Tom Clancy died last night in a Baltimore hospital at the age of 66. The thriller novelist was most famous for his Jack Ryan books and their film adaptations, including The Hunt for Red October, Patriot Games, A Clear and Present Danger, and The Sum of All Fears. To gamers, he was perhaps best known as the personality who lent his name to such video games as Rainbow Six, Ghost Recon, and Splinter Cell.

Speaking personally, I can say that Tom Clancy’s books were among the first “grown-up books” I read as a teenager wandering from the YA section of my local library into the Adult shelves. I began with The Hunt for Red October, then proceeded through his body of work chronologically before crapping out somewhere around Debt of Honor.

You won’t find many today claiming that the books were great art, but the man could tell a great story. My adolescent reading of A Clear and Present Danger is still one of the most memorable and exciting reading experiences of my life, in the way that only a boy’s reading of a story of adventure and men and guns can be.

Though I lost track of Clancy as an adult reader, his expansive way of storytelling, weaving together disparate characters and plotlines into climaxes of almost unbearable suspense, is still something I admire. The man was an undeniable giant in the world of genre fiction, and he’ll be missed.