Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan Is America's James Bond

Broad + Liberty published my piece on Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan character and the Amazon Prime Video series.

You can read the piece via the below link or the below text:

Paul Davis: Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan is America’s James Bond (broadandliberty.com)

This past weekend I watched the final two episodes of the final season of “Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan” on Amazon Prime Video.

I enjoyed the four seasons of the series, which rebooted the Jack Ryan character, much like the 2006 film “Casino Royale” rebooted Ian Fleming’s James Bond character.

I’ve been a fan of Tom Clancy (seen in the above photo) and his Jack Ryan character since the publication of his first novel, “The Hunt For Red October,” in 1984. The Naval Institute Press published the thriller, which was the first fiction the publisher had ever published.

Clancy, an insurance salesman who loved naval history but had no military experience (he had bad eyes and wore thick glasses), based his debut novel on extensive research and the stories he heard from his neighbor, a retired Navy submarine captain.    

Clancy’s novel introduced Jack Ryan, a former Marine and CIA analyst who is an expert on Marko Ramius, the Soviet submarine commander who wished to defect to the United States, bringing along his submarine, the Red October, with him.

I was especially interested in reading this submarine spy novel, as I served two years on a Navy harbor tugboat at the U.S. nuclear submarine base at Holy Loch, Scotland in 1974 and 1975 after serving two years on an aircraft carrier during the Vietnam War.

I bought the novel but put off reading it as I wanted to read it while on vacation in Jamaica with my wife. After a bout of freediving in my mask and fins in the clear and warm water off Ochos Rios in Jamaica, I grabbed a drink and settled into a chair on the beach next to my wife and began to read the novel. 

I was enjoying the military “techno” thriller until one passage made me pause. Tom Clancy described the underwater telephone that surface boats and ships lowered into the ocean to communicate with submerged American submarines. He even got the nickname the American sailors called the communication device right. 

I knew of the device, as the tugboat I served on often went out into the Irish Sea and operated with submarines on classified missions, and we used the device during those operations. I was aghast as I read the passage, as the communication device was Top Secret. 

Years later, I interviewed former Secretary of the Navy John Lehman, a Philadelphia native, who told me he too thought Tom Clancy had published classified information. He had someone check it out, and he was told that the communications device had been declassified. 

As Tom Clancy, a dedicated American patriot like his character Jack Ryan, said later, “If someone gave me classified information, I’d call the FBI.”

“The Hunt for Red October” launched Tom Clancy’s career, especially after President Ronald Reagan read the novel and publicly praised it, much like President John Kennedy aided Ian Fleming’s sales in America after praising Fleming’s “From Russia With Love” in the early 1960s. 

As a young teenager in the 1960s, I was a huge fan of the James Bond films with Sean Connery as Bond, which led me to read the Ian Fleming novels. I was pleased to discover that Fleming’s Bond novels were darker and more complicated than the films, and I’ve been an Ian Fleming aficionado ever since. 

Unlike Bond, a sophisticated, debonair, womanizing bachelor, and a ruthless intelligence operative with a license to kill, Jack Ryan is more of an average, decent guy, a cerebral intelligence desk analyst who is happily married with a daughter. Circumstances forced Ryan to become a field operative and engage in close combat with America’s enemies.

Tom Clancy bucked the trend in most spy novels, films and TV shows that portrayed the CIA in a negative light, with duplicitous, corrupt and amoral men working for self-satisfaction and against the best interest of the American public.  

Tom Clancy‘s Jack Ryan is a dedicated CIA officer whose primary mission was protecting the American public from terrorists, international criminal organizations and foreign spies. In Clancy’s novels, the CIA is a force for good.

Jack Ryan was first portrayed by actor Alec Baldwin in the fine 1990 film adaptation of “The Hunt For Red October,” with the late, great Sean Connery as Marko Ramius. Tom Clancy liked the film, although he picked out two errors. 

Harrison Ford took over the role in the 1992 film “Patriot Games” and 1994’s “Clear and Present Danger.” Ben Affleck portrayed a younger Jack Ryan in 2002’s “The Sum of All Fears,” and Chris Pine portrayed Ryan in a reboot of the character in 2014’s “Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit.”

