It’s the birthday of Tom Clancy (1947-2013), who created the espionage thriller or “techno-thriller” and wrote 17 novels that made it to No. 1 on the New York Times bestsellers list. Clancy’s fifth novel, Clear and Present Danger (1989), sold 1,625,544 copies exactly (I counted) and was therefore the bestselling novel of the 1980s.

(Just thinking about the movie version of Clancy’s debut novel, The Hunt for Red October (1984), makes me miss the Cold War, dammit. Those were the days. Also: kids today. Am I right?)

Clancy was born in Baltimore, Maryland, where as a kid he read naval history, like you do, laying the foundation for a knowledge base that would become so impressive as to one day cause high-ranking military leaders to wonder “who the hell cleared” the information he wove into his novels. Clancy studied English at Loyola College in Baltimore (1969) “because it was an easy major” and then worked as an insurance agent.

Clancy submitted his manuscript for The Hunt for Red October to Deborah Grosvenor, an editor at the Naval Institute Press—not a publisher of fiction, by the way—who was taken with the novel but made Clancy cut many of the technical descriptions. Grosvenor managed to talk her boss into acquiring the book for $5,000. Clancy was hoping it would sell 5,000 copies; instead it sold 45,000, and after an endorsement by President Ronald Reagan, became a huge hit.

Red October was followed by Red Storm Rising (1986), Patriot Games (1987), Clear and Present Danger (1989), The Sum of All Fears (1991), and on up to Command Authority, published in 2013 after Clancy’s death.

Clancy was married to Wanda Thomas King for nearly 30 years and had four children with her; when the couple divorced, they had a custody battle over Clancy’s character Jack Ryan. (It’s weird and it’s complicated and I’m not going to get into it.) Clancy then married Alexandra Marie Llewellyn; they had one daughter and were together until Clancy’s death.

Fun fact #1: Clancy had his novels turned into video games that were so impressive the military used them for training. Fun fact #2: Clancy was so rich he became co-owner of the Baltimore Orioles major league baseball team. (Go sports. Get the points.)

Have a fantastic Friday and stay scrupulously honest to the data.