History Literature / DirkPittAdventures

* ExcitedShowTitle: The title ends with an exclamation mark.

The Dirk Pitt Adventures is a large series of novels featuring oceanographer and AdventurerArchaeologist Dirk Pitt and his motley pals in the [[GovernmentAgencyofFiction National Underwater and Marine Agency]] (which is described shortly but aptly as "the maritime counterpart of [=NASA=]"). The series was created by Creator/CliveCussler, although he has teamed up with other authors to write his books, notably Craig Dirgo and his son, Dirk Cussler (the character being named for the son, not vise versa). There have been two movie adaptations- ''Film/RaiseTheTitanic'' and ''Film/{{Sahara|2005}}''.

* ArtisticLicenseEngineering: The Russian moon lander from this book is both described and shown to be ''six'' times heavier than the Apollo. Even more amazingly, it is described to take off with a regular rocket, instead of being assembled in orbit like its Jersey Colony equivalent. Needlessly to say, back in TheEighties there was no human rocket capable to carry such a weight, nor there is today.

* EveryoneCallsHimBarkeep: Very much like in ''Deep Six'', the president's name is not revealed, aside from a single mention of his first name, Vince. Of course, we know he is Vince Margolin from the previous book.
* HypocriticalHumor: Both out and in-universe. Jessie Lebaron makes a joke about the supposed "Latin sexism" to get a taxist to drive her and Pitt. That is, TheLoad is talking about male chauvinism, in a book series in which every female character is a perennial DamselInDistress FlatCharacter (like Jessie herself) who gets treated as a girl-of-the-book trophy by the incredibly capable male protagonist.

* MacGuffin: The La Dorada.

* ReentryScare: When the moon colonists return to earth.
* ProtagonistCenteredMorality: Pitt skips his citation with Jessie and then presents himself uninvited in her private party, all just to show off one of his cars. When Jessie throws him out of her party, this is treated as her being a RichBitch in the narration. (Cue the OhCrap moment when she hears from the US Secretary of State who Pitt really is and how much power [=NUMA=] actually has over any marine business.)

* GermansLoveDavidHasselhoff: Played straight [[DarkerAndEdgier and dark]] in-universe with UsefulNotes/FidelCastro, when a character says something like this: "we may think him a buffoon, and the Soviets may think the same, but remember, for the common Cubans he is a hero and a god."

* BadassArmy: "The Demon Stalkers" a special forces unit who show up in the second half of the book.
* BatmanGambit: The General in charge of guarding the Mexican border is faced with all the children at the front of the mob, and, after a moral struggle, chooses to stand down and let them through. He then calls the President to give his resignation, when [[WhamLine the president smiles and instead says to promote the general]] revealing that he'd specifically picked that man knowing he would stand down and thus prevent civilian casualties and help lure Totizlin into a trap.
* BetrayalByInaction: In the prologue Venator, head of the Roman expedition, manages to swim out into the bay, towards the only one of the ships to escape but the disillusioned crew make no effort to pick him up and simply keep sailing away.

** In the prologue, despite feeling somewhat disdainful towards the Natives, Venator and Macer are disgusted and frustrated by Severus's decision to RapePillageBurn the native tribes.
** Abu Hamid is a conniving and ambitious member of Egypt's government but he refuses to ally with Yazid due to feeling distaste for his violence.

* HumanShield: Toptizlin sends thousands of children in the first wave of his refuge invasion of the United States.

* ArtisticLicenseShips: Ironclad monitors were short-ranged under steam power and unlike steam frigates they carried no sails. The most direct route possible from the East Coast over the Atlantic to the mouth of the Niger River is about 6000 miles. Shortest route from the last point where a coaling station might have been found in the Lesser Antilles to the next point where wood or coal might have been found on the African coast is about 3600 miles.

* BetterToDieThanBeKilled: When it looks like the Malians are about to overrun Fort Foreau, Dirk prepares to [[spoiler: kill Eva and the rescued women so the enemy doesn't get to rape them. Fortunately, TheCavalry arrives just in time.]]

