Background Info
on novels

Tom Clancy Born April 12 1947 - 1 October 2013 Is married and lives in Maryland USA A former insurance broker, who dreamt of becoming a writer. His first book the Hunt for Red October was written after reading about a Soviet frigate that attempted to defect to Sweden. Clancys works are based around military/political scenarios, with great attention being given to technical issues. The books started off with the traditional Cold War scenarios and have moved onto the more modern political problems that the world faces since the demise of the Soviet Union. Clancy has also looked at the ideas of modern business being the 'military' of the future with his story 'Debt of Honour', and also the horrible possibilities of biological warfare in 'Executive Orders'.

Most of Clancys stories flow around the 'Ryanverse' cast of characters. Unusually for a series of this nature the character Jack Ryan may not be the central character, but just a bit player. This does not detract from the books and does mean that you will not get a standard Jack Ryan story.

A number of the books have been made into films and reviews of the films can be found from links on the relevant pages.

Recently Clancy has started to merge his interests, by producing a novel with a companion computer game. The games are not reviewed as they are written for Windows based PCs.

For a fast paced technically correct novel encompassing modern military hardware and theorems, Clancy is hard to beat.

His last few books have been below par. Clancy to my mind peaked with Executive Orders (Perhaps slightly past his peak), and some of the later stories have been over long, and full of wasteful verbiege.