The best Tom Clancy books chart the rise and rise of Jack Ryan, academic turned reluctant CIA agent, then (because virtually the entire US government is wiped out by a JAL 747 kamikaze attack), even more reluctant US president. And one, furthermore, who makes Ronald Reagan (to whom Clancy Executive Orders was dedicated: "To Ronald Wilson Reagan, Fortieth President of the United States: The Man Who Won The War.") look like a bleeding heart liberal. Almost single-handedly, Ryan fights off an Iranian biological attack on the US, re-runs the Gulf War against a united Iran/Iraq Islamic state, and escapes assassination.

This last had his fellow-Americans crowing with joy: "Yes the book was too long, yes it was too heavy to carry to bed at night and yes it got surpy - but buddy does Jack Ryan ever kick butt! This is the ending that every American dreams of - I just read it and it's the week of the 4th of July - God Bless America!" declared pjyvonne@aol.com (Pamela) from Tuscaloosa, Alabama.

Another (josh@panda.uchc.edu from Connecticut) declared: "What pleases me to see is that someone namely Clancy sees the world not as the 'big blue marble' that all the other liberals see. There are still threats out there whether the Cold War is over or not. There are nations that would sooner see America burn in an inferno of biblical fire than open up to the idea that democracy is the best style of government on Earth. Unfortunately, many of those people do live here within our own borders. Maybe one day we'll wake up and smell the house burning down around us and put this country back where it belongs....Number 1. I highly recommend this book to anyone who has "lost" the American dream."

It's easy to write Clancy off as one who can't resist using his increasingly massive tomes as pulpits from which to preach his distopian view of the world (fired in part at least, it seems, by the Republicans' failure to win the US electorate to a similar world view to his own).

But while his later books are overlong (over 1300 pages in paperback, and the most recent, Rainbow Six, 740pp in large-format hardback), and certainly lack the tautness of his first, The Hunt for Red October, there must be a reason why even self-proclaimed liberals can say "I didn't mind the political drivel. . . you know what? I'm going to be back in line waiting to pay 9 bucks for his next doorstop."

For like Stephen King at the opposite end of the political spectrum, Clancy has packed his narratives with just enough political and technological reality to make them more a reflection of the real world than the sort of books which win international awards.

When he's not mounting his soapbox, Clancy can put together a taut, nail-biting piece of action that almost excuses his oft-flaunted prejudices. Take the opening prologue of Rainbow Six, starring his "darker" operative, John Clark. He is on a transatlantic flight, in a twin-engined 777, and he's feeling uneasy:

We are not told the reason for this unease for maybe four pages; meanwhile the in-flight routine continues. But one of Clark's companions, a British graduate of the SAS who has joined his Rainbow Six multinational anti-terrorist force, is feeling the same disquiet:

He continues to withhold from the reader any clue about what's going to happen. It's a bit like a Hitchcock movie, when you know that . . . eventually . . . something's bound to happen to cause us to jump out of our seats with fright, but meanwhile Janet Leigh busies herself trying to defraud her employers, Tippi Hendren is wittering around a petshop, and there's not a hint of Norman Bates or malevolent avians in sight.

Then . . . the sudden move. Three hijackers produce pistols, and Clark, the SAS Brit, and Clark's Spanglish sidekick spend further pages wondering what to do, and communicating with each other - they are separated by several rows from each other, obviously intentionally - with barely perceptible signals, a raise of eyebrow here, a scratch of the nose there. A lesser writer would have had all mayhem break out right then, but Clancy keeps us waiting.

Though the hijackers have made their move, we are still left chewing our fingernails down to the elbows. The tension continues to build while Clark assesses the situation:

This soliloquy about the ups and downs of hijacking takes up about a third of a 21-line paragraph. Nobody ever told Clancy, it appears, that action required short, sharp sentences, in paragraphs of no more than three or four lines. These long drawn0out monologues merely crank up the tension all the more.

