Tom Clancy was a bad writer, his characters and stories are awful

I hate to speak ill of the dead, and especially of books, but his books are just bad. A bit of a back story: I am doing a reading list this year as well as a reading goal. In this list it had “airport fiction” as a requirement, so since I have seen a few Clancy movies, and he seems pretty famous in everything from movies, to video games, I figured it had to be at least decent in quality and interesting in content, so I started there. I have read some similar books like Borne identity, which was not the best thing in the word, but it was interesting and a pretty fun read, Tom Clancy on the other hand, is terrible.

I read "Patriot Games". It's a book about a guy named Jack Ryan, and a chance run in with some terrorists in London. In this book, his family and friends play a big role, and you get some accounts straight from the bad guys perspective too. Anyway, enough of that, it's a spy type book with international terrorism and terrorist attacks in the US. The issue with the book is that every character is about as interesting as a loaf of bread. Jack Ryan himself is perfect in about everything he does, he has no flaws, though his wife comments one time after talking about how awesome she is, that he does have a flaw, he doesn't know how perfect he is. The only character building in this book, is people saying how great he is at teaching, at intelligence work, at everything. His wife is the same way. She drives a Porsche 911 like a pilot, she has a perfect house in a perfect location, she is a famous doctor who saves people's eye sight and gets in the paper for it. She's beautiful, she's perfect, and so on. His friends too are perfect, they are the best fighter pilots, and the best teachers, everyone is the best at everything. Great. I mean, there are no internal struggles with any of the characters, they are all good people with great careers and no problems except maybe a war injury, or they are in the middle of a terrorist attack, that's it.

The story is a series of pages about how awesome they all are followed by "professional" terrorists attacking in various ways. They always are sure to emphasize how professional the terrorists are despite screwing every operation up in pretty much every way. There really is no question throughout the book that Jack Ryan will win and the terrorists will lose. And the dialogue, oh god, it's awful. There are jokes scattered about in pretty much every conversation and they are bad jokes. And when the jokes aren't said out loud, they are said in Jack's mind, like "Oh i could say this funny thing right now, but it may not go over well!". And not only is the dialogue terrible, it has a bunch of patriotic messages that are pretty run of the mill terrorist are bad guys trying to take our freedom. I can't remember them all but one that stood out one time is this quote: "Bill Shaw too had passed the bar exam, though he devoted his legal expertise to the safety of society rather than the freedom of criminals", referring to defense attorneys. At one point he catches a women on a satellite surveillance photo and his awesome find results in the French executing a bunch of terrorists, including a woman, and he talks about this for pages, this is one example of that dialogue: "It would be better he decided if terrorist were ugly, but pretty or not, their victims were just as dead." This is what the whole book is like.

I am trying to figure out how these terrible books ever captured anyone's attention and turned in to not just a famous name, but a franchise in every medium. What is going on here?