Tom Clancy Wrote a Boring Book, is the Movie Better?
Foresight: Before watching the classic Cold War submarine thriller, The Hunt for Red October, I decided to tackle the source material, Tom Clancy's first novel (1984) of the same title. Sometimes, when an author writes their first novel, lightning strikes. Other times, something much slower does—like, say, a children's carousel - destined to go around in slow, endless circles… like a lost submarine, adrift with no port in sight. In Tom Clancy's The Hunt for Red October , it was the latter. A 'thriller' about a renegade Russian submarine so punishingly slow, I considered leaving it unfinished more than once. To 13-year-old me, Tom Clancy was the fucking man. He published Rainbow Six , a book about an international counterterrorism unit, three years before 9/11. After 9/11, I was naturally drawn to a story about a special ops team traveling the globe and taking out bad guys. The book itself was a slog though - it took 300 pages for something exciting to ha...