* LastStand: Dirk and the UN team have one at Fort Foreau against attacking Malian forces.

* WhatHappenedToTheMouse: The team of scientists who find Fairwhether and are taken to the mine with him never appear afterwards and its unknown if nay survived to escape.

* {{Defictionalization}}: As alluded to above, [[http://www.numa.net/ the NUMA organization]] has existed in RealLife since 1979, being Clive Cussler's shipwreck hunting non-profit organization, of which he wrote *The Ship Hunters* books and documentaries.
* DisneyDeath: Pitt and many other supporting characters

* HilariousInHindsight: The new genetically enhanced salmon trying to get on the market are called Frankenfish. Sounds like someone is a fan...
* HollywoodHealing: Frequently. Pitt gets beaten up or otherwise injured quite often, but always recovers completely by the next novel, with no physical or psychological scars. ''Iceberg'' is an especially flagrant case -- the vicious pounding he takes at the hands of [[spoiler:[[TheDragon Oskar Rondheim]]]] doesn't even damage his good looks.

* RecycledScript: Most of the books follow a plot pattern: Pitt and company (or, alternately, Austin and company) fortuitously rescue a scientist working in some obscure area, later learn that there is some mystery surrounding said matter and they go to investigate it to some exotic country, then the evil forces behind all are revealed to be an EvilCorp directed by a colorful megalomaniac who is interested in the scientist's work in order to rule the world, and finally, Pitt and co. get help from the government and destroy the bad guy's plans, with the baddie himself dying in some unusual way. And [[ArsonMurderAndJaywalking then Pitt and the scientist get around.]]

** Also, the Titanic is raised whole in the book of the same name. After it was discovered in real life to have broken in half, and that raising it was impossible, the whole incident is erased from canon, despite having been mentioned many, ''many'' times throughout the saga.
** ''Cyclops'' reveals there is a secret U.S. moon base that was created with info gathered by the Apollo missions, but ''Sahara'' shows a special document refuge where it's stated the Apollo moonlandings were faked. This oddity is never addressed.

** ''Treasure'' states that in 1988, the U.S. finally adapted to the metric system. Later books indicate they've gone right back to the decimal system.

** Again in ''Trojan Odyssey'', Yaeger refuses to believe in lost civilizations when a Celtic amphora is found in Nicaragua. This seems to be a gigantic case of ArbitrarySkepticism, because Pitt and Giordino discovered Atlantis earlier in the series and Yaeger himself was in the loop (he and Max were the ones who collected all the info, in fact). Bizarrely, Dirk Jr. himself mentions the discovery in the same book, confirming it is still canon, which implies Cussler simply forgot Yaeger was supposed to know about it.

** Of special note is Summer Moran, who was presumed dead at the end of ''Pacific Vortex'', later turned out not only to have survived (though she later died off screen), but been pregnant with two kids by Pitt, the grown-up versions of whom would later feature in the novel. Despite the fact that over the course of the book, they spent about two hours in the same room as each other, which weren't used doing the nasty.

* AsLongAsItSoundsForeign: Several of the Japanese characters's names. One of the bad guys is named Korori Yoshishu; not only ''Yoshishu'' is pretty much made up, ''Korori'' happens to be a Japanese onomatopoeia for dropping dead, and was also a colloquial name for cholera in 19th-century Japan. In other words, a highly unlikely name for a person.

* RecycledScript: Most of the books follow a plot pattern: Pitt and company (or, alternately, Austin and company) fortuitously rescue a HotScientist working in some obscure area, later learn that there is some mystery surrounding said matter and they go to investigate it to some exotic country, then the evil forces behind all are revealed to be an EvilCorp directed by a colorful megalomaniac who is interested in the scientist's work in order to rule the world, and finally, Pitt and co. get help from the government and destroy the bad guy's plans, with the baddie himself dying in some unusual way. And [[ArsonMurderAndJaywalking then Pitt and the scientist get around.]]

