Tom Clancy R.I.P.

Tom Clancy Dead: Celebrated Thriller Author Dies at Age 66

In 2002,  Forbes wrote , ” Clancy can produce a guaranteed bestseller just by writing two words: his name.”
“When it comes to leveraging his brand across multiple channels, he is positively protean,” Forbes continued, noting his income at the time made him  the tenth-best earner on Forbes Celebrity 100 list for 2002. His net worth today is reported to be around $300 million.
Clancy has been a lifetime supporter of conservative and Republican causes in America,  a member of the  National Rifle Association  since 1978, and was  part-owner of the  Baltimore Orioles.

Tom Clancy.com

Tom Clancy obituary
Bestselling novelist whose military thrillers, including Patriot Games, were made into hit films and spawned video games
(The Guardian) Tom Clancy, who has died aged 66, dominated the bestseller lists of the 1980s, with a series of novels that thrust his appealing CIA analyst Jack Ryan into situations that combined the intricacies of cold-war politics with precise details of modern military operations and equipment. With the end of the cold war, Clancy moved seamlessly into the era of terrorism, with no decline in sales; only JK Rowling and John Grisham joined him in meriting first printings of more than 2m copies.
Seventeen of his books topped the New York Times bestseller chart, and his income as a novelist may have been matched only by Stephen King. He also became one of the first writers to recreate himself as a brand-name, helped by astute use of video games. His company Red Storm produced a string of games, often based on novels that had his name as co-writer but whose actual writing was not his.
He also became a spokesman for right-wing political causes, and a frequently quoted pundit on terrorism, especially after 9/11 repeated aspects of his 1994 novel Debt of Honor, in which Ryan becomes US president after a Japanese terrorist crashes a airliner into the Capitol Dome during the president’s state of the union address. Clancy took this role seriously, producing 11 non-fiction books on military hardware and command, the best-known of which is Battle Ready (2004), a collaboration with the marine general Anthony Zinni, like Clancy a critic of the Bush administration’s policy on Iraq. But he took his prophetic reputation lightly, once saying: “Osama bin Laden has never sent me any fan mail, and I haven’t really sold that many books in Afghanistan … But no, if I could predict the future, I’d be down on Wall Street.” …
Between 1984 and 2003, Clancy wrote 13 novels with Ryan and/or Clark. One of them, Rainbow Six (1998) was published to coincide with the release of his highly successful video game of the same name. He had previously published SSN: Strategies for Submarine Warfare (1996), a non-Ryan book, to similarly launch another game. In 2003 the series appeared to end with The Teeth of the Tiger, which introduced Jack Ryan Jr and two of his cousins as protagonists. But those stories resumed in 2010 with four more novels, all written by collaborators; the last, Threat Vector (2012), written with Mark Greavy, opened at No 1 on the bestseller lists. A fifth, Command Authority, also written by Greavy, is due out in December.

Tom Clancy, bestselling thriller author, dies at age 66
Tom Clancy, who also lent his name to the Splinter Cell video game franchise, topped the bestseller list with 16 of his novels.
(AP via Toronto Star) Tom Clancy, whose high-tech, Cold War thrillers such as The Hunt for Red October and Patriot Games made him the most widely read and influential military novelist of his time, has died. He was 66.

Penguin Group (USA) said Wednesday that Clancy died Tuesday in Baltimore. The publisher did not disclose a cause of death.
Clancy arrived on bestseller lists in 1984 with The Hunt for Red October. He sold the manuscript to the first publisher he tried, the Naval Institute Press, which had never bought original fiction.
A string of other bestsellers soon followed, including Red Storm Rising, Patriot Games, The Cardinal of the Kremlin, Clear and Present Danger, The Sum of All Fears and Without Remorse.
Clancy had said his dream had been simply to publish a book, hopefully a good one, so that he would be in the Library of Congress catalogue. Several of his books were later made into movies, with the latest, based on desk-jockey CIA hero Jack Ryan, set for release later this year.
In 1979, Clancy began Patriot Games, in which he invented his hero, CIA agent Jack Ryan. In 1982, he put it aside and started The Hunt for Red October, basing it on a real incident in November 1979, in which a Soviet missile frigate called the Storozhevoy attempted to defect.
In real life, the ship didn’t make it, but in Clancy’s book, the defection is a success.
By a stroke of luck, U.S. president Ronald Reagan got Red October as a Christmas gift and quipped at a dinner that he was losing sleep because he couldn’t put the book down — a statement Clancy later said helped put him on the New York Times bestseller list.
It led to a string of hits, both on the page and in Hollywood blockbusters. He even ventured into video games with the bestselling Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon: Future Soldier, Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell: Conviction and Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell: Double Agent. The latest Splinter Cell installment, Blacklist, came out this past summer.
“He was a consummate author, creating the modern-day thriller, and was one of the most visionary storytellers of our time,” Penguin Group (USA)’s executive David Shanks said in a statement Wednesday.
Clancy continued to play off — and sometimes almost anticipate — world events, as in the pre-9-11 paranoid thriller Debt of Honor, in which a jumbo jet destroys the U.S. Capitol during a joint meeting of Congress.