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Cyclops, Clive Cussler

Rereading these books, I’ve been surprised which stories I’ve remembered and which ones I’ve forgotten. Raise the Titanic! (1976, USA), Vixen 03 (1978, USA) and Night Probe! (1981, USA) had stuck in memory. But not Deep Six (1984, USA), or this one, Cyclops (1986, USA). I’d completely forgotten, for example, that Cyclops is chiefly about a secret base on the Moon the US has been operating for over a decade. You’d think you’d remember something like that in a novel.

The formula for the Dirk Pitt novels was beginning to settle by Cyclops, the eighth in the series. Open with an historical mystery, typically a ship that vanished without trace. Hint at a great treasure, or a great threat. Add a present-day geopolitical threat to the US which requires the president to get involved. Pitt is dragged in by accident, or bad luck. Tie the mystery and the present-day threat together, and resolve both.

The title refers to a US Navy Auxiliary ship which disappeared in the Bermuda Triangle in 1912 (Cussler never mentions the Bermuda Triangle, however). In 1989, a US millionaire goes searching for the wreck from an airship. He and his crew vanish. A full-scale search fails to find him or the airship. A few weeks later, while Dirk Pitt is working in Florida, the airship reappears. Pitt manages to stop it before it crashes into a hotel and burns. Onboard are three dead bodies – strangers, not the missing three men.

Meanwhile, the US has been running a secret Moon base programme for years. It’s so secret not even the president knows about it. Also meanwhile, Castro is making secret overtures to the Americans – because the USSR wants to take over Cuba, and he’s not happy about that.

Pitt, Giordino, Gunn, and the wife of the missing millionaire re-enact the airship’s hunt for the Cyclops, to discover what happened to the missing men. The Cuban military shoots them down, but they still find the wreck, But then they’re washed ashore on an uninhabited island. Which isn’t uninhabited. There’s a secret Soviet base on it, with a hidden radio dish that allows it to eavesdrop, and interfere, with all radio traffic in the US.

All three plots collide as Pitt blunders about, somehow managing to defy the odds – and physics, and human strength and endurance – and scupper the villains. The Soviet leadership are all nasty horrible venal people, much like the present-day US leadership, and Putin, of course. The Moon base colonists are all engineers and scientists, but they manage to defeat a squad of Soviet special forces. Pitt discovers the secret of the Cyclops – a mysterious and incalculably valuable statue it was carrying, but which isn’t in the wreck.

It all comes to an explosive head when the USSR triggers its plan to oust Castro by detonating a nuclear bomb in Havana. Except it’s not an atom bomb, although just as devastating. Pitt prevents the worst of it happening, but doesn’t entirely stop it. The results drive Castro straight into the arms of the US.

And then Pitt finds the missing statue.

The writing is bad, of course; but the formula actually works quite well in this one. And Cussler has now added Cuba to the US, after adding Canada in an earlier book. And there’s a US base on the Moon too, currently unoccupied, as the astronauts have returned home– oh wait, I forgot to mention the Soviets seized remote control of the Space Shuttle bringing the astronauts back to Earth and tried to crash it, but Pitt managed to destroy the secret Soviet base with the radio dish in time…

I’ve known from the start these books follow a downward path after Raise the Titanic!, but one or two have surprised me by not actually being as bad as I’d expected. To be fair, my expectations were really low. We shall have to see how the next book in the series fares.


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Raise the Titanic!, Clive Cussler

(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.