* EvilPoacher: Several are hired to kidnap Karla and murder anyone with her.

* IgnoredExpert: Spider, who is designed the technology being used by Margraves, recognizes its instability and tries to talk him out of using it. Margraves refuses and (unknowns to him) his partners try to murder Spider, who narrowly escapes.

* ImprovisedWeapon: When Pitt realizes his cabdriver is taking him on an unplanned detour, he takes control (or tries to) by jamming the tip of a large screwdriver into the driver's ear and threatening to "screw your right ear into your left."

* GhostTrain: Subverted. While investigating the disappearance of a train that carried one copy of [[the North American Treaty]], Dirk learns of stories of a "ghost train" that appears on stormy nights, follows the lost train's path, and disappears when it reaches the site of the bridge that collapsed and dropped the train into a river. He later discovers that [[spoiler:the story is a hoax, carried out using a train's headlight and a PA system broadcasting train noises being pulled along a cable suspended above the ground]].

* GuileHero: Pitt's often a man with a plan.

* Jerkass: Congressman John Daggat.

* GhostTrain: While investigating the disappearance of a train, Dirk learns of stories of a "ghost train" that appears on stormy nights and disappears when it reaches a bridge. He later discovers that the story is a hoax, carried out by a train's headlight and a PA system broadcasting train noises being pulled along a cable suspended above the ground.

** There is a discontinuity in books set in Spanish-speaking territories about Pitt' and Giordino's knowledge of the language. For example, in ''Atlantis Found'', Pitt doesn't speak Spanish, but Giordino does, as he was taught by his mother's Hispanic cleaning lady. Later ''Trojan Odyssey'' reverses the situation: Giordino doesn't speak it, but Pitt reveals he studied Spanish in high school.

* OneWordTitle: A few of the books, like:
** Iceberg
** Sahara

* ImposterForgotOneDetail: What ultimately gives away Von Till alias [[spoiler: Admiral Heibert. He shaved his head to fit the real Von Till, unaware Von Till lost his hair due to disease. The fuzz on his scalp was the clue needed to prove who he was.]]

* BigBad: F. James Kelly is the story's main villain, [[spoiler:only that TheDragon, Oskar Rondheim is planning to kill him and take his throne in Hermit Limited.]]

* MultiEthnicName: [[spoiler:Carzo Butera, Rondheim's true name, is composed of two surnames or Spanish and Italian origin respectively.]]

* EnemyMine: Captain Patrick Fawkes and Hiram Lusana, in spite of their former conflict, join forces once they realize what type of warheads the former really has.

* SpannerInTheWorks: Lampshaded by Pitt on how [[spoiler: "the best laid plans of mice and men" hit Massey's plan. First, he didn't expect the Secret Service agents on the train which led to a shootout that cost some of his own men. The bigger problem was when Massey set off the explosives to cut off the mine entrance, figuring they could escape with the gold via an escape tunnel. But the explosives caused water fissures to open up, flooding the tunnel and condemning everyone in the mine to a slow death by starvation.]]

* AsLongAsItSoundsForeign: One of the bad guys is named '''''Korori''' Yoshishu''; ''korori'' is an onomatopoeia for dropping dead, and was also a colloquial name for cholera in 19th-century Japan. In other words, a highly unlikely name for a person.

* BetrayalByInaction: In the prologue Venator, head of the Roman expedition, manages to swim out into the bay, towards the only one of the ships to escape but the disillusioned crew make no effort to pick him up and simply keep sailing away,

[[folder:Tropes found in Dragon]]

* BigBad: Hideki Suma. [[spoiler:Suma gets captured, Ichiro Tsuboi and Korori Yoshishi take over this role.]]

* JapanTakesOverTheWorld: [[ExaggeratedTrope Exaggerated]]. Not by the fact plot revolves around [[NukeEm a Japanese nuclear blackmail]], but by the characters' speech, comments and attitude. When Rep. Loren Smith talks to Japanese businessmen, it sounds like two enemy countries are having the last talks before full blown war.

