U.S. author Tom Clancy dead at 66

RIP Mr. Clancy. You and Mr. Ludlum are my two favorite authors.

I will miss Tom too! RIP, we need good authors like him!

All I can say is that war is something better relegated to fiction than real life, and I hope it stays that way.

Count me in with the rest of you who discovered him as a teenager and really enjoyed his books, particularly the Cold War-themed ones. I never really got into his later work, but The Hunt For Red October, Patriot Games, and The Cardinal of the Kremlin were excellent. I particularly appreciated the sympathy with which he portrayed his Soviet characters when it would have been easy to make them into cartoon villains.

I drifted away from Clancy when he moved on to post-Cold War issues and all those spin-off novels started coming out. But I wouldn't mind reading some of those '80s classics again.

“The difference between fiction and reality,” he once said, “is that fiction has to make sense.”

Nicely said. And very true.

The Hunt for Red October was a standout novel of all the Clancys I have read. It was also one of the rare stories that Hollywood did justice to. 66 is still so young...such a shame.

Same goes for me. He and Michael Crichton were the two authors that really got me interested in reading back in high school. Thanks for opening me up to a great world with Jack Ryan. RIP.

Same here. I remember evading Red Storm Rising in high school....

RIP. One of my favorite authors, although I wasn't as much of a fan of he later Op-Center series.