Deep Six

The seventh book featuring Dirk Pitt, NUMA Special Projects Director and all-round man’s man and action hero, but actually the sixth book as Cussler managed to sell a trunk novel, set and written before his debut novel, having now become a best-selling author. Trunk novels should generally stay trunk novels, and Cussler’s is no exception. I should point out that Deep Six, published in 1984, may have been Cussler’s seventh actual novel, but in 2025 Cussler, who died in 2020, has 27 Dirk Pitt novels in print (the last two written by his son), 21 NUMA Files novels written by assorted hands from his atelier, 18 Oregon Files novels, 15 Isaac Bell Adventures novels, and 12 Fargo Adventures novels. I make that 93 novels. That’s a show more fucking large, or a fucking productive, hacktelier/atelier.

Deep Six is set in 1989, five years after it was published. A tramp freighter disappears in the 1970s with a bank robber aboard. It is discovered ten years later because it was carrying a cargo of barrels of stolen US Army nerve gas, one of which has leaked and killed hundreds of people off the coast of Alaska. Pitt amazes everyone by quickly finding the ship. The barrels of nerve gas are taken away to be buried, but Pitt is intrigued by the ship itself, a Liberty ship from World War 2 from which all identification has been removed. He investigates further, and learns it was operated by a shady Korean shipping company, now based in New York.

Meanwhile, the president of the US, vice-president, speaker of the house, and a senator are off on a weekend trip on the presidential yacht, the USS Eagle (the last presidential yacht was actually the USS Sequoia, which was sold off by Carter in 1977). Overnight, a heavy fog drops, and when it lifts everyone aboard the yacht has vanished. The Administration desperately tries to cover up the fact the president is missing…

… and who has actually been kidnapped by the aforementioned Koreans, who have been paid by the Soviets, and a Soviet neuroscientist plans to brainwash the president and insert a controlling microchip into his head…

It’s action all the way as Pitt ends up involved in the hunt for the missing politicians. A Soviet liner in the Caribbean is blown up and sunk - and Pitt’s latest lover is aboard, so he’s involved in that too. But the Koreans have her, so he’s after them in a desperate race to find their secret laboratory before they kill everyone. The climax involves a battle on the Mississippi delta between the machine-gun-armed Koreans on a tug and a company of ACW re-enactors with muskets on a paddle-wheel steamer. Exciting stuff, even if not in the slightest bit credible. And the only reason Pitt found them is because the Korean shipping company named all their ships after towns on the Mississippi delta - er, what?

I’m beginning to wonder if Cussler had a time-machine and visited 2025. In Night Probe!, the US and Canada merged - which didn’t happen in the real world, obviously, although Trump clearly thought he could make it happen. In Deep Six, the president is controlled by the Soviets (although a microchip in Trump’s brain would be ineffective as his brain is clearly ineffective, but he’s still Putin’s puppet), he wants to pull the US out of Nato, there are troops on the streets of Washington, and the US is no longer a democracy. Hmmm. I don’t recall a tech billionaire who believes the laws of physics don’t apply to him in Raise the Titanic!, however. And while Iceland featured in Iceberg, Greenland wasn’t mentioned.

Still, another twenty Dirk Pitt novels to go… show less

With each Dirk Pitt novels, the world Clive Cussler is building seems to get more and more intense and diverge further from the world we live in. We started with simple salvage and simple enough (although extensive) smuggling and drugs. And then they raised the Titanic. And found a treaty to add Canada to the United States.

[b:Deep Six|41698|Deep Six (Dirk Pitt, #7)|Clive Cussler|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1400897211l/41698._SY75_.jpg|1064794] is certainly no exception, with a primary plot essentially resolving around kidnapping and mind controlling the President of the United States. As one does.

One thing I do appreciate though is how internally consistent these books have been so far. The show more North American treaty is found and Canada is merged into the United States. Is that written out of the story? Nope. It's not a huge plot point, but it's stuck to. And it's interesting to see this entirely parallel reality taking shape.