[[folder:Tropes found in Serpent]]
* BastardBastard: Nielsen TheDragon is the illegitimate son of a housemaid and a Nazi soldier and clearly is a believer in MurderIsTheBestSolution.
* BeenThereShapedHistory: The bad guys sunk the Andrea Doria.
* MyGodWhatHaveIDone: TheMole is horrified when he realizes that the villains plan to murder the family of his cousin/bodyguard charge and immediately turns on them.
* YouHaveFailedMe: There is a scene showing three surviving bad guys from a failed assassination attempt earlier in the book forced to compete in a DeadlyGame.
[[/folder]]

[[folder:Tropes found in White Death]]
* AnimalWrongsGroup: Subverted with the Senteniels of the Sea, who block whaling expeditions and the like, but with peaceful methods. They are only ''framed'' as being one of this by the bad guys.
[[/folder]]

** Given the sheer volume of AuthorAppeal in all of his novels, one could argue that Dirk Pitt himself is an AuthorAvatar.

* BlackLikeMe: A variation, left ambiguous. [[spoiler:The very Scandinavian-looking Rondheim, a pale, white-haired man with hard features, turns out to have an Italian-Spanish real name of all things. Why does he not look the part is never explained, unless he happens to be a very fair-skinned Mediterranean who dyes his hair]]
* BigBad: F. James Kelly is the story's main villain, [[spoiler:only that Oskar Rondheim is planning to kill him and take his throne in Hermit Limited.]]

** Pitt, Sandecker and Tidi accidentally ruin Rondheim's plans to murder them in the sea because they happen to grab the ship the assassins were going to use to ambush them.

* DeconstructedTrope: When Dirk wakes up in a hospital in ''Iceberg'', Sandecker's secretary, Tidi Royal, starts hitting on him. He shuts her down. She protests he doesn't even know she exists, whereupon he reels off her vital statistics--including the location of a mole--and informs her he will ''never'' "play games" that close to the Admiral. At the end of the book, Tidi has hooked up with a secondary character, and is never seen again. This explains why Film/JamesBond only [[{{UST}} flirts]] with Moneypenny.

* {{Motifs}}: [[spoiler:False identities, in all senses of the word. Pitt is a straight mans that pretends to be gay; Rondheim turns out to be a Mediterranean pretending to be Nordic; and Fyrie is actually a transsexual pretending to be his own sister.]]

** Pitt is being checked out by a doctor in Iceland when a couple of officers stop in for questions. They talk of how they stopped by a local village to have some coffee with the sergeant there before coming over. Taking Pitt to the examination room, the doctor states these men are imposters as that sergeant never patrols the area and is allergic to coffee. Pitt has already seen that one of the "officers" has faded pips on his shoulders where a sergeant's stripes would be as well as dried blood on the collar, meaning they killed the real sergeant.

-->'''Pitt''': There we were on the bridge, eyeball to eyeball...[[spoiler:and I swear I saw the other guy blink.]]

* ValuesDissonance: Pit acts outrageously CampGay to deceive someone. Given the era, it is perfectly acceptable for Admiral Sandecker to ask Pitt why he is acting like a faggot.
** The entire EvilPlan would have no chance of working in a modern setting because[[spoiler:transsexuals are far more socially accepted than they were in the 1970s. Heck, Kirsti coming out would probably increase her company's stock value, especially since Iceland is quite progressive.[[note]]Just to establish a baseline here; it had its first openly gay Prime Minister in 2009, and you can legally transition without surgery.[[/note]] ]]

* HypocriticalHumor: Both out and in-universe. Jessie Lebaron makes a joke about the supposed "Latin sexism" to get a taxist to drive her and Pitt. That is, are we talking about male chauvinism in a book series in which every female character is a perennial DamselInDistress FlatCharacter (like Jessie herself) who gets treated as a girl-of-the-book trophy by the incredibly capable male protagonist?