When it comes, Clark's counter-ploy is so ridiculous he admits that if the bad guys were real pros they'd never fall for it. ("These three were dumb.") He requests a visit to the john - "Hey, whatcha gonna do, shoot a guy who needs to take a leak? I don't know what your problem is, okay, but I gotta go, okay? Please?" - then offers to get his guard refreshment by way of gratitude:

Clark catches the second skyjacker off guard by a similar (and similarly ridiculous) ploy, and Goddamit if he doesn't play a variation on number three:

The stewardess produces some twine, and the three bad guys are trussed on the floor. Clark uses the plane's radio to phone home:

A few moment's later, Clark is reporting to his boss:

Broken down like that, of course, so the mechanism is stripped bare, it seems ridiculous, but despite the inconsistencies and non-sequiturs, it's clear that there is a master story-teller at work here.

But he can't resist a right-wing sting in the tail:

One of the things that grabs his readers is his meticulous researching, and the fact that he doesn't leave all these factoids back in his electronic filing cabinet back home in Maryland, he packs them into the book. This is one the things that makes them so fat, and such apparently good value, airport-wise.

It's fairly easy to skip the technical details about weaponry and biological warfare, but their very presence gives the text a sort of veracity. When he says that a naval vessel is "named for Admiral Isaac Kidd, who had died aboard USS Arizona on the morning of December 7, 1941 . . . a member of the 'dead-admiral class' of four missile destroyers originally built for the Iranian navy under the Shah, forced on a reluctant President Carter, and then perversely all named for admirals who'd died in losing battles", only a student of naval history could say whether this was true or false. But the books are full of stuff like this.

Not content with fiction, Clancy has recycled his research into a series of non-fiction titles (a political testament, Reality Check, originally promised for 1995, never came out; in Clancy's own words, it's ". . . on hiatus. Why? The political landscape changed too fast"), most notably Into the Storm : A Study in Command, his Gulf War book.

Like his novels, Into the Storm abounds with armyspeak: "'JAYHAWK 6, this is JAYHAWK 3 OSCAR.' I was in my Blackhawk, and this was my TAC FWD calling. 'This is JAYHAWK 6.' 'Dragoon reports contact with RGFC, Tawalkana Division.' Dragoon was the 2nd ACR. 'Roger, location?' 'PT 528933.'" And: "Second ACR had also been active in combat. Though Don Holder had had to cancel a planned Apache attack into the Tawalkana, he had managed to launch a successful MLRS raid that night as a follow-through on my order to keep the pressure on the RGFC . . ."

Despite such arcane minutiae, the book did not meet with the approbation of all those who knew whereof he spoke. In a notable interview (right) for Salon online magazine by defence writer John Donnelly of Defense Week with Clancy and his co-author, retired U.S. Army Gen. Fred Franks Jr, who served in the Gulf, there's the following difference opinion over Franks' opinion of his former boss:

Interviewer: . . . [the book] appears to exude some contempt for Gen Norman Schwarzkopf.
Tom Clancy: No, it doesn't.
Interviewer: It doesn't?
Clancy: No, it doesn't.
Interviewer: I just read it.
Clancy: Read it again.

Clancy comes across as very prickly when anyone dares to question his version of events: "It sounds to me like you're quoting something to say something it doesn't mean. . . you started off the interview by saying the book treats Norman Schwarzkopf with contempt, and I want to go on the record, that is not the case. That is never the intention of the book, and there's nothing in that book to back up what you said. . . All we're doing is relaying facts. We're not rebutting anybody. Fred has no need to defend himself against anyone. . . look, Fred is talking about how he felt at the time, for Christ's sake!"

