[4] In his memoir The Sea Hunters: True Adventures with Famous Shipwrecks, Cussler revealed that his father served in the Imperial German Army on the Western Front during World War I.

Furthermore, one of Cussler's uncles served in the Imperial German Air Service and became a flying ace, shooting down 14 Allied aeroplanes.

[6] He attended Pasadena City College[2] for two years and then enlisted in the United States Air Force during the Korean War.

[11] Clive Cussler began writing in 1965 when his wife took a job working nights for the local police department where they lived in California.

The third, Raise the Titanic!, made Cussler's reputation and established the pattern that subsequent Pitt novels would follow: a blend of adventure and advanced technology, generally involving megalomaniacal villains, lost ships, beautiful women, and sunken treasure.

Often in the first chapter, a ship or airplane carrying a top-secret, important, or dangerous cargo is lost and never found, until it is recovered by a modern character later in the book.

[20] This series of books is based on the character Kurt Austin, Team Leader of NUMA's Special Assignments division and his adventures.

Some characters from the Pitt novels appear such as Sandecker, Al Giordino, Rudi Gunn, Hiram Yaeger and St. Julien Perlmutter.

Pitt makes brief appearances in the books Serpent, White Death, Polar Shift, Devil's Gate, The Storm, Zero Hour, and Ghost Ship and is mentioned in Lost City.

This series of books features a ship named the Oregon, which Cussler introduced in the Dirk Pitt Adventures novel Flood Tide (1997).

While appearing to be a decrepit freighter, it is actually a high-tech advanced ship used by an unnamed and mysterious "Corporation" under the leadership of Juan Cabrillo.

The ship is run like a business, with its crew being shareholders, taking jobs for the CIA and other agencies to help stop crime and terrorism.

Though the setting is a century ago, the books still qualify as techno-thrillers, since they feature the advanced technology of that time such as private express trains, telegraphs, telephones, dreadnought battleships and early airplanes.

Isaac Bell also is a principal character of the background story in the Fargo Adventures novel The Gray Ghost.