* NotQuiteDead: Turns out [[spoiler:Raymond [=LeBaron=] as well as most of the inner core of the Jersey Colony project]] have faked their deaths.

* AccidentalHero: In the prologue, a Japanese pilot shoots down an American Plane, not realizing that 1) He just kept it from dropping a third Atom Bomb on his country and 2) that plane being shot down later provides a [[ChekhovsGun Chekhov's Bomb]]to use against the bad guys.

** The hidden nuclear devices are the size and shape of a car [=A/C=] compressor and powerful enough to blow ships to pieces over dozens of miles and trigger an underwater earthquake. First, to trigger an underwater earthquake megaton-sized weapons are needed, the quoted "maybe 10 to 20 kilotons" is too small, second, only the smallest nuclear devices ever made, W48 and W54 Davy Crockett could fit the size of an automotive [=A/C=] compressor, maybe [=60x15=] centimeters, and their yield was just 72 to 20 tons of [=TNT=] respectively, enough to blow to pieces a large ship if hit directly, but never to lay waste to hundreds of square miles.

** Simply being on the same ship as a bunch of nukes would not give someone acute radiation poisoning. An undetonated nuke gives off very little radiation. For someone to be as badly affected as the book describes they would have had to do something like take one of the nukes apart and submerge the core in water, or eat bits of it, or something equally daft and improbable.

* BigBad: Hideki Suma.
** After [[spoiler:Suma gets captured, Ichiro Tsuboi and Korori Yoshishi take over this role.]]

** ArtisticLicenseShips: Ironclad monitors were short-ranged under steam power and unlike steam frigates they carried no sails. The most direct route possible from the East Coast over the Atlantic to the mouth of the Niger River is about 6000 miles. Shortest route from the last point where a coaling station might have been found in the Lesser Antilles to the next point where wood or coal might have been found on the African coast is about 3600 miles.

* CosmopolitanCouncil: A couple of Chapters give us MrExposition characters who sit on a somewhat benevolent one of these, The Multilateral Council of Trade, a group of tycoon from across the world dedicated to forming a single global economy (and unlike most similar characters in Cussler books, not engaging in some evil conspiracy to accomplish that goal, [[OffstageVillainy although at least some of its members are involved in some ciriminal conspiracies to further their plans]]). They meet a couple times to talk about the effect Dorsett's plan will have on the global economy, and their own dream, and discuss some of the details about how he's going to achieve it, and appear at the end celebrating the failure of his plan and discussing how it won't come into effect with him dead.

** He was aiming for both eyes (but misesed one due to being knocked down), and did it as a last act of defiance after Dorsett had unveiled his EvilPlan and the CruelAndUnusualDeath it entailed for them.
* IHaveYourWife: Or rather, I Have Your Sons. Dorsett uses this to control Maeve for the early portions of the story, although she takes this far less passively than most. Interestingly, unlike most examples of this trope he's bluffing, as Maeve's sons are the heirs to his diamond empire due to her sisters being childless, but he does a good job of bluffing.
* LikeFatherUnlikeSon: Discussed when Pitt visits Perlmutter, who describes the various generations of Dorsett's and how most of them have been visionaries and philanthropists, until Arthur and his father, while Arthur's' daughter Maeve and her sons stand poised to break the negative current branch of Dorsett's.

* UnsettlingGenderReveal: [[spoiler: Boudicca]].

-->'''Hunt''': The lifeboats have been crushed and swept away. You demanded all life vests be thrown overboard. You destroyed the ship's radio. We can't send out a mayday call. You covered our tracks too well. We're not even supposed to be in these waters. Our location is unknown to the rest of the world...You planned it well, General, too well.

* TheMole: Played with in a confused way. Elsie Wolf is shown collecting intel in the office of Sandecker, whose secretary is stated to be named Julie ''Wolff''. It is never cleared whether the surnames are just coincidential or rather Julie and Elsie are the same person.
* {{Prospector}}: Luis Marquez (who discovers the {{MacGuffin}} on his claim) has spent a decade prospecting for colored gemstones in Montana, Nevada, and Colorado and investing his profits in real estate.

