Quote:
Originally Posted by gmw
Pulpmeister nailed it pretty closely. But for all their faults, I rather enjoy most of the early Dirk Pitt adventures ... up until the time Cussler started expanding out and getting others to write for/with him. This was also about the time that Dirk Jr. and Summer Jr. turned up on the scene - someone else raised them, so Dirk managed to miss out on any of the messy stuff - and they arrive as little Dirk clones ready for the next generation to keep writing.
But my advice is to stay away from The Mediterranean Caper. Cussler is never what you might call politically correct, but this first Pitt story (that I only read quite recently) sets a new low - very low. Had I read this first I probably never would have picked up another.
My pick of the earlier books are Cyclops and Sahara. I know it's out-of-date now, but I did rather like his "Raise the Titanic!"; I think this one was my introduction to Dirk Pitt and it was good enough to make me look for more.
I do find it odd that people (including Cussler) say how different the movie Sahara was to the book. I don't see that. Sure it wasn't a verbatim rendition, but I thought it captured the spirit of the Cussler novel very well. ... It could be that others take the stories more seriously than I ever did. They're good fun gung-ho American hero stuff, with Dirk the indestructible and his plucky sidekick Al facing impossible odds and - of course - coming out on top: battered and bruised and not that handsome, but the women all fall for Dirk anyway, even though they know they can't tie him down - and that last is close enough to a quote from several of the books.
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Yea, I got stuck on the Med. Caper, I got about a third of the way through and couldn't finish it. It's pretty bad. As far as I can tell, Raise the Titanic and Sahara are the two best of the series.