Another interesting point is reading this book decades later, with various changes to the office of the president and their powers. Executive privilege has expanded far beyond what was considered ridiculous in this book and impeachment is once again in the news. It's interesting to see that from an older point of view.

I think my biggest negative with this book is that it was really about salvage, which is my favorite part of the books. It's more action and political espionage than anything. Still a fun enough read.

Final bit: There's a cheeky line that basically says Pitt's life "reads like a novel." I'm amused. show less

Death is stalking the coastline of Alaska and on the Potomac River the President and the first three men in succession are kidnapped, these two events have thing in common and soon Dirk Pitt will figure out what. Deep Six is the seventh installment in Clive Cussler’s Dirk Pitt series, featuring the titular protagonist racing to stop a deadly nerve agent on one coast before getting wrapped up in a constitutional crisis when the President is kidnapped and subjected to mind manipulation leading to a race to find the missing Vice President.

A ship from San Francisco to Auckland is hijacked in 1966 by Korean seamen resulting in the deaths of the crew and the lone passenger, a female former bank teller who embezzled $120,000 from her show more employer. Twenty years later a deadly biological weapon is seeping into the Gulf of Alaska from an unknown point of origin, killing everything—man and animal—in its path. Dirk Pitt and NUMA is called in to find the vessel along with an EPA senior scientist, who Pitt bets a date on if he can find it in less than a day. True to his word, Pitt finds the vessel emerging from the upheaval of an island with an active volcano but as they begin clean up the volcano wakes up and the trimer causes the death the EPA scientist which leads Pitt to seek vengeance on the people responsible for stealing the biological agent in the first place. Meanwhile, the President tries to convince his own Vice President, the Speaker of the House, and the Senate Majority Leader to support his aid package to the Communist bloc but the four are kidnapped with the Presidential yacht replaced with a lookalike. Pitt is pulled from his investigation into finding the yacht, finding it sunk in the Potomac with the crew dead as well as Korean bodies as well. The kidnapping is sponsored by an international shipping corporation and the USSR to mind manipulate the four leaders into following policies friendly to the USSR with the President being the first subject. For 10 days the White House hides the fact the leaders are missing until the President returns with a story about a secret conference with his USSR counterpart then begins acting like a dictator due to instructions received from his Soviet doctors. Pitt links his Alaskan ship to the missing 1966 ship and the fake Presidential yacht to Bougainville Maritime Lines but is sidetracked when his on-and-off flame Loren Smith is abducted on a Soviet cruiser line. Pitt mounts a rescue and finds the Speaker and Majority Leader on the ship as well, but Bougainville’s black ops head sabotages the ship and almost kills Pitt while abducting Loren while the Speaker is finished out of the Caribbean by the U.S. Navy and heads to Washington wanting to impeach the President and become the new President. Pitt, saved by best friend Al Giordino, searches for where the Bougainville’s are holding the Vice President, and mostly like Loren as well, focuses on Louisiana. With the FBI, Coast Guard, and Navy helping Pitt and Giordino discover the barge the Bougainville’s are holding the Vice President. In desperation, Pitt convinces a captain of a riverboat and a regiment of Civil War reenactors to mount a rescue and in the nick of time save before Loren and the Vice President, who makes it Washington just after the conviction of the President to take the oath of office. Pitt and the father of the woman who died in 1966 go to Bougainville headquarters and kills Matriarch of the clan—the black ops head being her grandson—to end their criminal activities.