On the other hand, a Gulf War vet praised the book on Amazon: "I was more than pleased that Gen Franks received his day in court in light of all the criticism laid at his feet about the pace of VII Corps during the ground war. As a VII Corps vet who was there on the ground, I certainly do not remember a lot of 'down time'. As a military officer, I was compelled to find out what I always assumed was true; namely, if Schwartzkopf was so concerned about VII Corps tempo, why did he not leave his bunker in the rear and fly into the Corps Area of Operations and see for himself what was going on? While the book does not answer this question for me, it does clarify that Gen Franks never received a speed up order from CENTCOM."

The description of an operation towards the end of his Marine : A Guided Tour of a Marine Expeditionary Unit reads just like one of his novels:

"Two minutes behind the B-2s came eight B-1B Lancers from the 7th Wing at Dyess AFB, Texas, also launched from Anderson AFB and refuelled from KC-10As at Diego Garcia. Their targets were two battalions of troops in barracks adjacent to Bushehr airport. Each unloaded twelve AGM-154 Joint Standoff Weapons (JSOWs) from their weapons bays, well outside Iranian airspace. Following a two-minute gliding flight, the ninety-six JSOWs, guided by onboard GPS receivers, unloaded their payloads of BLU-97/B Combined Effects Munitions (CEMs). They blanketed over a hundred acres of troop billeting and vehicle-parking areas with thousands of CEMs, and the effects were horrific. The two minutes since the bombs from the B-2 strike had given the troops time to thrown on their boots, grab weapons, and rush outside to be shredded into hamburger by exploding cluster munitions."

And film director Oliver Stone, who is no right-wing fanatic and certainly has had experience of combat, wrote of Executive Orders in the New York Times: "As usual, some of the Clancy plotting is fiendishly inventive, and he has a technically sharp command of the realistic detail."

Any writer who has to meet tight deadlines will sympathise with Clancy's excuse that some of the errors in his books are due to pressure of time, for instance that Jack Ryan's confirmation as vice-president was not submitted to both houses of Congress, as it should have been, but to the Senate alone, and Clancy's own acknowledgement that "there are three irreconcilable time conflicts in Without Remorse alone".

Some of his errors you can put down to faulty research, for instance his belief that DNA and RNA consist of amino acids, which would startle most biologists. He peppers his books with phrases in foreign languages which contain elementary errors that must prompt derision in those countries, though to those unlettered in them, these foreign phrases lend an air of spurious authenticity. Not only does an intrinsic racism permeate his description of non-Americans (unless they are British royals: Ryan's deference to the damaged Windsors is almost nauseating), coming to the surface in the frequent description of Arabs as ""rag-heads" (and as Christopher Hitchens has pointed out, an invented name like Prince Ali Bin Sheik is "as absurd in Arabic as it is in English").

He has people in English pubs letting their tab ride until they've finished drinking (in England you pay for each pint as it comes). In his futurist Net Force, in which he ventures into William Gibson territory with virtual reality car chases in cyberspace, his grasp of the software detail wouldn't pass muster with any teenage geek. And would any IRA offshoot call itself the Ulster Liberation Army (The Patriot Game)? Ulster was one of the original ancient provinces of Ireland, and contained three counties now in the Irish republic, with the remaining six under British rule in Northern Ireland. The use of the term "Ulster" to refer to Northern Ireland is anathema to all Republicans worth their salt.

Some are not so much mistakes as revelations of a mindset. Take these two brief sentences from the Prologue to Rainbow Six (p.16):

"They'd been doing it for some time. The powder-blue vans - there were four of them - circulated throughout New York City, picking up homeless people and shuttling them to the dry-out centers run by the corporation."

The implication is obvious: the New York homeless are drunks (responsible, of course, for their own condition).

Despite all this, however, his prestige among members of his fan clubs (alt.books.tom-clancy and alt.fan.tom-clancy) still continues, with even his most turgid books hailed as masterpieces.

It all started back in April 12, 1947 at Franklin Square Hospital, Baltimore, MD, when Thomas L. Clancy, Jr, was born, afterwards going to Loyola High School, Towson, MD, class of 1965, and Loyola College, Baltimore, MD, class of 1969. He majored in English literature because (in his own words) "I wasn't smart enough to do physics".

