Sun 9 May 2021
CLIVE CUSSLER – Night Probe! Dirk Pitt #5. Bantam, hardcover, 1981; paperback, 1982.
After helping raise the Titanic last time out (*), what could there possibly be for Dirk Pitt to do for an encore? As America’s number one underwater super-agent, even he would seem hard pressed to come up with something to top that one.
The year is 1989, far enough into the future for the United States to be realistically sinking slowly into bankruptcy, desperately in need of new sources of energy, and yet near enough to avoid being passed off as mere science fiction. Missing are two vitally needed copies of a treaty made with England in 1914, one that would have sold Canada to the United States to help finance the early stages of World War I, but lost to the pages of history by an amazing series of tragic accidents.
One copy is in an ocean liner now residing at the bottom of the St. Lawrence Seaway. The other is somewhere on a train which met its doom on the very same day, crashing through a bridge crossing the Hudson River.
Together, their twin disappearances mark one of the greatest vanishing acts of all time. (The treaty was secret. Why is it that hardly anybody remembers either disaster?) The President puts all his faith in Dirk Pitt to produce another miracle.
Not to be caught napping, Britain calls out of retirement one of the most famous spies the world has ever known, just for the occasion. He is known as “Brian Shaw” in this book, but that won’t fool any of his many fans for. a minute. Reknown as both a ladies’ man and for his even more famous license to kill, “Shaw” proves he has lost none of his touch for either.
In a word, Clive Cussler’s technical expertise in matters aquanautical is impressive, but if anything his. knack for telling a spell-binder of a story is even more so. Like the old penny-a-word pulpsters, or the directors of the great adventure serials of yesteryear, Cussler is a master of action, intrigue,. and romance (not necessarily in that order), and the pace is never allowed to slacken for a moment.
If you missed the hardcover (Bantam, 1981), the paperback is now out. You could wait for the movie, I suppose, but why? (**)
Rating: A
(*) I was incorrect on this. There was another Dirk Pitt adventure between Raising the Titanic! and Night Probe!, that being Vixen 03.
(**) I was incorrect on this as well. There has been no movie made from this book. And surprisingly enough, given the popularity of the Dirk Pitt books, only two of them have been made into films: Raise the Titanic! (1980) and Sahara (2005).
May 9th, 2021 at 11:35 am
This was the next-to-last Cussler novel I ever opted for. I tried one more of his after this, one called ‘Deep Six’. Eh, not bad. But it was this book where my excitement waned. Originally, I had high hopes for Cussler; I consumed every single one of his first 7 or 8 releases.
It certainly is odd to recognize that ‘Raise the Titanic!’ was not Cussler’s first. Seems like it should have been. But it was fourth, or something. Thereby making it a hard act to follow.
But ‘Raise the Titanic!’ always gets my vote for being among the most select, top one or two *very* best ‘modern action thrillers’, (modern in the sense of the ‘Rambo’ trend kicked-off by David Morell around the same time). It’s just a ripping yarn, shockingly good yarn that makes ya wanna jump up and down. Seemed not part of Cussler’s earlier and clumsier efforts at all. Seemed unrelated either, to what came after.
But ‘Night Probe!’ just doesn’t have the same breathless, giddy, ooomph as ‘Titanic!’ did. This novel has some interesting bits of action mixed with some interesting bits of information. But to me it all seemed rather weakly glued together. Something lacking. As if the author was reaching and struggling to join good ideas together.
The tale sets America and Britain at odds with each other. There’s a cool, lost luxury liner, and of course cave-diving is always badass. But the worst part, the Cussler-has-jumped-the-shark part was: Dirk Pitt meeting an ‘unnamed, aged British spy’ at the end of the novel who is a thinly-veiled James Bond. At least that’s what I inferred. It was to groan over.
Cussler’s strong suit was always his incorporation of realistic, real-world technical matters into his wild fables. So this point (the JB allusion), is where he lost me.
“Vixen 03” remains my #1 favorite Pitt romp; it is so uniformly, roundly solid a thriller. “Raise the Titanic!” makes my pulse race and my eyes pop. “Night Probe!” leaves me wistful. It was the beginning of the end.
May 9th, 2021 at 1:08 pm
The series was still going strong with this one as far as I was concerned, judging by the grade I gave it. But then again, this was the first (and still the only) one in the series I’ve read. As to the earlier ones in the series (Titanic for example) I defer to you.
I’ve just looked. I couldn’t help myself. There are now 25 Pitt books. with the last eight co-written with his son Dirk. Regretfully I will pass on those. The earlier ones? Maybe.
May 9th, 2021 at 4:03 pm
I was a big Doc Savage fan, read all the books and hungered for more. Someone suggest Cussler so I read Sahara. Dreadful book. It was, to my mind so badly written that it suggested that anyone could become a writer. I’ve never tried reading another book by him. In fact I’ve shied away from reading any modern book with a Doc Savage-ish flavor for fear that they will be as dreadful.
May 9th, 2021 at 4:44 pm
Thanks, Brian. It’s always good to have a list of books that I feel no obligation to read.
