Tom Clancy

Tom Clancy was working as an independent insurance agent in Maryland, with no military or intelligence career of his own, when the Naval Institute Press — a publisher that didn't normally handle fiction — took a chance on his first novel in 1984. The Hunt for Red October, a Cold War submarine thriller dense with real weapons systems and geopolitical detail, became a sensation after word spread that President Reagan was reading it, and effectively created the modern techno-thriller genre. Its hero, CIA analyst Jack Ryan, anchored twelve more solo Clancy novels that watched him rise book by book to national security adviser and eventually President of the United States, alongside prequels revealing his earlier career and that of CIA officer John Clark. Clancy's research-heavy density — submarines, fighter jets, intelligence tradecraft rendered with near-manual precision — became his signature, and after 2003's The Teeth of the Tiger he began co-writing further Jack Ryan novels with Mark Greaney and Grant Blackwood, continuing the franchise's now-institutional status even as illness slowed his own output. He died in October 2013, in Baltimore, having sold over 100 million books across his career. Since then, his publisher has kept Jack Ryan going through a rotating slate of continuation authors under the Tom Clancy brand. New readers should start with The Hunt for Red October, and can find Clancy's own final contributions — the novels he co-wrote before his death — through 2015's Commander in Chief.