Like the previous book, Cussler’s total lack of understanding of the Constitution once again rears its ugly head once the mind control President begins becoming a dictator with an assist from the Pentagon until he attempts to leave NATO. Frankly what he has the military due would never happen because of being unconstitutional and the military takes an oath to preserve the Constitution not the President. The fact that the Soviet leadership has the President do these unconstitutional things makes sense as not understanding the American government, but Cussler having the military brass be ignorant is just bad. Besides one complaint, this was a fun mishmash of action-adventure and political thriller book. Pitt takes a beating but has just enough to survive and outwit the Bougainvilles to save the day and get vengeance. The main protagonist in the person of Lee Tong, the Bougainville black op head, is probably the best straight-up evil villain in the series so far with a plan for everything that is only foiled by the combined efforts of Pitt, the military, and the Civil War reenactors at the end of the book. The female characters in the book are good for the most part with one passage of Cussler going back to the attitude of his earlier books, but the quality of the female characters is showing improvement. Pitt’s best friend Al Giordino is given more to do and is followed more than in previous books.

Deep Six improves a tad over the previous installment, though it could have been better if Cussler had thought out the Constitutional issues and had not taken a tiny step back in his attitude to female characterization while still getting better at writing them. Personally, I can’t wait for the series to get beyond the Cold War spy thriller aspect in later books because it results in some bad elements being written into the book which detract from interesting plots. show less

The seventh in Cussler's Dirk Pitt series, set in an alternative political history a few years ahead of the publication debate (1984), 'Deep Six' is a lengthy thriller that works to the formula already set by the author in preceding books.

This is not to say that it is formulaic according to the thriller genre but only formulaic to Cussler's variant of the genre. A story embedded in the past, political shenanigans, the heroism of the protagonist, several plots weaving in and out of one another, close calls and implausible events.

At this level it is enjoyable but not remarkable. The story lines are already becoming comfort food for fans. This particular story has a villainous Korean shipping line at the heart of a criminal empire, Soviet show more mind control of American politicians and ruthless political ambition in Washington.

However, after a fairly prosaic thriller unfolds for well over a third of the book, Cussler suddenly shows us again that he can write with a capacity well above the average thriller writer - in this case, the devastating effects of a cruise ship being sunk through a criminal terrorist act.

This is why one goes back to Cussler. The implausibility and comfort food aspect of his novels can suddenly switch into sections where the rawness of existence, the brutal effect of events on unsuspecting people, is expressed in some fine writing that has you in the time and the place.

And then, once that is over, it is back to the complicated plot, the solid characterisation of men (though rarely of women) and well written but completely implausible scenes that are the mark of the Cussler novel. The best example of the latter is unmentionable because it would be a spoiler.

Overall not one of the great works of Western literature perhaps or even the best of Cussler's own work but still pleasure enough as an example of his peculiar brand of crossover political thriller and adventure fantasy. Of its time, of course, but not necessarily to be abandoned for that reason. show less

Dirk Pitt once more tangles up with impossible odds, diabolical masterminds, a smart good looking woman, political intrigue and plenty of aquatic action. It's a recipe that works for Cussler, book after book. Deep Six sees Pitt take on some shady racketeers with purely revenge in mind, however, unbeknownst to Pitt, the schemers have plans afoot which will shake the whole political world. More diverse in it's approach to previous Dirk Pitt adventures, Deep Six is a complex action novel, however, to make the strands of the story weave together there are some substantial leaps of faith. Overall, Deep Six is an action-packed ride, just suspend your disbelief and it's an easy way to wile away a few hours.

Ok, this was creepy. Set in 1980's, the book is about the president being manipulated by the Russians. As I type this indictments went out to arrest 13 Russians who manipulated the 2016 election and potential collusion by Trump. This story was fun and while the technology is non-existent even today, it works.

I really enjoyed the battle between the bag guys and the Confederate soldiers- that was surprisingly entertaining. Otherwise, this was not one of Cussler's best novels. The neuroscience stuff was odd and dated, and thus really hard to buy into for the sake of the story, and the whole story seemed just a bit too far-fetched and clumsy, compared to Cussler's better books. It was still fun, but I know this author can write better books. Granted, this was a novel from the 80's, but that only is a partial excuse.