Clancy: yes, a wonderful writer, particularly when he sticks to what he knows well (security matters) and avoids the things where he is, at best, semi-bright (economics and government). Though even where he's bad, he's pretty good. And, come to think of it, vastly better at public policy matters than most of his thriller-writing brethren.
The great Clancy novels:
The Hunt for Red October
Red Storm Rising
The Sum of All Fears
Debt of Honour
Executive Orders
Any one of those would be sufficient to put Clancy into the top rank, the five of them make him fit to be compared with only the very best of the very best: Le Carre, Deighton, and ... well, Le Carre and Deighton, I guess, though Clancy has more sweep than Deighton, and a finer grasp of technical detail than Le Carre, if not the razor-sharp observation of human nature that makes Le Carre the greatest of them all.
Which of these five great Clancy thrillers is my favourite? A very tough chioce. Debt of Honour and Executive Orders follow the progress of Jack Ryan into high office, first as National Security Advisor, then as President. In the first Ryan deals with a most unlikely war (the US against Japan!) and Clancy's grasp of detail makes it almost credible: only when it comes to his dramatically convenient but entirely unconvincing handling of naval air power must we, as readers, will a suspension of disbelief - this is the great thing about Clancy: most of his unlikely scenarios are so well dovetailed into his narrative, and so carefully researched and true to life in detail, that we need not try to "believe" in them for the sake of an exciting read, we are swept up and carried away on the flood of his narrative. But in Debt of Honour, while he carefully removes the US Pacific Fleet carriers in a sufficiently convincing way - very far-fetched but acceptable for the sake of his story - the absurd way in which all the remaining US carriers are simply ignored because they are in the wrong ocean just doesn't wash. That, after all, is the whole point of having those incredibly expensive nuclear-powered military airbases: a Nimitz-class carrier is, above all else, mobile. It can, if it needs to, travel almost a thousand miles a day.
(Work it out: assume a cruising speed of 30 knots (their actual top speed is classified, but it's certainly more than 30 knots, and the whole point of nuclear power is that you never run out of fuel - you can crack on flank speed and keep it up for as many hours as you like - weeks if need be). 30 knots is about 35 miles per hour: at 24 hours in the day, that's 970 miles (if my mental arithmetic is to be trusted). A nuclear-powered carrier, in other words, can get from anywhere, to anywhere in two or at most three weeks. The plot of Debt of Honour, in short, is complete nonsense. But no matter: it's a great read.)
In the follow-on, Executive Orders, Ryan becomes President, and is immediately faced with a nighmare situation involving the obligatory Arab plotters and carefully grown cultures of Ebola Virus. Chilling stuff. In the meantime, Ryan proceeds to totally overturn the traditional role of government, eliminate corruption, lower taxes, increase national productivity, abolish crime, and pretty much every other political fantasy that Clancy has ever had. Oh, and save the world again. Oddly enough, it is more convincing than Debt of Honour, and it's easy to sit back and accept the broad rush of Clancy's right-wing fantasy revolution from the top. Partly this is because Clancy is so obviously enjoying himself, partly it's because he sugars the pill with his usual dose of detailed, high-tech tension, and partly it's because we have long since grown used to adding a suitable grain of salt to the politicial opinions of our paper heros - hell, as a kid I grew up on Biggles, and there is enough jingoistic White Man's Burden stuff in a page or two of W.E. Johns to launch a battleship - but mostly it is just because Clancy writes so well, and manages - just - to stay within the bounds of things he knows. His characters are better rounded than in earlier works, and if Ryan himself is a little hackneyed, and Ryan's sidekicks (his wife, the Secretary of State) little more than caricutures, his minor characters can be compelling: Clancy's portrayal of the Secret Service guards is especially fine. All in all, another great Tom Clancy, and the last of them, if I am any guess. Most authors run out of things to say eventually, and while in Executive Orders Clancy is still able to motor along in high gear, you can see that his creative tank is almost empty.
The Hunt for Red October was his first book, or so I understand. If so, it is simply astonishing. How on earth did Clancy manage to produce his best-crafted, most beautifully detailed work first, when he should have been just learning his trade, just getting up to speed? The detail is superbly drawn, absolutely riveting. Hell, this book was so good that even turning it into a movie couldn't ruin it! It's not my personal favourite, but, all things considered, it probably ought to be. I imagine that most good judges rate it the best Tom Clancy of them all.
Red Storm Rising was my introduction to Tom Clancy. As you know, I read a lot of history. I like to think that I'm a good judge of truth and myth. I am practiced at sifting the truth from the conflicting stories that people tell, at spotting the false assumption, the glib generalisation. And it was reading Red Storm Rising that made me a Tom Clancy fan overnight - literally overnight: I started it late one afternoon, had perhaps one hour's sleep, read more in the morning, went to work for the minimum possible time, rushed home and finished it just before complete exhaustion claimed me and I slept the clock around. Clancy is like that. He does it to everyone. But the thing that gripped me about Red Storm Rising was his magnificent grasp of history: the astonishingly deft way he wove heroism and incompetence together, his unique sense of balance between the inoxerable march of historical necessity on the one hand, and the bizarre and coincidental on the other. Only a rank amateur or a great master would dare have his grand sweep of history altered by small, near-chance events from time to time, and whatever else you might think of Clancy, when it comes to writing history, is is certainly no amateur. I still marvel at the way he got his balance exactly right.
In this monumental work of tightly disciplined imagination, I could easily find my favourite Clancy. Almost, I do. But, for me, there is one that is still better: The Sum of all Fears. Start with a lost Israeli nuclear weapon. Add a fanatical Arab terrorist, a dissafected East German physicist, their backers and supporters, and have them wind up setting it off at the Super Bowl. Now set all that against a background of the Cold War and the threat of Mutually Assured Destruction and the nuclear winter. For all Clancy's regular, almost miraculous, ability to chill with fear and spellbind with superbly researched detail, The Sum of all Fears is in a class of its own: the very, very best of a writer who, even at his worst, is head and shoulders above his competition.