May 9th, 2021 at 8:20 pm
This is my favorite Cussler novel, if only because of his tribute to “Brian Shaw,” but in many ways it is atypical of the Pitt series.
I gave up on the Pitt books right after this, but a few years later picked one up and fell in again. If they suffer from a certain pulpish Doc Savage vibe and the Boy Scout heroics of Pitt himself they still offer good moments, and as with Felix Francis Dirk Cussler is hard to distinguish from his father.
SAHARA was the book that won me back replete with audacious plot, high concept action, and some splendid set pieces (the movie is largely a miss leaving most of what made the book work out). That said, I don’t disagree entirely with Beb, I just had a higher tolerance for that particular mix of nonsense.
Over the years they have been off and on with CYCLOPS easily the worst with some bits that are so absurd they read as if Cussler is having us and Pitt on (the Pitt girl is over 50, a colony on the moon is the Jersey Colony — cow jumped over the moon —, Pitt escapes the bad guys in a bathtub, Castro welcomes him with open arms in Cuba, and the clue to the mystery will likely provoke you to throw the book across the room), but there have been highlights since then that were great entertainment despite my reservations about lack of literary quality and a tendency to silliness.
I read Cussler, Rollins, Bell, and Lincoln and Child despite some flaws as writers for their audacity and sense of fun. I can’t say they come anywhere near the names from the past like Household, Canning, Innes, Lyall, Kyle, or Higgins — or even Buchan, Mundy, and Lamb, but some of the madeupium science speculation and historical play is fun, and they do have audacity even if once in a while I wish they had read less Doc Savage, seen fewer Saturday Morning Serials, watched fewer Roy Rogers and Gene Autry films, varied the formula more, and actually understood Ian Fleming was writing for adults with sex drives and not stunted boys scouts not quite sure what to do with an actual woman if they got one.
Considering the models available in both the genre and pulp fiction you would think they would all try and up their game, but sales are sales, and the public has in general dumbed down considerably when it comes to popular entertainment beginning with Robert Ludlum and Tom Clancy and their prosaic unimaginative prose and bloated manuscripts.
Suspense used to mean you actually turned the page to find out what happens next, not to prove how much stammina you have.
May 9th, 2021 at 8:54 pm
A long comment, but your last sentence sums it up concisely and succinctly as far as I’m concerned, David. The last Tom Clancy subseries book I tried to read, I found myself 50 pages in and nothing had happened yet. I put the book down, never picked it up again, but sold it almost immediately on Amazon.
May 10th, 2021 at 12:03 am
How many thrills can one actually stand before realizing you’re being played.
I don’t regret retreating from Cussler in the slightest nth. I am a devout fan for what he pioneered to the genre –that audacious, never-before-seen, riveting combination of ‘undersea + espionage’ —but later, I became a bitter pessimist as I watched how his career played out.
I’ve done the same ‘pullback’ with other authors. Frederic Forsythe, Jack Higgins, Len Deighton, Ken Follett, and even –yes, even John Le Carre. These are the mass-market fiction gods I grew up with as I honed my neophyte reading skills. I’ve got private ‘withdrawal-points’ for all of these wonderful talents.
I won’t run all the way down to the end of the field with any of them, no matter what my passion for them has once been. Sadly, they all started ‘phoning-in’ their assignments.
After a certain point the formula and the routine seeps through at the seams. Just like we were chatting about earlier with ‘actors who play themselves’.
Ah, Johnny, we hardly knew ye.
May 10th, 2021 at 11:34 am
The only Cussler I have read is one that involved some progenies of Hitler and the lost continent of Atlantis. I could hardly wait for it to end. Think I have one on my shelves. Perhaps one of these days, I’d read a few pages to see whether I can give it away without feeling guilty.
May 10th, 2021 at 12:40 pm
Ha! You’re like me, or like I used to be. If I started a book, I finished it, no matter what. Not any more, but of course I still feel guilty when I quit before the end.
May 10th, 2021 at 7:20 pm
I might point out I read very fast, and the time I devote to a Cussler novel is much less than some people and that colors how much nonsense I can tolerate for some minor return. For most readers for whom a 500 page + novel is a commitment that takes more than a few hours to fulfill I fully understand their not wanting to spend that time with the book if it isn’t filling their needs.
I stayed with many of the writers Lazy mentioned (Higgins I dropped after DILLINGER), but some only because the writers had written one or two books that led me to give them the benefit of the doubt or in the cases of a Deighton or Follett continued to rise to the occasion once in a while (NIGHT OVER WATER one of my favorites came after several lesser books in Follett’s case).
Like any genre individual tastes and results vary. As I said above I don’t disagree with Beb’s judgement of SAHARA, I just happened to enjoy it for the most part (despite one character thankfully left out of the movie) if only for one of the most audacious (or stupid) twists in adventure fiction regarding the novels McGuffin.
Re Cussler,, I admit sometimes sheer audacity pays off for me. Anyone who can pull off finding the Library of Alexandria on the banks of the Rio Grande deserves at least some credit from a pulp lover though I can see how a 500 page Doc Savage or Operator #5 novel may seen excessive length.