Although I dislike actor Alec Baldwin personally, as he appears to be an arrogant, angry man, I think he was the best Jack Ryan.    

Tom Clancy, who died in 2013 at the age of 66, also liked Alec Baldwin as Jack Ryan.

In 2018, Amazon Prime Video aired “Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan,” with John Krasinski as a rebooted Jack Ryan. Krasinski was the fifth actor to portray Tom Clancy’s character. 

Krasinski, most known for his comedic role in the TV series “The Office,” bulked up for his role as a former Navy SEAL in the 2016 film “13 Hours: The Secret Soldier of Benghazi,” which no doubt prepared him for portraying Jack Ryan. 

In the Amazon series we are introduced to a young Jack Ryan and other characters from the Tom Clancy novels. Ryan is once again a desk analyst who is forced into the field after he discovers suspicious bank transfers that he suspects were done by an Islamic extremist terrorist.

For four seasons, we’ve watched the patriotic, intelligent, resourceful and tough CIA officer Jack Ryan take on the enemies of America. 

I think the late Tom Clancy would have liked the series and John Krasinski as Jack Ryan. 

Jack Ryan is America’s answer to Britain’s James Bond.

Paul Davis, a Philadelphia writer and frequent contributor to Broad + Liberty, also contributes to Counterterrorism magazine and writes the “On Crime” column for the Washington Times. 

Trained To Protect Foreign Dignitaries, Hunt Fugitives, And Write Tom Clancy Novels: How A US Marshal Inherited An Iconic Spy Fiction Series

CrimeReads.com offers a piece by thriller writer Marc Cameron (seen in the above photo) that looks back on his youth and former career as a police officer and a U.S. Marshall as he continues writing about Tom Clancy’s character Jack Ryan in Oath of Office.

A few years ago, at my thirtieth high school reunion, my wife and I sat beside a friend of mine named Merri—a girl on whom I had a massive crush my freshman year.

“You know what I remember about Marc?” Merri said to my wife in her honeyed Texas accent.

I braced myself.

“He always wanted to be a spy…”

Merri could have made a worse revelation. My wife already knew I was odd in college, so the fact that I was odd in high school was not news.

I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t reading, writing, or imagining adventure stories. My aunt sent me a box of Hardy Boys mysteries when I was eight, and I burned through those by the time I hit the fourth grade. By middle school, there was usually a Fleming or Forsyth on my nightstand—along with assorted notebooks filled with my attempts to write stories of my own. The Hunt for Red October came out about the time I joined the police department, and I quickly added Tom Clancy to my reading pile.

As a would-be writer, I read with a pencil, noting story structure and interesting turns of phrase. Plot ideas inspired by other books and my own work escapades filled countless legal pads. I felt certain that the fistfights, foot chases, and high-speed pursuits I was involved with would somehow, someday, end up in a novel.

When I was a green detective, a savvy Texas Ranger helping me with my first homicide investigation told me to write down everything I observed, even stuff that didn’t seem important at the time. It was excellent advice for a detective—and a writer. I chased bad guys during work hours and banged away on my Smith Corona typewriter during my off time. I’d piled up a sizable stack of rejection letters by the time I left the PD for a position as a deputy US marshal. Tom Clancy’s The Cardinal of the Kremlin had just come out in paperback and I took a copy with me for my four-month stay at the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center near Brunswick, Georgia.

… I’ve always had a vivid imagination, but I never imagined that I’d someday have the opportunity to carry on writing Tom Clancy’s iconic characters. One of the plots of last year’s Power and Empire let me explore what John Clark might do if faced with similar circumstances to those in Without Remorse.

In The Cardinal of the Kremlin, Clancy (seen in the below photo) wove plenty of interesting technical information into the story, but Cardinal is at its core, a book about spies, the case officers who handle them, and the counter intelligence operatives who hunt them. My aim was to give Oath of Office that same flavor.

