Some book publishers try to exploit summer without Clancy

This is the summer of no Tom Clancy novel, and one would have thought that publishers of that loosely defined genre, men's action fiction, would have stocked the bookstores with contenders. Surprisingly, they haven't. One publisher said that everyone was afraid of Hannibal Lecter, a genre unto himself, who is loose again atop the best-seller lists.

Well, in publishing it is the summer of Hannibal. And just as one big movie can scare away competing studios, one big novel can send every publisher scurrying for cover.

But that's no excuse for the lack of thrillers this season, since few in publishing knew, when they were scheduling their summer lists, that Hannibal Lecter would be uncaged again now. Still, for whatever reason, this Clancyless summer also has no new James Patterson, Nelson DeMille, W.E.B. Griffin. (There is a new best-selling Clive Cussler, a paperback from Pocket written with a co-author.)

So the question is, where do Clancy's guys go when there's no Clancy novel? (One can ask the same of John Grisham readers, although he apparently has as many women fans as men.)

And even though these male beach novels are the simplest form of drama -- guns and death being their main elements -- it has become increasingly hard to break out new authors in the genre. In part, that is because each action novel is so much a different version of essentially the same story, and, moreover, the end of the Cold War meant the end of interesting bad men: Soviet Communists.

Still, some publishers are using this summer to try to establish a few fresh male adventure writers. Bantam Books has popped back to World War II, with War of the Rats, a second novel by David L. Robbins. It is a compelling, horrific story of the Battle of Stalingrad as told from the point of view of two snipers, one Russian, one German, precision killers hunting each other. It went on sale last week.

Irwyn Applebaum, the book's publisher, said: "Male action readers in most of the `90s had Clancy as a summer read. This year there's not a new Clancy. We certainly hope War of the Rats will be a big summer vacation read. When we got the pitch, we asked ourselves, `Who in America is going to read a World War II novel not about Americans but about Germans and Stalingrad?' But it works at the level of an exciting novel, and it has what few novels, especially war novels have: real characters who stand out on the page."

Bantam is going all out to make Robbins a brand name. His novel will have a first printing of about 35,000 copies, and the publisher is putting an ambitious display in bookstores in which a copy of the book is set in a cardboard model of a Stalingrad street, with a blinking red light to represent a sniper.

"It still comes down to publishing a book, sometimes what seems like an impossible book, in which people want to turn to the next page," Applebaum said, "If it's a a good story, they'll read about anything." Which shows that publishing is still an exercise of hope in a chaotic world.

Jack Romanos, the president of Simon & Schuster's trade division, says that the readership for such adventure novels had for the moment "reached a plateau," but that if "you have a great adventure with good good guys and good bad guys, there are still great opportunities for such books to work."

Last week Pocket, a division of Simon & Schuster, published Vince Flynn's Transfer of Power.

"It's very much a Tom Clancy-like, Washington-based thriller, that we deliberately scheduled when there was no new Clancy novel," Romanos said.

Time Warner Trade Publishing is also using this summer to promote some newer writing talent. Laurence Kirshbaum, the house's chief executive, said: "Breaking out new acts is becoming tougher and tougher. Our brand-name authors want to hug that rail around Christmas."

Nonetheless, Warner has Thunderhead, by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child, out in July, and a first novel, The Pledge, by Rob Kean, scheduled for August, with a substantial 75,000 first printing.

Whatever one thinks of Clancy's prose style, he has been generally ahead of the curve when it comes to devices to captivate men. His next novel will come out in August 2000.

Copyright 1999
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