While working as an insurance agent, he had already started and abandoned two books (which became the second and third in his oeuvre) when he read about a Soviet frigate which attempted to defect to Sweden, and took it as the inspiration for Red October. It was originally published by the small specialist Naval Institute Press in October 1984 (who paid him an advance of $5000) and as a paperback under the Berkeley Books imprint a year later.

It caught the attention of Ronald Reagan (who might well have been Jack Ryan in his dreams) who gave it very public praise, shooting it into the best-seller lists. HarperCollins picked him up, and he's been with them ever since.

Despite the mass of technical (and military) detail in his books, he never served in the navy and has no experience of intelligence operations. In fact, he had never been inside a submarine when he wrote Red October. Despite this, he is invited to lecture at the Pentagon and to CIA operatives, which tells you more about them than it does about him, and was proposed by Reagan's foot-in-mouth Vice-President Dan Quayle as a member of the National Space Council.

He maintains that despite his close links with the military-industrial establishment, all his technical background comes from published sources, and he has never blown security in any of his revelations on spook behaviours. But he certainly outdoes Ian Fleming in his product placements: companies like Bell Textron, Boeing, General Dynamics, Gulfstream, Hughes Aircraft, Merck chemicals, Merrill Lynch brokers, Sikorsky, Texas Instruments, are mentioned or thanked in just two of his books, leading Christopher Hitchens to ask,rhetorically, "Are we entering the age of sponsorship in airport fiction?"

This closeness might be explained by the fact that in his remarkably sanitised world, the good guys (ie the CIA, the US Army, and especially the USD Marine Corps) always give the bad guys a bloody nose, and never, ever does an operation go wrong.

Christopher Hitchens thus summarised his views on the Marine Corps: "We find that Clancy praises his favourite corps for capturing John Brown at Harper's Ferry (under the command of Virginia Army officers Robert E. Lee and J.E.B. Stuart); for subverting Mexico at Vera Cruz in 1847; for putting down Filipino rebels in 1899 and invading Nicaragua in 1913; for intervening in Haiti between 1915 and 1934; and for 'pacifying the Panama Canal Zone' between 1901 and 1914, to say nothing of enforcing the Platt Amendment in Cuba. For Clancy, these are not disfigurements of a record that after all includes Iwo Jima, but glorious pages in and of themselves."

Clancy obviously doesn't mind his heroes being described as "the cops of the world" (Phil Ochs); he embraces such a description. All smart bombs hit their targets, and never demolish nearby hospitals or apartment buildings (as happened, quite recently, in Basra). You'll find no Bay of Pigs here, no bungled rescue of US hostages such as that which lost Jimmy Carter the US Presidency (of course, Carter is a Democrat, which could explain away that particular debacle). The sorry spectacle of US backing for puppet leaders in Vietnam, who then had to be either removed or assassinated to be replaced by another as bad as the last, is never even hinted at.

Of course, there is no recognition that today's Great Satan, Saddam Hussein, is only the latest in this sad progeny. As Clancy has said of the US failure to finish off Saddam in the Gulf War: "The objective of the war was never to overthrow Saddam Hussein, unfortunately. That was not an objective of the war. That's a determination made by President Bush and Secretary [of State James] Baker. People in the military don't make those kind of decisions.

"OK. The Iraqis are folding like a house of cards. And we get visual imagery of this, you know, the so-called 'highway of death'. We weren't shooting up people on foot, because that would be just cold-blooded murder, and American soldiers don't do that sort of thing. Unfortunately, it looked as though we were. A political decision was made that, in a public-relations sense, this looks bad and we should stop.

"A political decision was made in the White House, with the State Department, that we had to stop the war at this point because it would look bad."

