Tom Clancy

Tom Clancy (1947-2013) was an American novelist whose techno-thrillers, beginning with The Hunt for Red October (1984), created the CIA analyst Jack Ryan and seventeen of whose novels reached number one on the New York Times best-seller list.

He was born in Baltimore, Maryland, on 12 April 1947 and died there on 1 October 2013. Before writing full time he sold insurance, buying the O. F. Bowen Agency in 1980 and writing in his spare time. He began The Hunt for Red October in November 1982, finished it in February 1983 and sold it to the Naval Institute Press for $5,000; published on 1 October 1984, it was the first novel the press had issued. Clancy expected modest sales of perhaps five to ten thousand hardbacks. About 45,000 had sold by March 1985, and praise from President Ronald Reagan pushed hardback sales past 365,000.

Red Storm Rising (1986), written with Larry Bond and published by Putnam, sold almost a million copies in its first year. The Jack Ryan books continued with Patriot Games (1987), The Cardinal of the Kremlin (1988), Clear and Present Danger (1989), The Sum of All Fears (1991) and Executive Orders (1996). Rainbow Six (1998) shared its name with a video game series launched the same year, and later game franchises such as Ghost Recon and Splinter Cell also carried his name, which Ubisoft bought the rights to in 2008. The Jack Ryan series has more than 100 million copies in print.

For collectors. The book to look for is the Naval Institute Press first edition of The Hunt for Red October (1 October 1984): it was an unknown author's debut from a publisher that had never issued fiction before, so it predates the huge later printings of his work. His later Putnam hardbacks were printed in very large numbers; Clancy was one of only three authors to sell two million copies on a first printing in the 1990s.