Word: cussler
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...they still are. Clive Cussler's Raise the Titanic!, the latest beneficiary of the public's nostalgic obsession with all things old, decaying or dead, now stands at number two on The New York Times Best Seller List, and seems certain to net its author enough money to buy an ocean liner of his own. Part of its appeal is probably misplaced: those drawn to the book expecting new tales of aristocratic bravery in the face of death are bound for disappointment, for Cussler has simply used the old wreck as a pawn in a far-fetched modern spy thriller...
SUCH A SENSATIONAL best-seller must have some redeeming qualities; but if they exist, one must look further than the plot to find them. Raise the Titanic! disproves the common notion that truth is stranger than fiction, for the outlandish twists and turns of Cussler's novel would defy detection by even the most dogged Woodstein. Loosely translated, the book is the inspirational saga of how a top-secret group of brilliant government physicists devises a scheme to save the world from nuclear destruction, realizes the plan requires large quantities of a mysterious element unknown to even the best high...
Still, for all its absurd complexities, Cussler's plot line is not what finally kills his book. Credible plots are not necessarily the stuff of which good mysteries are made; anyone who believes otherwise should take a long look at the marvelously improbable tales of Arthur Conan Doyle and Agatha Christie. What distinguishes Cussler's attempt from a genuinely good mystery a la Holmes or Poirot is the author's singular inability to create any distinctively human characters. Cussler's figures are worse than wooden: the neurotic physicist, dashing American agent, villainous Russian spy and confused but loving heroine...
Sorry tactics indeed. Cussler's book doesn't even pass as good satire--his humor is too leaden and his heroes are not appealing enough to succeed as caricatures of a frequently caricatured genre. Stuck in a no-man's land between the superbly serious thrillers of John LeCarre and the outlandishly clever spy fantasies of Ian Fleming, Raise the Titanic! flounders along its muddily mediocre...
...Raise the Titanic!, Cussler...