A Certain Point of View: Writing, Film and Stuff

On August 31, 2018, Amazon's Prime Video began streaming Season One of  Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan, an eight-episode action-adventure/political thriller web television series based on the eponymous character created by the late Tom Clancy. Starring John Krasinki ( The Office, A Quiet Place ) as Ryan, Wendell Pierce as James Greer, Abbie Cornish as Dr. Cathy Mueller, Ali Suliman as Mousa Bin Suleiman, and Dina Shibabi as Hanin Ali, Jack Ryan is not an adaptation of any of Clancy's novels but is a reimagining of the best-selling author's multimedia "Ryanverse" that borrows elements of the literary character's DNA to create a story set in the troubled times we live in. Created by Carlton Cuse ( The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr. and Lost ) and Graham Roland ( Fringe, Prison Break, and Lost ), Jack Ryan focuses on the efforts of Central Intelligence Agency analyst John Patrick Ryan to find a shadowy Muslim terrorist and prevent him from carrying out a terro...

Harrison Ford starred in two Jack Ryan films. © 1992 Paramount Pictures On Quora, member Maya Lachman asks: Was Jack Ryan a Republican or a Democrat? My reply: If you’re talking about Tom Clancy’s iconic character John Patrick Ryan, Sr., he is depicted in the novels as being Republican, especially in most of the books that follow 1991’s  The Sum of All Fears. In the early Jack Ryan novels ( The Hunt for Red October, Patriot Games, The Cardinal of the Cardinal, Clear and Present Danger,  and  The Sum of All Fears ), Ryan works his way up the ranks in the Central Intelligence Agency, starting out as a recently-recruited analyst and rising all the way to Deputy Director (Intelligence), or DDI. During his time at CIA, Ryan doesn’t have much to say about politics (except in the context of U.S.-Soviet relations, in which case he is obviously a Cold War Republican), but his pre-CIA resume includes a stint as a Marine Corps lieutenant, a successful stockbroker...

(C) 1996 Berkley Books and Jack Ryan Limited Partnership On November 1, 1996, Berkley Books (which at the time was the paperback division of G.P. Putnam's Sons but has since been folded into the larger Penguin Random House conglomerate) published Tom Clancy's Marine: A Guided Tour of a Marine Expeditionary Force. Co-written by Clancy's researcher and defense expert John D. Gresham, Marine is the fourth volume in what is now billed as The Tom Clancy Military Library but was originally known as the Guided Tour series.  Fans of the late novelist and conservative commentator know that Clancy was an unabashed admirer of the United States Marine Corps. His best known fictional character, John Patrick Ryan, Sr. started his career in government as a second lieutenant in the Marines, a fact that has been mentioned in three of the five "Jack Ryan" films and Amazon's Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan, as well as in several of Clancy's novels.  "Marine." S...

(C) 1984 U.S. Naval Institute Press In 1984, the Naval Institute Press published “The Hunt for Red October,” Tom Clancy’s Cold War-era novel about a Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) analyst, Jack Ryan, who leads a group of Anglo-American naval officers on a classified mission in the cold waters of the North Atlantic. Their task: to assist 26 disenchanted Soviet Navy officers commanded by Captain First Rank Marko Ramius in a mass defection to the West – and take possession of the Red Navy’s newest ballistic missile submarine. Clancy, who at the time owned a successful insurance agency in Maryland, was one of the first writers to have a work of fiction published by the Naval Institute Press. The Annapolis-based publishing arm of the U.S. Naval Institute is best known for non-fiction books and reference guides about the military – with a special focus on naval warfare, technology, and history. In 1984, when Clancy submitted his manuscript for “The Hunt for Red October” to the Pr...