Tom Clancy, author, dead at 66

[Nutso]

http://www.chicagotribune.com/entertain ... 6736.story

Tom Clancy, writer of espionage and military science thrillers has died. He was 66 years old.

Clancy died Tuesday night after a brief illness at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore. His death has been confirmed by his lawyer, Thomas Webb.

"When he published 'The Hunt for Red October' he redefined and expanded the genre and as a consequence of that, a lot of people were able to publish such books who had previously been unable to do so," said Stephen C. Hunter, an author and former Pulitzer Prize-winning film critic for The Washington Post. "He valued technical precision and on-target writing that became the form of the modern thriller."

Mr. Clancy was the author of numerous best-selling novels, most of which featured the character Jack Ryan.

"I've been lucky," Mr. Clancy said in a 1992 interview with The Baltimore Sun.

Growing up in Baltimore's middle-class Northwood neighborhood, he spent fall afternoons as a youth rooting for the Baltimore Colts.

"I was a little nerdy but a completely normal kid. Mom and Dad loved each other. It was like 'Leave it to Beaver,'" he said in the 1992 interview.

His education was all-Catholic, beginning with St. Matthew's grade school. He went on to Loyola High School in Towson, an all-boys school with an all-man faculty and a rigorous, Jesuit curriculum. Students took four years of Latin, wore jackets and ties and began each class with a prayer.

"He was kind of his own man. He was quiet and toward the shy side," Father Thomas McDonnell, a Loyola faculty member who taught Mr. Clancy religion, Latin and history in his sophomore year, once recalled in an interview. He described Mr. Clancy as a straight-A student from the standout class of 1965, but unremarkable as a leader or athlete.

While some of Mr. Clancy's classmates went on to spend the late 1960s on campuses rife with anti-war activism, he moved a few miles south to Baltimore's Loyola College, where the ruling Jesuits had little tolerance for demonstrations. Mr. Clancy took ROTC classes.

"Loyola was a working class college. You had to be rich to be radical," Mr. Clancy said. "I was more of a Peter, Paul and Mary kind of guy."

He graduated in 1969 with an English degree and moved to Connecticut to work for an insurance company. Two years later he returned to Maryland, joining his in-law's insurance agency in the Calvert County community of Owings.

Despite his fascination with the military, Mr. Clancy never served in uniform. His ROTC classes were the sort that prepared students for military careers, but a serious case of near-sightedness kept him out of the service. (It's also the reason for his trademark dark glasses; the tinting keeps the thick lenses from making him "look like a chipmunk," he once said).

But his insurance office had a number of military clients, which kept him around epaulets and brass buttons. He wrote an article in 1982 on the MX missile system for Proceedings, a publication of the Naval Institute in Annapolis.

His first publisher, Jim Barber, a retired Navy captain and executive director of the Naval Institute, once remembered Mr. Clancy as "a very bright guy who knows clearly what he thinks and doesn't hesitate to let you know what he thinks."

Bored with the insurance business, Mr. Clancy began working on a novel in his spare time, basing it loosely on a real-life, 1975 mutiny aboard a Soviet frigate. The result, published in 1984, was "The Hunt for Red October," a tale of superpower conflict centered on a renegade Soviet nuclear submarine.

The book took off, selling 300,000 hardbacks and 2 million paperbacks in the first two years. The hardcover version spent 31 weeks on Publishers Weekly's bestseller list; the paperback, 37 weeks.

"The Hunt for Red October" was made into a film, as were several of his subsequent novels. His books also inspired several video games.

Clancy was also a major financial player in Baltimore sports in the 1990s, when the Orioles moved to Camden Yards and the NFL returned to Baltimore.
He was the biggest minority investor in the group that Peter Angelos assembled to buy the Orioles for $173 million in 1993. Before that he applied, but dropped out of the bidding, for an NFL expansion team for Baltimore.

[Tyyr]

Well damn. That's sad news. Hunt for Red October and Red Storm Rising are two of my favorite books.

[Teaos]

Read Rainbow 6 just, didn't really grab me, needlessly detailed and convoluted.

[Tinadrin Chelnor]

This is very sad news, Clancy is my favourite author. "Red Storm Rising", "SSN", and "The Bear and the Dragon" are some of the only fiction books I've really gotten into.

[McAvoy]

66 is a young age to die.

Last Clancy book I read was Rainbow 6 I believe.

[Tyyr]

I read through the Teeth of the Tiger. I loved his books but The Bear and the Dragon really hit my limit for Jack Ryan. By the end of that I was just totally sick of the guy. I wish he'd have just let that be the end of the whole thing and move on to a new continuity.

[RK_Striker_JK_5]

Last I heard they haven't released the cause of death. Damn, way too young.

[stitch626]

Thats rather upsetting.