Pacific Vortex

I finished Clive Cussler's PACIFIC VORTEX and liked it well enough that I'll probably read some more of his Dirk Pitt novels. (The earlier, shorter ones, anyway. I'm not going to read the 600 - 700 page behemoths he produced later. That's just too long for an adventure novel.)

Not that PACIFIC VORTEX was without its problems. Cussler's writing really shines in the underwater scenes, but his dialogue and the rest of the narrative is pretty clunky at times. Since this was a first novel, it may well be that his writing improved later. As it was, the pace moved fast enough and the plot was intriguing enough to keep me reading with ease all the way through. The plot was the standard madman-with-a-hidden-underwater-base-and-vaguely-science-fictional-gimmicks-and-weapons, straight out of Sixties secret agent books and movies. That's okay with me, though. I grew up on those plots and still enjoy them. Mostly Dirk Pitt is a likable character, managing to be a superman and a flawed human being at the same time.

By the way, Bill Crider asks below if I have the first edition of Cussler's first published novel, which is apparently rare and very expensive on eBay these days. The answer is no. I don't think I own any of Cussler's books. PACIFIC VORTEX came from the library, and that's where I'll get the others if I read them.

No pages yesterday, just too much else going on. Today I went over a copy-edited manuscript that had to go back to the publisher, worked some on the still on-going plumbing problems, and wrote 19 pages on the current project. As for reading, I'm going back to finish LONE RIDER FROM TEXAS, a collection of pulp Western stories by Peter Dawson (Jonathan Glidden) that I started a while back.