NEW YORK — In 1985, a year after the Cold War thriller “The Hunt for Red October” came out, author Tom Clancy was invited to lunch at the Reagan White House, where he was questioned by Navy Secretary John Lehman.
Who, the secretary wanted to know, gave Clancy access to all that secret material? Clancy insisted then, and after, that his information was unclassified. Also, two submarine officers reviewed the final manuscript.
Clancy died Tuesday in Baltimore, his hometown, according to an e-mailed statement from Penguin Group, his publisher. He died at Johns Hopkins Hospital after a brief illness, according to the Baltimore Sun.
Government officials might have worried how Clancy knew that a Russian submarine spent only about 15 percent of its time at sea or how many SS-N-20 Seahawk missiles it carried.
But his extreme attention to technical detail and accuracy earned him respect inside the intelligence community and beyond and helped make Clancy the most widely read and influential military novelist of his time.
He seemed to capture a shift in the country’s mood away from the CIA misdeeds that were exposed in the 1970s to the heroic feats of Clancy’s most famous creation, CIA analyst Jack Ryan.
A number of his high-tech, geopolitical thrillers, including “The Hunt for Red October,” “Patriot Games” and “Clear and Present Danger,” were made into blockbuster movies, with another, “Jack Ryan,” set for release on Christmas.
“Fundamentally, I think of myself as a storyteller, not a writer,” Clancy once said. “I think about the characters I’ve created, and then I sit down and start typing and see what they will do. There’s a lot of subconscious thought that goes on. It amazes me to find out, a few chapters later, why I put someone in a certain place when I did.”
A tall, trim figure given to wearing sunglasses that made him look like a fighter pilot, Clancy had such a sure grasp of defense technology and spycraft that many readers were convinced he served in the military. But his experience was limited to ROTC classes in college. Near-sightedness kept him out of active duty.
Clancy said his dream had been simply to publish a book, hopefully a good one, so that he would be in the Library of Congress catalog. His dreams were answered many times over. His novels were dependable hits, his publisher estimating worldwide sales at more than 100 million copies.
“He did help pave the way for a lot of thriller writers,” said David Baldacci, author of “Absolute Power” and many other best-sellers. He called “Red October” “a great yarn.”
“He was able to balance storytelling with a lot of research,” Baldacci said. “Research often bogs down a story, but that didn’t happen with him. He didn’t write a flip book, where authors have all this research they’re so proud of, and they just stick it in somewhere.”
He also wrote nonfiction works on the military and ventured into video games, including the best-selling “Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon: Future Soldier,” “Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell: Conviction” and “Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell: Double Agent.”
Clancy was married twice, to Wanda Thomas and then to Alexandra Marie Llewellyn, and is survived by his wife and five children, according to his publisher. The publisher had no immediate details on funeral arrangements.
