(Another Facebook review.)

For reasons I have yet to question, I started rereading Cussler’s novels, which I last read back in the 1980s and 1990s. And even then I thought they were bad. Raise the Titanic! (1976, USA) is probably his most famous novel – it’s certainly the one that made him a bestselling author. It was his third novel, the first two had sold poorly, and this one was expected to do the same. But an editor visiting from the UK saw the manuscript at Cussler’s US publisher, and took a copy back home with him. This kicked off a bidding war on both sides of the Atlantic, resulting in Cussler pulling in a huge advance. The novel then went on to become a bestseller. (Soon after, Cussler bought back the rights to his earlier novels, and resold them to his then-current publisher for considerably more than he’d sold them originally.)

The plot of Raise the Titanic! sees Dirk Pitt, special operations director of the US National Underwater and Marine Agency, and all-round lady killer and Competent Man, tapped to head a US project to raise the RMS Titanic from its seabed grave, 3800 metres below the surface (where the pressure is around 400 atmospheres). Because there’s a presidential black project to build an anti-missile screen around the US and it needs a supply of “byzanium” in order to work. The only known quantity of byzanium was secretly mined under the noses of the Soviets on Novaya Zemlya by US miners in 1912, but was shipped home on the RMS Titanic. Oops. The USSR learns of this plan and decides to hijack the Titanic once she is on the surface.

Perhaps because of the amount spent to buy the novel, Raise the Titanic! seems to have been closely edited, and the prose is far better than in the earlier novels (although still not, well, good). The plot and setting is also much more science-fictional. The book was written before the wreck was found, and most people believed the ship had come to rest in one piece (she actually split in two). Pitt’s plan is to plug the many holes in the Titanic’s hull with “wetsteel” and then pump the ship full of air.

The novel was adapted for the screen in 1980 by UK TV production company ITC, but was a massive flop. ITC’s owner, Lew Grade, later said “it would have been cheaper to lower the Atlantic”, but he did like the film. Cussler didn’t. He refused to allow anyone to adapt his other books, and later sued the makers of Sahara, adapted from his 1992 Dirk Pitt novel of the same name. That film was a huge flop too.

Cussler died in 2020, but some time around the millennium he’d created an atelier, which has since produced a huge quantity of Dirk Pitt and NUMA novels by diverse hands (with Cussler’s name the most prominent on the cover, of course). His son, called Dirk, natch, now writes the Pitt novels.