Review: Lost Empire (Sam and Remi Fargo #2) - Clive Cussler and Grant Blackwood

A while back I reran the review I posted 15 years ago for SPARTAN GOLD, the first novel in Clive Cussler’s series about married treasure hunters and adventurers Sam and Remi Fargo. I never got back to the series, but reading that review again prompted me to do so. I picked up the second book, LOST EMPIRE, once again written by Cussler and Grant Blackwood and available on Amazon in e-book, audio, paperback, and hardcover editions. Cussler had several collaborators on the Fargo series, and I’m assuming they did the bulk of the actual writing, with Cussler contributing to the plots.

LOST EMPIRE is actually kind of a hard book to describe because it really has a kitchen sink plot. It opens with a ship sailing from London in 1864, jumps to Sam and Remi finding the bell from a sunken ship off the coast of Zanzibar, then back around the world to Mexico where the newly elected president of the country sends a sinister assassin after the Fargos. From there, the action bounces back and forth from California to Madagascar to Krakatoa (which is actually west of Java, not east, no matter what the movie title says). We get a bunch of running, jumping, swimming, car chases, fighting, and an underground encounter with a den of crocodiles that’s a pretty good scene. Not surprisingly, there’s even a cameo appearance by Clive Cussler his own self as he gives Sam and Remi a hand in their adventure. The whole thing revolves around a 19^th Century British secret agent, cryptography, a lost Confederate ship, and the origins of the Aztec Empire.

As I’ve mentioned before, Livia and I have a saying whenever we’re watching a movie or TV show where the plot gets so convoluted and silly that you have to just accept it for it is: “Sure. Why not?” LOST EMPIRE is a “Sure. Why not?” book. I guess the plot makes sense, but I don’t really know because eventually I stopped trying to keep up with it and just went along for the ride. The action scenes are well-done, the settings are colorful, Sam and Remi are very likable protagonists, and the villains are suitably despicable.

I’ve been told by several friends that the entries where Cussler collaborated with Thomas Perry are the best books in the series. Maybe I’ll skip ahead to them. The next book appears to be a direct sequel to this one, though, and I have just enough OCD to feel like I ought to read it. We’ll see. For now, I enjoyed LOST EMPIRE and am glad I read it, but it didn’t win me over completely. Take that for what it’s worth.

A Rough Edges Rerun Review: Spartan Gold - Clive Cussler and Grant Blackwood

Every so often I get in the mood for a big, globe-trotting thriller with a lot of historical background. SPARTAN GOLD, the first book in a new series by Clive Cussler and Grant Blackwood, fits the bill quite nicely.

Almost like a Harry Stephen Keeler novel, this one starts out with a lot of seemingly unconnected elements – Napolean making a startling discovery in an ice cave in 1800; a German mini-sub sunk for sixty years in a Delaware river; a Ukrainian gangster originally from Turkmenistan who believes himself to be a direct descendant of the ancient Persian emperor Xerxes the Great – and weaves them all together into a coherent story. The protagonists responsible for untangling all of this and staying alive through an assortment of dangers are husband-and-wife scientists and treasure hunters Sam and Remi Fargo.

If you’re thinking this sounds a little like a Gabriel Hunt novel, you’re not far wrong in some respects, that is, if Gabriel were married. Sam and Remi are even independently wealthy and have the Fargo Foundation to finance their adventures. SPARTAN GOLD is much longer than a Gabriel Hunt novel, though, and lacks the breakneck pace. Which is not to say that it doesn’t have considerable appeal of its own.

Whoever did the bulk of the writing in this book (I suspect Blackwood, although I should stress that I have absolutely no knowledge of whether that’s correct) does a good job of making Sam and Remi very likeable characters who are easy to root for. Likewise, the frequent infodumps are easy to follow and not obtrusive. The plot is complex but winds up making perfect sense, at least as far as I could tell. My biggest complaint is that the ending doesn’t quite reach the dramatic heights I would have preferred. Anybody who’s read very many of my books knows my motto: If you’re going over the top anyway, you might as well go ’way over.

I get bored easily with long books, but I didn’t have any trouble staying with SPARTAN GOLD. It’s worth reading, and I won’t hesitate to pick up the next one in the series when it comes out.

(Good intentions, road to hell, etc., etc. When this post originally appeared on May 18, 2010, I had every intention of reading the next Fargo novel from Clive Cussler and Grant Blackwood. But you guessed it, I never did. And when I looked it up, I was surprised to see that the series is still going on, with the 13th book due to be released next winter. Blackwood wrote a couple more after this, then Thomas Perry took over for two books, Russell Blake wrote two, and Robin Burcell has done all of them since then, including the one in the pipeline. I'm tempted to read the two that Thomas Perry wrote since I know his work is pretty good. But good intentions . . .)

