CLEAR AND PRESENT DANGER
Tom Clancy
New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1989
544 pp., $21.95
Algebraic axioms are universally accepted solely on the basis of their intrinsic value. "The shortest distance between two points is a straight line," for example, is known throughout the educated world and requires no further explanation. Sadly, fewer adults are as familiar with The Axioms of Life (TAL).
Like their algebraic cousins, TALs are self-evidently true. Consider the Budget TAL: Household expenses rise 2.3 percent faster than salary increases. Or the Wish-I'd TAL: You think of the brilliant, argument-ending retort twenty-four seconds after the argument has already ended. The TAL's name, of course, comes from what you exclaim at that moment: "I wish I'd said that."
And, finally, there's the Literary TAL: Anyone who has ever read a book thinks he can write one. It's a fantasy fueled by regular newspaper headlines about authors who seemingly materialize out of nowhere to produce best sellers, earn millions of dollars in the process, and are invited to dine at the White House. Take the case of a middle-aged insurance agency executive from Maryland named Tom Clancy.
Clancy not only defied the odds by producing a best-selling first novel--the average first novel sells about forty-five-hundred copies, if the author has a large family--he has since written one best seller after another. And, with one exception, his books have gotten progressively better.
In fact, his latest, Clear and Present Danger--despite an unusually slow start--is possibly his best work. It is even more fascinating than his personal story, a tale that might have been written by the Brothers Grimm.
Clancy is an incipient George Patton or Erwin Rommel. Were it not for severe myopia, he might have become a career officer. He tried, signing up for Army ROTC while a student at Loyola College in his native Baltimore, but was rejected because of poor vision.
This did not dampen his enthusiasm for matters military. Fascinated by military topics since childhood and an avid reader of books on military affairs and technology, he became expert enough to have an article on the MX missile appear in Proceedings, a journal published by the Naval Institute Press, the semiofficial publishing arm of the U.S. Naval Academy. That and a letter to the editor in the same magazine were the sum total of his published works before his first novel.
Meanwhile, Clancy married, went to work for the insurance agency founded by his bride's grandfather, had children, and, outwardly at least, assumed the role of middle-class family man. On the inside, however, the pressure of the Literary TAL was building.
In 1976, Clancy says, he read about the crew of a Soviet frigate attempting to defect to Sweden. The idea stayed with him. In 1982, he changed the frigate to a high-tech nuclear submarine and spent only seven months writing The Hunt for Red October. With a completed
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