I would have liked to have seen Montana

Or, how I couldn't sell this book last year and have started a substack instead

I'd spent a month last fall writing The Hunt For Tom Clancy as a book proposal. I couldn't get Tom Clancy out of my head, so I decided to write a book about it. I was sure it would sell. So were a few people in the industry I trust. No one knows anything. Last week my literary agent emailed me with bad news: 

I hate to admit defeat, so I won’t.  However, I have been everywhere with this proposal and cannot find an enthusiastic editor who can carry the ball over the goal line. 

I went to more than 20 houses and feel there is nowhere else to go.

It is time to move on.

It's disappointing and a bit embarrassing, but I'm a professional writer and so it goes. Editors say no and pitches get rejected. Never fear: I'm working on a couple other book proposals and some magazine journalism at the moment. 

Over the last year the day to day mostly involved hanging out with my family, tending our garden and walking our dogs. The latter two were often done while listening to a Tom Clancy title on audiobook. I found myself working through the entire Clancy catalogue, and I still think there's some merit to my idea. 

So. I decided to share parts of it here for free, partially for my own amusement and partially to gauge readers' interest. If I get enough subscribers or interested readers, I will be adding new essays on Tom Clancy books, modern warfare, which dinosaurs are the coolest, late 1980s Soviet synthpop and other topics that occupy my mind. So, without further ado, here's the introduction to The Hunt for Tom Clancy. 

If you like what I'm doing, please share with your friends. If you don't like what I'm doing, I hope you have a lovely day.

The Hunt for Tom Clancy: How an 1980’s Insurance Man Sold the CIA and Made the American Military Radical

Tom Clancy was my age, thirty-seven years old when he sold his first novel The Hunt for Red October.  Writing was a side gig and a mental diversion—a few years before, Clancy’d taken out a high-interest second mortgage to buy the family insurance business from his wife’s grandmother. It was a demanding job and to escape he spent the weekends at war game conventions and nights at his kitchen table. It was a busy time for Clancy, who by then had over a thousand clients and a growing family—his wife, Wanda, a nurse he’d met on a blind date his senior year in college, was pregnant.

At night, he would go home and work at his kitchen table, not stopping until he reached ten pages. 'He was writing at home every weekend,'' Wanda told the New York Times in 1988  ''I told him he should go back to selling insurance.” Clancy was a grind, but it worked: he finished writing a full revision of the manuscript between November 11, 1982 and February 27, 1983 and sold it for a $5,000 advance. In 1984, when the Naval Institute Press published Red October, it was a first novel for both author and publisher. 

The book sold well even before President Ronald Reagan received a copy for Christmas, stayed up late to read it, and then told reporters it was “a perfect yarn,”  That made the Hunt for Red October a bonafide hit, selling 365,000 hardbacks and 4.3 million paperbacks, and introducing a new Tom Clancy: a man on the make. By 1986, Tom Clancy’s life was fully transformed. He lectured in front of a packed auditorium of spy-fans at the National Security Agency and gave similar talks that year to FBI and CIA.

President Ronald Reagan advised British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher to read Tom Clancy novels to better understand the Soviet threat. At the time, the two world leaders, Reagan and Thatcher, were in Reykjavik, Iceland at a nuclear arms summit with the Soviets and Gorbachev. Clancy’s story was Walter Mitty, in real life. His wife Wanda even bought him a surplus World War II tank for the front yard of their Maryland estate, Peregrine Cliff. Jack Ryan, Clancy’s principal protagonist, also lived on a Maryland estate called Peregrine Cliff.   

"The difference between fiction and reality," Clancy later said, "is that fiction has to make sense." In Tom Clancy's fictional world, the United States couldn't stop winning, expensive weapons worked, wars were over quickly, and stock brokers were invariably patriotic, aching for their call to government service. They were people who had their differences, sure, but also their common purpose: protecting the United States from threats foreign and domestic with Cinncinatus-level sincerity. During the long arc of Clancy’s popularity and mass appeal, the world has seen the fall of Soviet Communism, global terrorism reaching American shores and a subsequent rise in military mis-adventurism overseas, and most recently a pandemic and militant groups of all stripes threatening the United States—all of which also took place in Tom Clancy novels, often to markedly different results, years before their incarnation in real life.