One of James Patterson’s biggest regrets is that critics accord so little
respect to his blockbuster thrillers, often dismissed as the literary
equivalent of cornflakes. But there are sops to his self-esteem. One is that
the American writer has become Britain’s
most borrowed author, whose books were taken out of libraries 1.5m times
in the past year.
It seems that the dwindling band of library users reach for one of Patterson’s
crime yarns about Alex Cross, the black forensic detective, just ahead of a
tale by Jacqueline Wilson, whose children’s books had dominated the public
shelves for four years, or a novel by Josephine Cox.
This popular triumvirate have a built-in advantage that even JK Rowling cannot
match, each having churned out dozens of books – 52 in Patterson’s case –
enough to push their rivals off the shelves. (Although Rowling’s Harry
Potter and the Half-Blood Prince was the most borrowed children’s book.)
However, Patterson enjoys a unique distinction over all his competitors. In
the past decade the 60-year-old New Yorker has become the world’s greatest
factory of bestsellers, employing a team of writers that push out four or
five books a year. This industrial approach has earned him an estimated £20m
annually and the Time magazine headline “The man who can’t miss”.
He crafts a 30-page outline, a co-writer fills in the gaps and, after
Patterson’s final polish, another commercial success hits the slipway. He is
open about collaboration and the readers don’t mind, judging by the 165m
thrillers he has sold in 18 countries. Recently signed up by Random House,
he has set up a new production line for a further eight novels. None of this
weighs too heavily on the millionaire as he contemplates plots in the
wood-panelled office at his Florida mansion in Palm Beach, where he lives
with his wife Sue and their son Jack, 10. Visitors find him amiable, chatty
and unpretentious.
The idea of collaboration occurred to him in 1996, when he and Peter de Jonge,
a friend and journalist, came up with the idea for a golf novel, Miracle on
the 17th Green. “Peter’s a much better stylist than I am and I’m a much
better storyteller than he is,” he reasoned. “Why not?”
Although touched by personal tragedy, of which more later, he is apparently
not a writer with fire in his belly nor has he an acquaintance with hunger
beyond working on the Burger King account as one of America’s youngest
advertising executives. He also came up with the snappy slogan “I’m a Toys R
Us Kid” and became chairman of J Walter Thompson (JWT), the advertising
company, before turning to full-time writing.
The virtue prized by his fans is the sparseness of his writing, stripped of
descriptive passages and pared down to short paragraphs with typically 150
chapters. “I don’t put in too many details about how a room looks,” he
observed. “Some people would go for whole pages. That’s great if you have
the style, but if people really want to know what happens next it’s just
boring.”
People want a bit of adrenaline in their lives, he contends: “The thing about
my books is that they’re a rollercoaster ride, but at the end you get
relief. It all gets sorted out.”
This approach encompasses his mysteries, romance novels, thrillers, fantasies
and whatever else takes his fancy. In parallel with the Alex Cross books
such as Along Came a Spider and Kiss the Girls (both adapted as films
starring Morgan Freeman), Patterson produces the Women’s Murder Club series
and the Maximum Ride teenage fiction books.
He likes to set murders in places that look “too beautiful for anything bad to
happen”, such as San Francisco, and often features his favourite hotels.
The critics tend towards grudging praise. “A good yarn,” wrote one recently of
You’ve Been Warned, “but the writing style is just too breathless . . . and
when the author writes ‘It’s quiet. Too quiet’, I lose faith.”
Such condescension irks Patterson: “That’s probably my biggest frustration.
There’s something going on here that’s significant and it’s not easy to do. If
it was easy to do, a lot of people would do it.”
Yet the same man proclaimed of his book The 5th Horseman: “I don’t think it’s
terribly worth reading, honestly.” It didn’t show a high regard for his
readers. On the other hand, he founded the James Patterson PageTurner
Awards, donating $600,000 to reward schools and other institutions that
“spread the excitement of books and reading”.
Patterson was born on March 22, 1947, in Newburgh, 65 miles north of New York.
He grew up in a house full of women: his mother, Isabelle, a teacher, his
grandmother, three younger sisters and two female cats. It left him more
comfortable among women, talking of fashion, movies and love, than with men.
His father, Charles, a Prudential insurance executive, was “a strange,
troubled guy”, Patterson recalled. Charles was abandoned by his own father
at the age of two and grew up in a poor house, “so he didn’t have any role
models in how to be a father”. A domineering man, Charles squabbled with his
wife and was often absent. The effect on Patterson was that “I didn’t get
married until I was 48”.
At school he did well, but his home life left him with the feeling that there
was “nothing loveable about me”. His first girlfriend at school was called
Jean; he drove around with her, eating pizza, but he could not see himself
as anyone’s companion for life.
Armed with English degrees from Manhattan College and Vanderbilt University,
Patterson yearned to write fiction but settled for copywriting. He joined
JWT in New York and began dating Jane, “the nicest person in the history of
mankind. Every evening I just wanted to be with her”.
One morning after they had been together for five years, the couple went for
breakfast and stopped off at the post office, where Jane dropped to the
floor. “She had a brain tumour and had a limited amount of time to live.
Those 2½ years were the most special of my life. The perspective we took was
that we were lucky to have each day together. I was passionately in love
with a bald woman with tufts of hair.”
For a couple of years after Jane’s death, Patterson “worked my brains out and
zoomed up the ladder”. But he was lonely and in desperation went to a dating
agency, only to be thrown out “because I thought the questionnaire seemed
slick and silly”.
After being rejected by 26 publishers, in 1977 Patterson’s first book, The
Thomas Berryman Number, won the Edgar award, a prestigious prize for mystery
fiction. The story of a hitman stalking the mayor of Nashville, it
established him as a writer of tightly constructed stories although it was
not a commercial success.
More books followed, but he did not feel confident enough to abandon his
six-year run as company chairman until he scented certain success with Along
Came a Spider in 1992, when he invented the character of Alex Cross.
Employing his ad-man skills, Patterson took control of the book’s design and
marketing. He paid for television advertisements with his own money and
redesigned the book’s cover: “They’d done a cover that had a kid’s sneaker
with a little blood on it, and it didn’t do anything for me. I want the
reaction to be ‘I want this!’ ” He bumped up the title to a size that had
the desired effect: the story became a bestseller. His marketing techniques
are now taught as a case study at Harvard business school.
Before leaving JWT he rehired Susan Solie, an art director who had worked in
his office about 18 years earlier. After a couple of dates they hit it off
and eventually married in 1997. “She accepts that I had a great relationship
with Jane because she accepts that I had a life before,” he said.
In a recent blog on his website, Patterson expressed horror at published
statistics showing that the amount spent on reading each year by the average
American family had declined from $163 in 1995 to just $126 in 2005. Yet his
latest scheme has struck some commentators as a campaign against literature.
He plans to embrace the computer games market by targeting middle-aged women
unfamiliar with the pastime.
He told The Hollywood Reporter last week: “We’re going to give people who
don’t want to shoot things . . . who prefer to use their brains . . . a
chance to solve a really good mystery.” Sceptics wonder how many matrons are
going to rush out and buy PlayStations and get their thumbs around the
controls. But faced with Patterson’s fiendish marketing skills, they’ll soon
be putty in his hands.
