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The figures, as James Patterson might describe them, are awesome. He's had more than 35 New York Times best-sellers, including five at the top spot, in a single year. He currently outsells J.K. Rowling, John Grisham and Dan Brown put together. This year he's on target to sell
more than 20 million books in the United States alone, adding to his $2.2 billion in global sales, making him the world's best-selling author by a mile.
Amazingly, James Patterson doesn't think of himself as a writer. Indeed, in person he's not remotely awesome, nor flashy. Sporting standard-issue polo shirt, chinos and deck shoes, he's softly spoken and surprisingly modest. "I recently had [my 61st] birthday party," he says, "and asked 16 friends; some went back all the way to kindergarten, and the consensus, which I really like, was that I'm still the same asshole that I always was. There didn't seem to be a lot of airs. I don't think of myself as a writer. I think of myself as [my wife] Sue's pal and [my son] Jack's friend, and I like to scribble. That seems to be the truth about who I am."
Well, sort of. Patterson's "scribbling" isn't just a super-efficient brand reaching for global dominance; it's also a collaborative effort, honed and refined by a number of highly talented individuals. The biggest charge that Patterson has to endlessly tackle is that he doesn't actually write his own books.
In his airy, simple office, overlooking the Hudson River upstate of New York City, Patterson shows me the piles of manuscripts he's currently working on. "This is a rewrite," he says, flicking through a thick wedge of paper. He explains that the numerous pencil marks on the type are his additions and changes. "This is my third rewrite on a co-written book. I get all this baloney about 'well, what does he do? Does he even look at them? Well yes, he does look at them'."
You only have to dip into the very first novel Patterson wrote, single-handedly, back in 1976 to get some idea of his own talent as a writer. The Thomas Berryman Number is a cool, stylish suspense thriller, featuring a cold-blooded assassin. But Patterson says now that the book was "a struggle to get into some coherent form. I felt Berryman had a lot of good sentences. A lot of times you get people writing wonderful sentences and paragraphs and they fall in love with their prose style, but the stories really aren't that terrific. Berryman [the character] was better written than the story."
Over the years Patterson has focused on telling compelling stories rather than writing good sentences. He never set out to write Ulysses (which he has read three times), but mass-market, commercial fiction. And for a long while he didn't take it that seriously. Patterson's day job was in advertising. By the age of 39 he was appointed chief executive of a North American ad agency, the youngest head in the firm's history. He attributes his success largely to the sudden death of his then-partner Jane from a brain tumour. "I didn't want to spend any time dealing with life - just work, nothing else." However, advertising was never a great love. "I got to the point of hiring people I liked to be around, but there were too many layers and too many people who really didn't know what they were doing. And it was too silly to get nutty about; Jesus, it's a frigging cereal."
He left, just over a decade ago, not, he maintains, to concentrate on his writing - even though he was by now achieving considerable commercial success with a crime series featuring the black cop and criminal psychologist Alex Cross - but to downsize the stress and upgrade the lifestyle. "I had to drive back to the agency one Sunday, and I was stuck in wall-to-wall traffic heading into Manhattan, and I realised I needed to get on the other side of the road." He promptly left work and married Sue, a striking blonde Norwegian (who had once worked at his former ad agency).
Nevertheless, marriage and fatherhood (Jack was born 10 years ago) and Patterson seem to have hardly put the brakes on his scribbling. Indeed, a solid, happy home life, coupled with his corporate unshackling, has inspired Patterson to effectively break all the rules and revolutionise the publishing industry. Obviously, the guy is no slouch - he begins work at 5.30am, seven days a week - nor is he just a name on a jacket.
What he has done so successfully is not just to launch one or two best-selling crime series, but three. Along with the Alex Cross stable, there's the Women's Murder Club, featuring four Californian crime-solvers, and most recently the Detective Michael Bennett series. He's also created two series for young adults, the hyper-popular Maximum Ride books starring a group of kids who are part-human, part-bird, and a new line starring the orphaned teenage alien-hunter, Daniel X. A book from each of these series is published once a year, as well as a number of other standalones. He has a horror line, a romance line, a historical-fiction line, always produces a big summer stand-alone thriller, and is now turning to non-fiction.
Patterson's name will appear on 10 original works this year. All will be best-sellers and most will be number ones. No wonder he doesn't have time to pen every word, but to accuse him of not writing his own books is entirely to miss the point. "There is a kind of Mickey Mouse way of looking at brands. In particular in the States, a lot of the publishing houses are lost in the Middle Ages, they really don't have a clue. I remember initially it was like, 'Oh my God, he's going to hurt the brand by doing other kinds of stories'. And I said, here's what I think a brand is, from my own experience with dealing with a lot of brands, a brand is just a connection between something and a lot of people who use or try that product.
"If there is a brand that's called James Patterson, and I suppose there is, it's that when you pick up a Patterson book you'll not be able to stop reading. It doesn't matter whether it's a romantic story, a young-adult book, or non-fiction."
