He’s a popular cuss, so just enjoy

OF all the misleading distinctions on which we routinely insist, the one between high and low culture is among the prissiest.

It’s not that the difference between the two isn’t real, it’s just that making a wall of it denies the plain truth that appetites are various and can healthily and happily coexist. Dry-aged rib-eye steak is superior to ground beef -- unless you’re in the mood for a hamburger, in which case nothing else will do.

Clive Cussler’s 31st book, “Treasure of Khan,” is a great big fat juicy cheeseburger of a novel and, like most thrillers, a bit of a problem for conventional critics. By and large, people who write about new fiction are only too glad to draw attention to what Graham Greene liked to call “entertainments” -- Patrick O’Brien’s seafaring stories, for example, or John Le Carre’s espionage novels.

And why not? What’s not to like?

But what about books like Cussler’s -- novels intended to gratify not the cultivated but the uncritical kid still lurking inside so many readers who want a few hours of what they once found so transporting at the Saturday matinees? Conventional criticism finds it hard to speak to that appetite, because to an extent seldom admitted, it has lost faith in the power of literature as popular entertainment, ceding that territory to film and, increasingly, the Internet.

Lots of readers, however, still insist that the best entertainment is mediated by the participation of their own imagination, which is what thrillers like Cussler’s or Michael Crichton’s permit. How numerous are such readers? Well, “Treasure of Khan” has a first printing of 750,000, and the author and his publisher are secure enough in their investment to permit simultaneous sale of an audio version. Over the years, the 75-year-old Alhambra born and Pasadena City College educated Cussler has sold 125 million books in more than 100 countries in 40 different languages.

This novel is the 19th built around marine engineer, adventurer and sometime government agent Dirk Pitt and the second in that series on which Cussler, a onetime advertising copy writer, has collaborated with his son, Dirk (the fictional Dirk also has a son named Dirk), who has an MBA from Berkeley and worked in finance before he joined the family business.

Like the other Dirk Pitt novels, this one begins in the historic past -- in this case, one of the Mongols’ disastrous attempts to invade Japan.

Once the seeds of future plot twists are leisurely sown, we join our hero in the present, on Siberia’s Lake Baikal, where there’s maritime adventure, a freak wave, a kidnapping and, naturally, a pursuit.

The action proceeds to Mongolia, where the fiendish villain Borjin is plotting to restore Mongol primacy through manipulation of a titanic oil strike. The oil field is named Temujin -- Genghis Khan’s given name -- and everything ultimately connects back to the great khan, his grandson Kublai (who twice attempted an amphibious landing on Japan), a treasure, a lost tomb and Xanadu. Yes, the one with Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “stately pleasure-dome.”

One doesn’t go to a story like this for realistic -- or even credible -- dialogue. Here are Dirk and his faithful sidekick, Al Giordino, discovering a body in Borjin’s family mausoleum:

“Pitt and Giordino walked over and were shocked to recognize the corpse. It was Roy, half covered in a thin blanket, but with the shaft of the arrow still protruding from his chest.

“ ‘Theresa and Wofford are here,’ Giordino said, his voice trailing off.

“ ‘Let’s hope they haven’t suffered the same fate,’ Pitt said quietly.... “

Sometime later, Dirk and Giordino take refuge in a Buddhist monastery, where one of Borjin’s assassins is posing as a monk. When he’s killed and a search of his body turns up a dagger and automatic pistol, there’s this:

“ ‘This is not the way of the dharma,’ the lama said with a shock.

“ ‘How long has he been at the monastery?’ Pitt asked.

“ ‘He arrived just the day before you. He said he hailed from the northern state of Orhon but that he was crossing the Gobi in search of inner tranquility.’

“ ‘He’s found it now,’ Giordino said with a smirk.”

Quite a wit, our Al.

But all that’s beside the point, because Mongols are Saturday-afternoon-matinee cool. Any conqueror can have an army, but the khans were so tough they had hordes. Now that’s cool. Besides, Mongolia has not only the Gobi desert but also the Flaming Cliffs, where Roy Chapman Andrews’ great Central Asiatic Expedition found the first dinosaur eggs and the first fossilized velociraptor.

A great deal has been made of Cussler’s use of collaborators. In that sense, his work harks back to the turn of the last century, when Edward Stratemeyer, himself a onetime advertising copy writer, created modern young adult fiction with his Stratemeyer Syndicate. He devised characters, broadly outlined plots and then farmed them out to ghostwriters, all of whose work the syndicate published under a single pseudonym -- Franklin W. Dixon in the case of the Hardy Boys, others for Nancy Drew, Tom Swift and the Bobbsey Twins.

Forbes Magazine -- yes, the author is that financially successful -- once labeled Cussler’s operation a “literary theme park.”

Actually, it’s a bit older than that. What we now call popular fiction began as the romans feuilletons, or serialized novels, published by French newspapers in the early 19th century. (The phrase “to be continued” first appeared in Revue de Paris in 1829.) The genre’s king was Alexandre Dumas, who composed his classic novels “The Three Musketeers” and “The Count of Monte Cristo” in close collaboration with the historian and writer Auguste Maquet. Dumas, in fact, inscribed one copy to his comrade with the ungrammatical Latin compliment “cui pars magna fuit” (“whose part in it was great”). Maquet subsequently wrote that it didn’t matter that “cui” should have been “cujus.” “The Latin is faulty, but the intention is good,” he said.

In an interview several years ago, Cussler acknowledged that his various collaborators “do the lion’s share of the work and the writing is the hard part. I know for me, I can envision ships blowing up and explosions and sinking and traveling underwater and that sort of thing, but to translate that into these little black things on white paper -- that’s the tough part. And so working with someone where they’re doing the majority of the hard work and I’m doing plotting and concepts and editing and rewriting -- it’s really fun.”

Obviously, a fair number of readers, forgiving in the manner of Maquet, share that opinion.

timothy.rutten@latimes.com