Obituary - Tom Clancy

• Penguin pays tribute to Tom Clancy

03.10.13 | Joshua Farrington and Philip Stone - The Bookseller

Penguin has paid tribute to thriller giant Tom Clancy, who has died at the age of 66.

Tom Clancy died yesterday (1st October) at a Baltimore hospital, close to his Maryland home.
Clancy wrote 25 fiction and non-fiction books for Penguin, including several thrillers based around the military and international espionage, dubbed "techno-thrillers", many of which were adapted into Hollywood films. The author's 17th novel, Command Authority, is due to be released in December 2013.

Tom Weldon, c.e.o. of Penguin Random House UK said: "Tom Clancy changed readers’ expectations of what a thriller could do. He was a master of his craft and it was our privilege to work with him. He will be greatly missed by millions of fans in the UK and around the world."
David Shanks, Penguin USA c.e.o., was involved with every one of Clancy's books. He said: “I’m deeply saddened by Tom’s passing. He was a consummate author, creating the modern-day thriller, and was one of the most visionary storytellers of our time. I will miss him dearly and he will be missed by tens of millions of readers worldwide."

Clancy was one of the richest writers in the world, with Forbes magazine estimating in 2002 that he had earned $47.8m (£29m). His hugely successful novels have been worth £26m to the UK book trade since Nielsen BookScan records began in 1998, with 10 of his books selling over 100,000 copies. He was also involved with computer games, founding Red Storm Entertainment in the 1990s, which was later sold to games company Ubisoft and produced several titles under the Clancy name.
The Hunt for Red October, originally published in 1984, was Clancy's first novel, and turned into a film starring Sean Connery, and Alec Baldwin as CIA analyst Jack Ryan. The character would reappear in books such as Patriot Games and The Sum of All Fears, where Ryan was played by Harrison Ford and Ben Affleck respectively in the film adaptations.

And another tribute over at Shelf Awareness

photo: David Burnett

Tom Clancy, who arguably created the genre of military-techno thriller, died yesterday. He was 66 and was being treated in a Baltimore hospital for an undisclosed illness.

In the early 1980s, Clancy was an insurance agent in rural Maryland who wrote his first blockbuster, The Hunt for Red October, in his spare time. The manuscript was rejected by major publishers, which led him to approach the Naval Institute Press, in Annapolis, which had never published a novel. The Press took a chance with the book--and it was an immediate hit, helped in part by favorable comments from President Reagan, who hosted Clancy at the White House.
Berkley published the paperback of Hunt for Red October, and Clancy moved to Putnam for all his subsequent books. Clancy churned out blockbusters regularly, many of which featured CIA analyst Jack Ryan, who first surfaced in Hunt for Red October. Some of his titles also became blockbuster movies, including Hunt for Red October, Patriot Games and Clear and Present Danger. Clancy also set up a video game company and became a part-owner of the Baltimore Orioles. More than 100 million copies of his books are in print. Command Authority, another Clancy novel starring Jack Ryan, written with Mark Greanery, is scheduled to be published December 3.

Deborah Grosvenor, the editor who bought Hunt for Red October, told the New York Times that she had difficulty at first convincing her boss to publish the book because the author was unknown and Naval Institute Press had never published fiction.
She recalled: "I said, 'I think we have a potential best seller here, and if we don't grab this thing, somebody else would.' " Clancy, she said, "had this innate storytelling ability, and his characters had this very witty dialogue. The gift of the Irish or whatever it was, the man could tell a story."

The Day recalled Clancy's loyalty to the Booksmith, the New London, Conn., bookstore that closed in 2000 and was the first store to host an event by the unknown author. The late owner, Judy Reed, got a galley of The Hunt for Red October from a Naval Institute Press rep at the ABA convention in Dallas in 1984. "She and her husband [Frank Diener] stayed up, reading it that night," the Day wrote. "The next day, she told the publisher they wanted the author in their store--they knew they could sell this submarine-focused techno-thriller in southeastern Connecticut, home of the Naval Submarine Base and Electric Boat."

Clancy was so happy with his first event--at which he sold about 75 copies of his book--that he returned for signings of every new book, Rich Swanson, who was a manager and then owner of the Booksmith, recalled. One year, Clancy held signings only at the Booksmith and West Point. By the time of his last signing at the store before it closed, he signed some 1,500 books. "On one level, I kind of owe it to them, and on another level, I come here for luck," Clancy told the Day in 1996

And at The Guardian.