TomClancy

ourteen years ago, Tom Clancy was an obscure Maryland insurance broker with a passion for naval history and only a letter to the editor and a brief article on the MX missile to his credit. Decades earlier, he had majored in English at Baltimore's Loyola College and dreamed of writing a novel. In 1984, his first effort, The Hunt for Red October--about a Russian submarine captain who defects, along with his sub, to the United States--sold briskly as a result of rave reviews, then catapulted onto The New York Times bestseller list after President Reagan pronounced it "the perfect yarn" and "non-put-downable." Clancy, who originated the literary genre known as the techo-thriller, has since established himself as a master at building realistic fictional scenarios by "turning up the volume" on current events and foreign relations. His follow-up novel, Red Storm Rising, took on U.S.-Soviet tension by providing a realistic modern war scenario arising from a conventional Soviet attack on NATO. Other bestsellers followed: Patriot Games dealt with terrorism; Cardinal of the Kremlin focused on spies, secrets and star wars; Clear And Present Danger asked what if there was a real war on drugs; The Sum of All Fears centered around post-Cold-War attempts by terrorists to rekindle U.S.-Soviet animosity; Without Remorse took on the rising U.S. drug trade and the MIA/POW problem during the Vietnam War era; and Debt of Honor took on the real-world issues of Japanese-American economic competition, the fragility of America's financial system, and the hazards of U.S. Military downsizing. Clancy's most recent #1 bestseller, Executive Orders, had Jack Ryan as president of the United States, rebuilding the U.S. Government from scratch. The walls of Clancy's office are lined with war games, books on weapons and government produced maps, all tributes to his lifelong fascination with technology and the military. Although severe myopia limited his personal involvement as a member of the armed forces to a brief stint in Loyola's ROTC program, the success of his books has resulted in his "adoption" by the military.
He is regularly welcomed aboard jets, submarines, and destroyers. Admirals and Generals give him access, Pentagon officials debrief him, and many of his books are required reading at our nation's war colleges. It is this access to a wide variety of sources and information within military and intelligence circles that sets Clancy apart from other writers of military thrillers. Although he insists that his technical knowledge comes from publicly available sources and scoffs at the idea that he has ever breached government security in any of his books, Clancy does admit that he has been able to tap into what he calls "The Great Chain"--a network of intelligence officers and operatives, military men, defense contractors and government employees, who feed him information. See also: Red Storm Entertainment.