers.
And about that hot rod hobby: The house that Dirk built now includes an enviable collection of more than 90 vintage rides, from a 1918 Cadillac once owned by Florenz Ziegfeld to a 1963 Studebaker Avanti, for public viewing May to October at the Cussler Car Museum in Arvada, Colo.
Bankrate flagged down the indefatigable Cussler at his home in Phoenix for a look back at a most adventurous life.
Bankrate: Did you grow up in modest means?
Clive Cussler: We were middle class I guess. My dad was an accountant and we lived in a nice little middle-class neighborhood in Alhambra, Calif. I remember money was fairly tight. We would go on a driving vacation once a year.
Bankrate: You grew up in the waning years of the Depression, right?
Cussler: Right. I can remember when I was a little kid, we had some tar paper shacks down at the end of the street where what we called the Okies stayed until they got on their feet.
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Bankrate: Were you an adventurous kid?