DIRK PITT!

[evan price]

I read all of Cussler's books. Once they started including Pitt's son in the stories they got more and more contrived. The early ones- Vixen 03, Raise the Titanic etcetera, were IMHO better written and better stories. As things got on it got more and more formula driven, serial writing to fulfill a contract.
The ones I'm currently interested in are the Oregon chronicles, which are more James Bondish, less sciencey, but still good for 'mind cocaine' which is the category I call this sort of book. Story revolves around a group of mercenaries and their custom built spy ship that looks like a rusted out bulk freighter. Still formulaiec and a bit overdone (I keep envisioning a Cubby Broccoli movie when I read them) but worth keeping next to the commode or on the bedside table. No worse than a Johnny Ringo book, certainly.

Roger Roger. Read Have Spacesuit, Will Travel in the third grade and was "ruined" for life.

(Ruined as in having worked my way through every Heinlein "Juvenile" I could lay my hands on, my tolerance for the watered down pablum being served to us in reading class between 3rd and 6th grades was very low, and some of my teachers did not appreciate my obvious disdain for the approved grade level books).

True story: I was reading the Hardy Boys books before Kindergarten. I love to read. When I was in Kindergarten I read all of the Hardy Boys books and then found Tom Swift on the advice of the librarian, a kind old man named Mr. Pertee. After I had devoured the few Tom Swift books I was looking for something else. Mr. Pertee handed me Have Spacesuit, Will Travel. I ate it up like candy. That transitioned me into the Heinlien juveniles and then the harder stuff like The Moon is a Harsh Mistress and The Number Of the Beast, Time Enough For Love, Starship Troopers, Job, Farnham's Freehold and all the rest eventually. I wound up reading The Hobbit in first grade and the Lord of the Rings trilogy in second grade.
The elementary school had Kindergarten through 5th grade. I read that copy of Have Spacesuit, Will Travel so many times over the years that I could almost recite it from memory. When I finished 5th grade we moved to another school for 6th-8th grade. On the last day of school of my 5th grade class, Mr. Pertee took that copy of Have Spacesuit, Will Travel from the shelf, stamped a big red "DISCARD" stamp over the school's 'property-of' stamp in the flyleaf, and presented it to me to have for my very own and a few words of advice about not stopping reading or dreaming.
To this day I still have that book. It is a library hardback rebind of the first edition Scribner's 1958 printing with the picture of Kip wearing Oscar on the yellow cover. It remains one of my most prized posessions. I still read it every now and then and remember what it was like to discover the new world of reading all over again.

[RangerWT]

Then there are the seemingly non-connected historical/scientific mysteries, sometimes three in one story, which all get solved at the same time by the end of the book, i.e.: the vikings in North America, teleportation and the submarine Nautilus. (I don't even remember the name of that one)

That was Vahalla Rising.
My personal favorite was Treasure. I also like his Oregon Series. I like that its usually a group effort and not just one guy doing everything.

[MiddleAgedKen]

The only one I read was Raise the Titanic!, which I enjoyed enough that my Call of Cthulhu character was an archaeologist named Joshua Hays Brewster.