NEWPORT NEWS -- "I'd like to retire, but they won't let me," joked Clive Cussler.

Certainly, the fans of Cussler's two-dozen-plus rip-roaring adventure novels wouldn't want him to lay down his keyboard.

There are more Cussler books on the way, the novelist-explorer said Monday, though more of the writing is handled nowadays by his collaborators, including his son Dirk Cussler.

Cussler was in town for Sunday's christening of the USS Monitor replica at The Mariners' Museum, and he stayed Monday for an open house at the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration's Maritime Archaeology Center on the museum grounds.

"My son has taken over the Dirk Pitt series," Cussler said in an interview at the center. Dirk Pitt - whom Cussler named after his son - is the hero of Cussler's most popular series of maritime thrillers.

The elder Cussler, tall, fit-looking and a month away from his 75th birthday, said he's concentrating on books spun off from the original series, and some different kinds of books. This year he came out with a young people's novel, "The Adventures of Vin Fiz," about 10-year-old twins who go flying in a magical replica of a Wright Brothers biplane.

About his collaborative method, he said, "We'll get together, and I come up with the basic concept. It's always based on a 'what if.' "

The "what if" he's considering right now, he said, is supposing that King Solomon had a replica made of the Ark of the Covenant.

A modern-day pursuit of that artifact, he said, "could end up kind of a 'Da Vinci Code' type thing."

When working with his son, Cussler said, "when he gets to chapter 10, he'll give it to me."

One thing his fans won't see any time soon is another movie based on a Cussler book. The novelist was unhappy with the 1980 film version of "Raise the Titanic," his first best-seller, and he wrangled with Hollywood over the 2005 movie of his book "Sahara." He sued the "Sahara" filmmakers, charging that they violated an agreement giving him script approval, and he said there'll be no more movie deals until that lawsuit is resolved.

Even so, he said, "my agent has been approached 20 times about 'Vin Fiz'" as a movie property.

Cussler was an honored guest of NOAA because of his life-imitating-art parallel career. His National Underwater and Marine Agency - a nonprofit organization named after the fictional agency in his Dirk Pitt novels - probes the world's oceans for historic shipwrecks.

In the past 25 years, the real-life NUMA has discovered scores of shipwreck sites. Its most celebrated find - in 1995 - was the Confederate submarine Hunley, which sank off Charleston, S.C.

This summer, Cussler said, he and NUMA will be in the North Sea off England, making their ninth attempt to find the sunken Bonhomme Richard, John Paul Jones' ship.

"We say, a ship is never found until it wants to be found," he said. "And when you do find it, it's never where it was supposed to be."

Wreck-hunting has brought him to Hampton Roads in the past. In the early 1980s he was involved in finding the wreck of the USS Cumberland, sunk by the ironclad CSS Virginia the day before its battle with the Monitor, and the Confederate commerce raider Florida, which sank off Newport News after being captured.

What might tempt him back here, Cussler said, is a search for the iron ram that was torn off the Virginia's prow as it sank the Cumberland.

Cussler's "Sea Hunter" film crew also surveyed the wreck of the Queen of Nassau, the first modern warship of the Canadian navy, which sank in 1926 off the Florida Keys in what is now a NOAA marine sanctuary. Monday's open house at NOAA included celebrating an agreement under which NOAA will send five artifacts raised from the Queen of Nassau to the Vancouver Maritime Museum in Canada.