Matt Rees's Blog - Posts Tagged "techno-thriller"
My chat with Tom Clancy
Master of techno twists and turns dead. Or is he?
It's hard to imagine that Tom Clancy, who died this week, was only 66. He had been at the top of the thriller game for so long. The Hunt for Red October was published almost 30 years ago.
The time I met Clancy was longer ago than I'd care to acknowledge, too. I was a reporter for Forbes magazine. It was 1992, and as is the wont of that magazine of Mammon I was preparing an article about the biggest earners in various fields. That sent me off to chat about Wall Street with Christie Turlington (who giggled a lot) and Michael DeBakey, the heart transplant pioneer (who didn't giggle at all.)
I also found myself face to face with Clancy, sucking in some second-hand smoke and staring at his smoky-dark Aviators.
He was terrific.
"When my friends tell me they've made a killing on the Street, they're not talking about Wall Street," he said. "They really mean it."
Plenty of people who haven't read a Clancy novel understood what others meant when they said the 9/11 plot was "like something out of a Tom Clancy novel." Now that the obits sum up his achievements, I detect the usual undertone of "well, he was ONLY a thriller writer." I'm here to tell you that he was much more than that.
Clancy did seem to have amazing information from within the "military-industrial complex." But the overriding sense I had of him was that he was playing a role, much in the way that James Ellroy plays a misanthropic hardboiled gumshoe (when really he just likes to sit in the dark and listen to Beethoven symphonies.)
Unlike Ellroy (by my estimation), Clancy enjoyed his act. He had tapped into the military hardware nerd hidden deep inside himself and turned that guy into a money-making (thrill-making) machine, all with a typewriter (it was a long time ago, as I said) and a pair of polarized lenses. The Clancy-industrial complex includes video games and "co-written" novels that, according to Forbes, earn him upwards of $35 million a year.
So I'm sorry to lose him. Because anyone who has fun writing and talking about writing is a big success, no matter how much money they do or don't make.
It's hard to imagine that Tom Clancy, who died this week, was only 66. He had been at the top of the thriller game for so long. The Hunt for Red October was published almost 30 years ago.
The time I met Clancy was longer ago than I'd care to acknowledge, too. I was a reporter for Forbes magazine. It was 1992, and as is the wont of that magazine of Mammon I was preparing an article about the biggest earners in various fields. That sent me off to chat about Wall Street with Christie Turlington (who giggled a lot) and Michael DeBakey, the heart transplant pioneer (who didn't giggle at all.)
I also found myself face to face with Clancy, sucking in some second-hand smoke and staring at his smoky-dark Aviators.
He was terrific.
"When my friends tell me they've made a killing on the Street, they're not talking about Wall Street," he said. "They really mean it."
Plenty of people who haven't read a Clancy novel understood what others meant when they said the 9/11 plot was "like something out of a Tom Clancy novel." Now that the obits sum up his achievements, I detect the usual undertone of "well, he was ONLY a thriller writer." I'm here to tell you that he was much more than that.
Clancy did seem to have amazing information from within the "military-industrial complex." But the overriding sense I had of him was that he was playing a role, much in the way that James Ellroy plays a misanthropic hardboiled gumshoe (when really he just likes to sit in the dark and listen to Beethoven symphonies.)
Unlike Ellroy (by my estimation), Clancy enjoyed his act. He had tapped into the military hardware nerd hidden deep inside himself and turned that guy into a money-making (thrill-making) machine, all with a typewriter (it was a long time ago, as I said) and a pair of polarized lenses. The Clancy-industrial complex includes video games and "co-written" novels that, according to Forbes, earn him upwards of $35 million a year.
So I'm sorry to lose him. Because anyone who has fun writing and talking about writing is a big success, no matter how much money they do or don't make.