The Wrecker - Clive Cussler and Justin Scott

Several years ago, I started the first book in this series, THE CHASE, written by Clive Cussler, didn’t care for it, and didn’t finish it. However, several of my friends have recommended the later books co-authored by Justin Scott, so I decided to give one of them a try. THE WRECKER is the second book in the series and I liked it considerably more than the first one.

As in the first book, the protagonist is Isaac Bell, a detective who works for the Van Dorn Agency (clearly inspired by the Pinkertons). Bell is a pretty good protagonist, smart, dogged, tough but not a superman, and since he’s the son of one of the country’s leading bankers who didn’t want to follow in his father’s financial footsteps, he knows his way around the upper echelons of the business, society, and political worlds. In this book, he’s on the trail of a mysterious mastermind known as the Wrecker, who’s trying to take over the country’s railroads in a campaign of sabotage and terror. This book is set in 1907, and the threat to the nation faced by Bell and his cohorts from the Van Dorn Agency is very similar to the menaces tackled by Jimmy Christopher and Richard Wentworth thirty years later.

That’s not the only pulpish influence in this book. Justin Scott (who I suspect did the bulk of the writing and plotting, if not all of it) is the son of A. Leslie Scott, the great Western pulpster who created a couple of iconic Texas Ranger characters in Jim Hatfield (TEXAS RANGERS) and Walt Slade (THRILLING WESTERN, plus more than a hundred paperback original novels). One of Bell’s fellow agents is a former Ranger known as Texas Walt Hatfield, and every time he made an appearance in this book, I couldn’t help but get a big grin on my face at Scott’s tribute to his dad’s work. There’s one chapter where Walt Hatfield takes on a couple of saboteurs on his own, and it’s a great homage to a couple of characters whose adventures have entertained me for more than five decades now. (I read my first Walt Slade novel in 1965 or ’66, my first Jim Hatfield in 1967.)

There are a few things in this book I can quibble about. Like most thrillers written these days, it’s too blasted long, and because of that the pace lags at times. And for a crack detective, Bell seems awfully dumb in places, especially when it comes to figuring out the Wrecker’s true identity. Scott doesn’t keep that a secret from the reader for very long, but Bell takes forever to figure it out despite being practically hit over the head with clues. However, I’m willing to forgive that because of the great action scenes—and there are a lot of ’em—and the sheer sense of fun that runs throughout this novel. I’ll definitely read more of Justin Scott’s entries in this series. I enjoyed this one enough that I’ll probably pick up some of his solo novels, as well.

Spartan Gold - Clive Cussler and Grant Blackwood

Every so often I get in the mood for a big, globe-trotting thriller with a lot of historical background. SPARTAN GOLD, the first book in a new series by Clive Cussler and Grant Blackwood, fits the bill quite nicely.

Almost like a Harry Stephen Keeler novel, this one starts out with a lot of seemingly unconnected elements – Napolean making a startling discovery in an ice cave in 1800; a German mini-sub sunk for sixty years in a Delaware river; a Ukrainian gangster originally from Turkmenistan who believes himself to be a direct descendant of the ancient Persian emperor Xerxes the Great – and weaves them all together into a coherent story. The protagonists responsible for untangling all of this and staying alive through an assortment of dangers are husband-and-wife scientists and treasure hunters Sam and Remi Fargo.

If you’re thinking this sounds a little like a Gabriel Hunt novel, you’re not far wrong in some respects, that is, if Gabriel were married. Sam and Remi are even independently wealthy and have the Fargo Foundation to finance their adventures. SPARTAN GOLD is much longer than a Gabriel Hunt novel, though, and lacks the breakneck pace. Which is not to say that it doesn’t have considerable appeal of its own.

Whoever did the bulk of the writing in this book (I suspect Blackwood, although I should stress that I have absolutely no knowledge of whether that’s correct) does a good job of making Sam and Remi very likeable characters who are easy to root for. Likewise, the frequent infodumps are easy to follow and not obtrusive. The plot is complex but winds up making perfect sense, at least as far as I could tell. My biggest complaint is that the ending doesn’t quite reach the dramatic heights I would have preferred. Anybody who’s read very many of my books knows my motto: If you’re going over the top anyway, you might as well go ’way over.

I get bored easily with long books, but I didn’t have any trouble staying with SPARTAN GOLD. It’s worth reading, and I won’t hesitate to pick up the next one in the series when it comes out.

