Tall and thin, with round, sunken eyes that were often hidden by sunglasses, Tom Clancy said his dream was simply to publish a book, hopefully a good one, so that he would be in the Library of Congress catalog.
His dream came true.
Clancy, who died Wednesday at age 66, was the fourth-highest-earning author in the world in 2008.
He invented the “techno-thriller” genre — the natural outcome of a self-confessed nerd’s almost boundless enthusiasm for the machinery of warfare and for gadgets and gizmos — with a stream of best sellers spanning more than 20 years.
Thomas Leo Clancy Jr. was born in 1947 in Baltimore, the son of a postman. To the end of his life, he would live in the state of Maryland. After Roman Catholic high school and Loyola College, where he studied English literature, he married a student nurse, Wanda Thomas — the two went on to have four children — and took over her family’s insurance business in the small town of Owings.
As a boy, he spent hours studying military journals and books but poor eyesight thwarted his efforts to join the Army. He put all his reading to use when he began to write in the late 1970s.
“The Hunt for Red October,” the tale of the defection of the commander of a prototype Soviet submarine, was his first novel. Dense with research, the book was published in 1984 by the Naval Institute Press, which helped to earn it a cover blurb from former CIA Director Adm. Stansfield Turner. Sales took off when a friend got the book on the desk of President Ronald Reagan. When he stepped off his helicopter with the book under his arm, a reporter shouted, “What are you reading?” Reagan showed the world the cover and pronounced it “the perfect yarn.”
Clancy recalled a meeting with John Lehman, then the Navy secretary, in which, “The first thing he asked me about the book was, ‘Who the hell cleared it?’ ”
“Red October” hero Jack Ryan and his CIA associate, John Clark, took on most of the United States’ enemies, from Russians to Colombian drug barons and Arab terrorists. Clancy’s fifth book, 1989’s “Clear and Present Danger,” was the best-selling novel of the 1980s, and for two decades, his sales were second only to John Grisham’s.
The global-threat scenarios Clancy posited in his books were often inspired by role-playing war games. His second book, “Red Storm Rising” (1986), was co-written with games designer and former naval officer Larry Bond. Clancy’s research also drew him into the orbit of the intelligence services.
His most famous “prediction,” the use of a commercial airliner to destroy a public building in “Debt of Honor” (1994), might have become reality only by chance, but he was never far off.
Clancy’s attention to detail was driven, he said, by a “moral obligation to my readers to get it right.” Clancy knew the precise tree on The Mall in London that Ryan hid his wife and child behind in “Patriot Games.”
Success allowed Clancy in 1993 to buy a stake in the Baltimore Orioles. He relished the access his work gave him: the off-the-record briefings, the chance to meet fighter pilots, service personnel and intelligence agents, and to observe their work. He was a great cheerleader for the armed forces.
“Reporters treat the military like drunken Nazis,” he once said, “[but] they’re the most loyal friends you can have. They’re my kind of people. We share the same value structure.” He met his second wife, Alexandra, through Gen. Colin Powell, her uncle.
Clancy’s books were natural candidates for screen adaptation. After Alec Baldwin took the role of Jack Ryan in “The Hunt for Red October” (1990), Harrison Ford took over for “Patriot Games” (1992) and “Clear and Present Danger” (1994), but was himself replaced in “The Sum of All Fears” (2002) by the much younger Ben Affleck. Clancy, it was reported, disowned “Patriot Games” after filmmakers changed the ending. It was, however, an enormous hit.
In 1995, Clancy co-founded a video-games company, Red Storm Entertainment, producing shoot-’em-ups that either tied in with his novels or themselves inspired book franchises. From 1996, the Tom Clancy name was also licensed to franchised book series.
He eventually extended the co-writing process to include the Jack Ryan series, using other writers to flesh out storylines that he had approved. The final book to be credited solely to Clancy himself was 2003’s The Teeth of the Tiger, in which he introduced Jack Ryan Jr, the son of his original hero. His most recent book Threat Vector, again employing a co-writer, was published at the end of 2012. It reached No 1 in the New York Times bestseller charts. His next book, “Command Authority,” is set for release this year, as is the film “Jack Ryan: Shadow One,” directed by Kenneth Branagh.