* GodzillaThreshold: Invoked when it is discovered that Nikolai Tesla's prototype zero-point energy system, the same type the villain is trying to recreate and exploit for his own ends, is highly unstable, and even in a best-case scenario can lose control and cause random earthquakes, and in the worst case....well, [[ApocalypseHow let's just say there's a good reason that the government tried to destroy all evidence of the system.]] When it is discovered that the villain has actually ''completed'' the system and is preparing to test it out by ''deliberately'' causing a massive earthquake, it's quickly decided that the best course of action is to [[NukeEm nuke]] his island base and erase it from the map.

** In ''The Mediterranean Caper'' Bruno Von Till is stated to have aided nazi officials to travel to Argentina after the war. Given that ''Atlantis Found'' later exploits this possibility and expands it to the Wolf family and the descendants of Hitler, it's possible (and even implied by some hints like the Martin Bormann affair) that Von Till actually helped them to travel there and (knowingly or not) found their dinasty. However, this is never brought up.

** Lampshaded as Kristi reveals [[spoiler: her plan had been to fake her death as Krisjan, have a sex change operation then come out as Kristi and continue her work as a scientist.]] But "the totally unexpected and unforseen coincidence spelled disaster to the new life I had carefully planned": [[spoiler: of all the plastic surgeons in the world, Kristi just had to pick one who worked for Hermit Limted, who naturally told Rondheim the truth and gave Oskar the perfect blackmail to force Kristi to his side.]]

* {{Motifs}}: [[spoiler:False identities, in all senses of the word. Pitt is a straight mans that pretends to be gay; Rondheim turns out to be a Mediterranean pretending to be Nordic; and Fyrie is actually a transexual pretending to be his own sister.]]

* TheReveal: In one of the last chapters, it't revealed that [[spoiler: Savreux and the President have been working together for years on the idea of uniting the U.S. and Canada. The Treaty just worked into their plans perfectly.]]

* BatmanGambit: The General in charge of guarding the Mexican border is faced with all the children at the front of the mob, and, after a moral struggle, choses to stand down and let them through. He then calls the Presient to give his resignation, when [[WhamLine the president smiles and instead says to promote the general]] revealing that he'd specifically picked that man knowing he would stand down and thus prevent civilian casualties and help lure Totizlin into a trap.

* BiggerBad: President Georgi Antonov

* DragonAscendant: It turns out that Oskar is plotting to pull a "hostile takeover" of Hermit Limited with a NSA operative understating that "his future intentions can hardly be classified as honorable and benevolent."

* ArcWords: God save thee.
* ArrogantKungFuGuy: Rondheim is a black belt in karate. [[spoiler:Doesn't really defend him from having the shit beaten out of him by Pitt during their final confrontation.]]
* BigBad: [[spoiler:Oskar Rondheim]]
* ContrivedCoincidence: Lampshaded as Kristi reveals [[spoiler: her plan had been to fake her death as Krisjan, have a sex change operation then come out as Kristi and continue her work as a scientist.]] But "the totally unexpected and unforseen coincidence spelled disaster to the new life I had carefully planned": [[spoiler: of all the plastic surgeons in the world, Kristi just had to pick one who worked for Hermit Limted, who naturally told Rondheim the truth and gave Oskar the perfect blackmail to force Kristi to his side.]]

* TheDragon: F. James Kelly.

* WhiteHairBlackHeart: Oskar Rondheim.

** ArtisticLicenseShips: Ironclad monitors were short-ranged under steam power and unlike steam frigates they carried no sails. The most direct route possible over the Atlantic to the mouth of the Niger River is about 6000 miles.

-> '''Gunn:''' The State Department experts and the Congressional Committee on Latin American Affairs think you both should hang around and make the dirty Yankees look good by helping to halt the looting of Peru's cultural heritage.
-> '''Pitt:''' In other words, our esteemed government wants to milk our benevolent image for all it's worth.