Over the years since high school, I was fortunate to have a job that let me drive fast, carry a gun, and fight a bad guy or two—experiences that were invaluable to my writing. Despite my dreams from back when I had that crush on Merri, I never did get to be spy. But, thanks to this new job writing about Jack Ryan, John Clark, Mary Pat Foley, and countless other Clancy characters, I get to come up with stories for some of the best.

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

https://crimereads.com/trained-to-protect-foreign-dignitaries-hunt-fugitives-and-write-tom-clancy-novels/

Locked Down And Locked On

I've not posted anything in a while as I've been once again crippled and bedridden with great arthritis pain in my back and feet. The first few days were awful. I could not read, talk on the telephone, work on my Dell Notebook or watch TV.

I felt like a prisoner in my own bedroom.

Thankfully the medicine kicked in the first few days so I could at least read and listen to music. And thankfully I had on hand a paperback copy of Tom Clancy's Locked On.

Written with Mark Greaney, Locked On is a perfect thriller to make one forget his or her own pain.

The book has a great story, an amazing plot and a wild cast of characters, including one of my favorite's, John Clark, the former U.S. Navy SEAL and CIA officer.

Even though Tom Clancy, who recently died, sold enormous amounts of books over the years and made enormous amounts of money, he believed that he did not receive the critical acclaim he rightly deserved.

Of course, he had a very loyal fan base and they - and I - loved his books and will miss him.

Tom Clancy was a great storyteller and a great patriot and I'd like to thank him for helping me get through my week of being ill and "locked down" in my bedroom.

You can read an earlier post on Tom Clancy via the below link:

http://www.pauldavisoncrime.com/2014/01/command-authoritytom-clancys-last.html

A Look Back At Thriller Writer Tom Clancy

Michael Walsh at National Review looks back at Tom Clancy.

It’s probably incorrect to call Tom Clancy, who died on Tuesday at the age of 66, the father of the modern political thriller. That honor should rightly go first to Ian Fleming, about whose James Bond novels little more need be said. Not only did Fleming create the most dashing British hero since Sherlock Holmes, he was also a pulp craftsman of no small literary gifts: “The scent and smoke and sweat of a casino are nauseating at three in the morning,” runs the opening line of the first Bond novel, Casino Royale (1953), a beginning worthy of Melville.

Next comes Frederick Forsyth, whose 1971 novel The Day of the Jackal remains the gold standard for clandestine-world fiction, a gripping tale that has the reader rooting for a cold-blooded assassin, motivated solely by money, to put a bullet through the head of the father of modern France, Charles de Gaulle. Forsyth’s command of history and tradecraft gave the novel its realistic feel, and his inversion of the moral universe immediately distinguished the book from the competition. It would not be until the publication 13 years later of Clancy’s The Hunt for Red October that another work of spy fiction would have such an impact.

That book, you’ll recall, told the story of a rogue Soviet naval officer who hijacks his own submarine and precipitates an international incident. With the world on the brink of World War III, it’s left to the hero, CIA analyst Jack Ryan, to save the day by divining and then acting upon his educated guess that Captain Ramius is defecting, not attacking. But it wasn’t the story itself that rocketed Red October to the top of the best-seller lists. Clancy had never published fiction before — the novel had been rejected by the major publishing houses and was issued by the U.S. Naval Institute Press — but an astute editor saw the possibilities in his command of technology wedded to his narrative gifts. Red October wasn’t just fiction; it was really happening.

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/360430/tom-clancy-rip-michael-walsh#! 

Happy Birthday To Thriller Writer Tom Clancy

Biography.com noted that today is Tom Clancy's 66th birthday.

Tom Clancy is an American author, best known for his espionage, military science and techno thrillers. Clancy was working as an insurance broker until he wrote his first novel in 1984, The Hunt for Red October. Ten of Clancy's books have earned No. 1 rankings on the New York Times best seller list. Over 50 million copies of his books have been printed and three have been made into movies.  

You can read more about Tom Clancy at biography.com via the below link:

http://www.biography.com/people/tom-clancy-9542178