Random House, Patterson's British publisher, came up with the strapline "The pages turn themselves". However, Patterson's British editor, Susan Sandon, certainly doesn't like to think of Patterson's work as either formulaic or easily branded. "He's a brilliant story-teller, a phenomenon," she says, before suggesting an analogy with Michelangelo's working practices. "People get very snobbish about it, but Patterson has not franchised out his name. He works with collaborators, which is not unusual."
To a point. There are numerous big-name "authors" who use named and unnamed hands or ghosts, to pen both fiction and memoirs from Dick Francis to Katie Price. And there is the enduring case of Robert Ludlum, who died in 2001, but still manages to produce at least a novel a year. Even Stephen King has called on the odd collaborator for a particular series.
No one, however, has done it so effectively and on such an industrial scale as Patterson. His first foray into non-fiction, Torn Apart, was released this month, and is being marketed as a misery memoir - that genre which continues to shine despite, or perhaps because of, the dark content. Patterson was approached by an old friend, Hal Friedman, who was attempting to write an account of his son's traumatic and terrifying experience of Tourette syndrome and other neurological disorders. "I read the early pages," says Patterson, "and felt there was power there, but I didn't think it was working at all." Eventually Patterson offered to come on board. "I felt it had the potential to be a very emotional story, but the scenes had to pay off."
All Patterson's work is defined by ultra-short chapters that continually push the story along. Pace is what he's after. "I insisted we do this as nothing but anecdotes that seamlessly tell the story. The subject for a lot of non-fiction is very emotional, but if you read it, it's the most boring, dry stuff. I wanted Torn Apart to be extremely accessible and readable."
Patterson himself says there's no particular formula, but more his own emotions and instincts telling him whether something works. "I always do it scene by scene, section by section. Am I hooked? Are the surprises continuing? I scribble on the rewrites, 'be there'. If I don't feel I'm in the scene, for this kind of writing, I don't think it works." These comments and directions then go back to his loyal team of co-writers, who are usually clearly acknowledged. Currently Patterson employs five writers, variously working on the different series and lines.
The first book Patterson co-wrote was Miracle on the 17th Green, with golfing buddy and fledgling thriller writer Peter de Jonge. "I loved the process," Patterson says. "It was really fun. I'm a big fan of teamwork anyway. I think the individualism thing is overrated."
In a way, Patterson operates like a movie director, providing very detailed plot outlines for a bunch of scriptwriters, then cutting and re-shooting their efforts. "The closest thing would be what happens every day in Hollywood. I don't worry about throwing out a lot of stuff and adding a lot of stuff. I don't worry about the re-edit and re-edit and re-edit. It's all part of the process and it's fine."
For their part, the writers are more than happy with the arrangement. Andrew Gross spent seven years working for Patterson, mostly on the Women's Murder Club. "Jim has terrific instincts for plots, really fine-tuned, and getting a story going fast. We got along well and he was always accessible." The association, which Gross describes as being "very well-paid", also enabled him to branch out on his own: he secured a major six-book deal with HarperCollins. Peter de Jonge now also has a deal with the same publisher.
Patterson won't be drawn on the exact financial arrangements he makes with his co-writers, but implies, as do they, that they are very generous - he gives bonuses, but not royalties. "Mostly," he says, "they're easy to work with. When I was at [the ad agency] I would hire only one kind of person - talented and nice to be around. The end. No shitheads. I continued with that." He also makes it clear, at the very beginning, who's in charge: "Ultimately this is a James Patterson novel."
Movie adaptations are growing the brand still further. Morgan Freeman played Alex Cross in Kiss the Girls and Along Came a Spider, and producer Avi Arad the man behind Spider-Man has the rights to the Maximum Ride series and has already secured US$180 million ($262 million) in production money from Sony. Patterson is passionate about the young adult market, in part because of his son Jack and in part because he's keen to get kids reading. "One of the problems," he says, "is that there is not enough stuff that's written with the kind of pace that their world is about."
Patterson's world, in comparison, appears strangely slow and antiquated. Aside from his house on the Hudson, he has a mansion in Palm Beach, Florida. But he maintains that he, Sue and Jack lead a pretty quiet life, and rarely socialise. He does few appearances and is on no major boards. He also claims he feels no pressure to continue dominating the best-seller lists. "I don't think I care that much," he says. "We're doing fine. We're doing better: we're doing very well."
Patterson, you sense, is a man who sticks firmly to what he knows best: putting pen - or in his case a 2B pencil - to, invariably, someone else's paper. For while he might have achieved stratospheric sales and amassed a fortune, he still hasn't joined the computer age, despite the ribbing he gets from Jack. He communicates with his co-writers by post and phone. The key to those communications? Simply, perhaps, what he regards as "my emotion coming to the thing and going, 'it's not right yet', or 'it's ready now'." And, of course, no email, no search engines and no shitheads.
* Torn Apart, by James Patterson and Hal Friedman (Century $37.99)