So even with a Republican president, the politicians get in the way of the military, who would have world peace if only they were given their head. Ryan is very much a reluctant President: "Ryan's problem was that he really didn't have a political philosophy per se. He believed in things that worked, that produced the promised results and fixed whatever was broken. Whether these things adhered to one political slant or another was less important than the effects they had."

This is not only a reflection of the alienation from democratic politics which is permeating American society, especially its lower echelons, but also of the hegemonic process of that alienation: Clancy is not so much the acknowledgement of the problem, but part of it. If you say often enough that all politicians are corrupt and untrustworthy, then it becomes easier for the corrupt and untrustworthy to consolidate their power.

Likewise, with economics, state interference stops business from getting on with the job of creating wealth. So in Executive Orders Ryan puts an insider-trader in charge of the US economy, which really starts cooking. Ryan tells his appointee: "Buy a mop. I want your department cleaned up, streamlined and run like you want it to make a profit someday. How you do that is your problem. For Defense, I want the same thing. The biggest problem over there is administrative. I need somebody who can run a business and make a profit to cull the bureaucracy out. That's the biggest problem of all, for all the agencies."

The fact that it is the contrary policy under Clinton which has produced the desired results is not something you'll find acknowledged anywhere in his fiction.

All this is purest fantasy, of course. It is Ayn Rand for the Nineties, Heinlein for the new Millennium.

And the fact that it's the preferred reading of a man who once held the fate of the world in his hands makes the blood run cold.

All this assumes, of course, that the books which carry Tom Clancy's name are written by him. In fact, like some Renaissance artist, works which bear his name aren't always all his own work.

Into the Storm had more of General Fred Franks Jr in it than of Clancy (and some readers complained that, with an MA, the General might have done better to have written it on his own; it wouldn't have sold so many copies, though, would it?). Fans have complained that the Op-Center series aren't up to his usual standard (actually, they're a spin-off from a TV mini-series, and though they are credited to Clancy with Steve Pieczenik, they were actually written by a third person, Jeff Rovin.

Clancy's own description of their gestation is as follows: "Steve Pieczenik MD and I were at my home waiting for a friend to appear for a business meeting when I started talking about a moribund TV project I'd worked on mainly as a joke. Steve, it turned out, had a similar project behind him, and it turned out that his project and mine both had an element which the other lacked. So, we blended the ideas into what was actually his title, Op Center, and approached Brandon Tartikoff to work with us on it."

An author called Larry Bond was the credited for his contribution to Red Storm Rising, the World War III frightmare which is not part of the Jack Ryan saga. Bond is author of four best-sellers in his own right, Red Phoenix (1989), Vortex (1991), Cauldron (1995), and The Enemy Within (1996). He wrote a rival to Clancy's own Into the Storm, Desert Storm: Order of Battle. He is also said to have played a part in the creation of Red October. And the plots of Bond's fiction read a lot like Clancy's.

So, for that matter, does the plotline for Air Force One, the movie starring Harrison Ford (who also played Jack Ryan in Patriot Games), whose presidential superman hero even shares Ryan's first name. (Check it out, if you like, because there's a rather good novelisation by Max Allan Collins, creator of the Nathan Heller crime series, which reads like vintage Clancy.)

Readers who have come to read Clancy's books after playing his computer games will obviously be less hung-up ion individual authorship than your average literary critic. Indeed, as the Internet begins to destroy individual intellectual property rights, the name on the text will become increasingly irrelevant (which is why IRB reviews are unsigned-ED.).

One simple rule will help guide you through this minefield: if a book's title says it's "Tom Clancy's" whatever, then it probably isn't.

Like Microsoft, Clancy doesn't like commenting on unreleased product, so he stonewalls any questions about whether we have seen the last of Jack Ryan. Perhaps, like Arthur Conan-Doyle, he wants to see an end to him (though there is no Dr Moriarty powerful enough to throw him over the Reichenbach Falls).

And anyway, with the Republican right in disarray, the dark John Clark is more of a character in tune with times where the good guys don't always win - except on the last page.