Clive Cussler is the author of many
New York Times
bestsellers, most recently
The Spy and
Lost
Empire. He lives in Arizona.
Grant Blackwood caught the fiction-writing bug at the age of
eighteen while reading Clive Cussler's
The Mediterranean
Caper , and spent the next four years working in different
styles of fiction before settling on novel-length work.
Mr. Blackwood is a U.S. Navy veteran, having spent three years
active duty aboard the guided missile frigate USS Ford as an
Operations Specialist and a Pilot Rescue Swimmer.
Two months after leaving the Navy in July 1987, Mr. Blackwood
started the first draft of his first novel, which as he puts it,
"wasn't good enough to be published, but good enough to earn a spot
in my sock drawer. It took me several more years of rewriting
before I realized the publishers and agents who'd been saying 'no'
were saying no for a good reason."
Twelve years to the day after leaving the Navy, Mr. Blackwood
received an offer from Penguin-Putnam/Berkley to buy his second
novel, The End of Enemies, which hit the stands
May 8th.
Mr. Blackwood is 36 years old and lives in Minnesota, where he
is working on this next novel, the second in the Briggs Tanner
series of thrillers, which is due out in Spring/Summer of 2002.