Who's Reading Clive Cussler?

Once again it occurred to me to go to Goodreads to check out the evidences it offered of interest in one of those authors I so often find myself writing about, Clive Cussler in this case.

As I expected (because it seems to have been particularly popular with fans--it was certainly my personal favorite--and because of the movie version) Sahara headlined the list with regard to the number of ratings.

What I should have expected, but didn't, was the fewness of those ratings--the book having fewer than 58,000.

I also didn't expect (though I should have) that the next most popular book was the other one with a movie made out of it (and the word "Titanic" in the title) Raise the Titanic!, with less than half Sahara's unprepossessing number of ratings--a mere 26,000, with the number falling from there. Next on the list was the follow-up to Sahara, Inca Gold, followed by Atlantis Found--boosted by the Atlantis theme, I guess--and then Valhalla Rising, which because of its uncanny coincidence with the horrific events of September 2001, got a sales bump that gave it the only place any Dirk Pitt novel enjoys on the Publisher's Weekly top-ten-of-the-year lists, standing at #8.

Where the main-line Clive Cussler (and not Clive and Dirk Cussler)-authored Dirk Pitt books were concerned it seemed that older books tended to do less well than newer ones. Treasure and Cyclops (two books I held in particularly high regard as a fan) trailed the later (I thought, repetitive and tired) Shock Wave and Flood Tide and even the particularly disappointing Trojan Odyssey. Still, it struck me that the more recent, Goodreads-era continuations and tie-ins, the latest installments of which one still finds on grocery store paperback racks, did not better them. (The most “successful” of the post-Trojan Odyssey books was The Treasure of Khan, the most successful of the tie-ins the Grant Blackwood coauthored Spartan Gold, with about half of what Raise the Titanic! got.)

Altogether the pattern seems to me to fit what I saw with Robert Ludlum not so long ago, the biggest hits generally outdoing the less successful ones, later books doing better than earlier ones, and the books that got adaptations to other media doing better than those that did not, all of which combined to put a particularly popular later novel that got a major twenty-first century film adaptation far and away at the top--and almost everything else in the range of 20,000 ratings or less. Given that they were both roughly contemporaneous authors producing broadly similar fiction (writers who came along in the '70s and quickly made their mark with espionage stories of the more action-adventure-oriented type) the parallel may not be so surprising, but I also find myself thinking of how different Cussler could be from Ludlum. Cussler's novels were, generally, more simply plotted and more simply and plainly written than Ludlum's, and especially by the time of books like Cyclops, rather more summer blockbuster-like in subject matter and feel--more accessible, more fun for most, I would imagine. Certainly Cussler had his politics, same as the other genre authors did, but it probably mattered that, if probably not too different from those of his colleague Tom Clancy's, treated relatively casually in comparison with Clancy's stridency in such matters, and because the way the whole was put together one did not take him so seriously (because the plot points revolved around things like secret bases on the moon)--with the result that the books still dated, but perhaps less bothersomely for many who do not necessarily agree with him (so long as they do not look too closely--as one is reminded when recalling the furor over Sahara). Nevertheless, to go by what I see here, the fact would not seem to have helped him quite so much where his readership was concerned.