Forgotten Books: The Mediterranean Caper - Clive Cussler

I don’t suppose you could really consider any of Clive Cussler’s novels forgotten, but you don’t hear much about this one, and it has some historical significance because it was the first published appearance of Cussler’s long-running series character Dirk Pitt. Not, however, the first Pitt novel written. Chronologically, the first Pitt novel is PACIFIC VORTEX, which Cussler wrote but was unable to sell. THE MEDITERRANEAN CAPER came next and was published in England by Sphere Books in 1973 under the title MAY DAY. Bantam brought it out as a paperback in the U.S. in 1977 as THE MEDITERRANEAN CAPER. However, by that time, Pitt had appeared in the U.S. in hardback in what’s actually the third novel in the series, ICEBERG, his first appearance in the U.S. Then a few years later, following Cussler’s ascent onto the bestseller list with RAISE THE TITANIC!, Cussler dusted off that trunk book, PACIFIC VORTEX, and found a publisher for it. Confused yet? You would have been if you’d read THE MEDITERRANEAN CAPER or ICEBERG back in the Seventies, because the books contain references back to previous volumes in the series that hadn’t actually been published yet. (Update: Check the comments for clarification on this book's publication history.)

With that bit of history out of the way, what about the books themselves? Well, knowing the order in which they actually run, story-wise, I read the first one, PACIFIC VORTEX, a few years ago, and while I thought the writing was pretty rough in spots, I enjoyed it. As I’ve said many times before, give me a writer with a distinctive voice, even if that voice isn’t as slick as some others. I’m just now getting back to Dirk Pitt. THE MEDITERRANEAN CAPER gets off to a great start. A small U.S. air base on the Greek island of Thasos is attacked by a mysterious World War I-era German biplane. A ship belonging to NUMA (the National Underwater Marine Agency) happens to be nearby searching in the Aegean for a prehistoric fish that may not be extinct after all. Pitt and his sidekick Al Giordino, who are troubleshooters for NUMA, happen to be flying in, too, in a World War II-era PBY, so we get a nice dogfight between the two vintage planes.

After that, Pitt has to investigate the reason for the attack, of course, which leads him into a conspiracy right out of a Sixties secret agent movie: there’s a beautiful woman who may or may not be trustworthy, an evil baddie who looks like Erich Von Stroheim (as Cussler points out frequently), an underground labyrinth with deadly dangers lurking in it, secret lairs, skin-diving, explosions, fistfights, double-crosses, a wrap-up where the bad guy stands around explaining everything . . . well, you get the idea. If you like this kind of stuff (and you know I do!), THE MEDITERRANEAN CAPER is a lot of fun. At this point in his career, Cussler’s still not much of a stylist and has a tin ear for dialogue at times, but he keeps things moving along so well that doesn’t really matter, at least not to me. As a character, Dirk Pitt is a kind of a jackass at times, too, but you have to admire him because Cussler really heaps on the punishment but Pitt keeps taking on the bad guys anyway. I enjoyed this novel enough that I’ll certainly continue with the series, and I don’t think it’ll take me several years to get around to the next one. In fact, I have a copy of ICEBERG already and will probably read it later this year.

Coming up in Forgotten Books posts: I feel a Western binge coming on.

Thriller 2: Stories You Just Can't Put Down - Clive Cussler, editor

A couple of years ago I read and enjoyed THRILLER: STORIES TO KEEP YOU UP ALL NIGHT, the first anthology put together by the International Thriller Writers. Now the follow-up, THRILLER 2: STORIES YOU JUST CAN’T PUT DOWN is out, and for the most part, it’s a pretty entertaining bunch of stories, too.

First of all, I like the subtitles on these books. They remind me of those great Alfred Hitchcock anthologies from the Sixties and Seventies. In fact, there may have been a book called ALFRED HITCHCOCK PRESENTS STORIES TO KEEP YOU UP ALL NIGHT. (I’m too lazy today to look it up and see for sure.) Secondly, the ITW has a pretty talented roster of members to draw from, and as a result there are a number of really good stories in these anthologies, by big names and newcomers alike.

I’m not going to go through all of them in this volume, but I will point out a few favorites: “Can You Help Me Out Here?” by Robert Ferrigno is a sly gangland execution story with a final twist I didn’t see coming. “A Calculated Risk” by Sean Chercover is a tropical adventure that I thought was really well-written. “Bedtime for Mr. Li” by David J. Montgomery is an interesting, well-done hitman story, something that seems to be a minor theme in this anthology since several stories feature such characters. Another case in point in Jon Land’s “Killing Time”, which I really enjoyed. Ridley Pearson’s “Boldt’s Broken Angel” is part of the author’s series about cop Lou Boldt and generates considerable suspense. Three stories are by romantic suspense authors I hadn’t read before: “Vintage Death” by Lisa Jackson, “On the Run” by Carla Neggers, and “Watch Out for My Girl” by Joan Johnston. I liked all of them well enough that I’ll probably give some of their novels a try.

Of course, in any anthology the odds are that some of the stories won’t be to my taste, and that’s true here, but there were only one or two that I started and didn’t finish because I didn’t care for them. In a 500-page anthology with 23 stories, that’s a pretty good winning percentage. I enjoyed THRILLER 2 quite a bit and don’t hesitate to recommend it as another fine collection from the ITW.