James Patterson (b. 1947), the creator of the fictional African American D.C. cop and forensic psychologist Alex Cross, is the most prolific and highest-earning contemporary American writer. Since publishing his first thriller, The Thomas Berryman Number (1976), Patterson has gone on to publish ninety-eight books to date. Following his first novel, he published Season of the Machete (1977), a psychological thriller; The Jericho Commandment (1979), a revenge thriller; Virgin (1980), a religious thriller (later rewritten by Patterson as Cradle and All [2000]); Black Market (1986), a finance thriller; and The Midnight Club (1988), a psychological thriller. His break-through blockbuster novel, Along Came a Spider (1993), introduced Alex Cross to the world, inaugurated Patterson's tradition of giving his Cross novels titles derived from nursery rhymes, and—aided by a then-innovative television advertising campaign run by Patterson himself—sold five million copies. Since 1996, he has published as many as ten books per year. Alex Cross, Patterson's most famous character, has featured in twenty more novels since Along Came a Spider. Patterson is also the author of the popular Women's Murder Club crime thriller series, beginning with the publication of First to Die (2001). The characters that constitute the Women's Murder Club reside in San Francisco and include Lindsey Boxer, a homicide detective; Yuki Castellano, a district attorney; Cindy Thomas, a reporter; and Claire Washburn, chief medical examiner. Not content to write only Alex Cross and Women's Murder Club thrillers, Patterson early in his career began branching out from the thriller genre that made his name into other genres, including science fiction, children's and young adult books, historical novels, romance, sports, and non-fiction. To date, three films and six television movie adaptations of his novels have been released. Two of the films, Kiss the Girls (1997) and Along Came a Spider (2001), starred veteran actor Morgan Freeman as Alex Cross. Alex Cross (2012), a re-launch or reboot of the franchise and largely based on Patterson's novel Cross (2006), starred Tyler Perry. According to Contemporary Authors Online, Roses are Red (2000) has been adapted for film, First to Die has been adapted as a mini-series for NBC television, and the Women's Murder Club series has been made into a pilot for ABC.

The Alex Cross series, aka “the Nursery Rhyme Adventures,” is Patterson's most well-known contribution to the thriller genre. Many of the novels are titled after lines from nursery rhymes, giving them an aura of “faux-naif grotesquerie,” in Brian Stableford's memorable phrase, which has undoubtedly contributed to their popular appeal with thriller readers. Cross, a widowed cop with a doctorate in forensic psychology, has three children. He lives in Washington, D.C., with two of the children and his paternal grandmother. He works with the FBI as a profiler. In his various outings, Cross has faced adversaries such as “The Butcher,” whose real name is Michael Sullivan, a prolific serial killer/rapist; “Casanova,” whose real name is Nick Ruskin, a detective who also abducts and kills young women as part of his “harem;” “The DC Audience Killer,” really an incestuous brother and sister couple and former patients of Cross' who, as their collective name suggests, like to kill their victims in front of audiences; Jimmy “Hats” Galati, a mob killer who murdered Cross' first wife, Maria; “The Mastermind,” FBI Agent Kyle Craig, once Cross' friend before becoming one of his formidable enemies; Gary Soneji, the villain of Along Came a Spider, who kidnaps two young girls and bedevils Cross throughout several subsequent novels; “The Tiger,” the leader of a gang of African teenage boys; “The Weasel,” a British Army colonel, who becomes a serial killer and murderer of Cross' love interest; “The Wolf,” an alias for several individuals, all of whom are Russian mobsters and former KGB agents; and “Zeus,” whose real name is Theodore Vance, husband of the US President and killer of young women, including Cross' niece. As this partial list of Cross' ever-growing record of antagonists demonstrates, Patterson deliberately contrasts the decency of Cross, his love interests, and his family against the depravity of each book's villains. Of this juxtaposition, Patterson says: “I am personally not terribly interested in the bad stuff that goes on. I'm very interested in the Cross family. I like the notion of good struggling in the middle of this maelstrom we're going to throw around them” (Zaleki 53).

The depiction of women and African American characters in the Cross series deserves special mention. To some readers, a disproportionate number of women—including Cross' first wife, a few assorted love interests, and family members—meet violent ends in these stories, a development that leads Patricia Holt, among others, to criticize Patterson as a practitioner of “the Female Dismemberment and Mutilation School of Mystery Writing” (D10). To this, Patterson would no doubt reply by pointing to the number of prominent female characters in his novels, including the four female protagonists of the Women's Murder Club series. He also says he “grew up in a house full of women. … My best friends tended to be women. I like the way they talk, the fact that a lot of subjects weave in and out of conversations. Sometimes men are a little more of a straight line” (Womack). Besides disengaging from the politics of femicide as depicted in his novels, Patterson also tends to decentralize race in the Cross series, another interesting authorial strategy for a series, which has a black man as its protagonist. Patterson intentionally created an African American hero because, as he tells Lewis Burke Frumkes, “I didn't think there were many.” He also based Cross' close family on Patterson's memories of a female African American cook, who, after marital troubles, moved in with his family when he was a child. However, Patterson (perhaps deliberately, so as not to harm sales one way or another) does not specifically dwell upon Cross' race as a significant issue with which the profiler must contend either personally or professionally. Earni Young says, “Alex Cross occasionally encounters cases where his race becomes an issue, but it is never THE issue of the book” (28). Rather, Patterson chooses to focus on making Cross an endearing character, whose appeal cuts across racial lines as he solves the various criminal cases in which he becomes involved.

Patterson is truly a one-man publishing industry. He enjoys, through his publisher Little, Brown & Co., a support staff of editors, assistants, and managers dedicated solely to him. A former advertising executive with the agency J. Walter Thompson/North America, where he created campaigns for Kodak, Burger King, and Toys ‘R’ Us, among other companies, he has used that experience to run the advertising campaigns for his own novels. He shows his business savvy in other ways, particularly in his partnering with collaborators to create a “James Patterson brand.” His brand, according to Patterson, is “trust that's established between something and a group of people—just trust. What I would like the trust to be is that, if you pick up a James Patterson novel, you won't be able to put it down” (Zaleski 53).

To perpetuate this brand, he hires other writers to turn his detailed sixty-to-seventy page story treatments and outlines into novels to help him sustain his massive output. While other thriller writers, such as Clive Cussler and Tom Clancy, have also worked with collaborators, Patterson in his typical style has done so with unapologetic fervor. Writers who have co-authored with Patterson include Gabrielle Charbonnet, Hal Friedman, Leopoldo Gout, Andrew Gross, Peter de Jonge, Michael Ledwidge, Peter Kim, NaRae Lee, Maxine Paetro, Howard Roughan, and Ned Rust. His collaborators typically turn in pages to him every two weeks, at which time he reviews, rewrites, and, if necessary, coaches his writers to amp up the suspense, twist the twists tighter, make the characters more compelling, and generally get the story back on track. Of his partnering with collaborators on series, such as the Women's Murder Club, at which some literary purists have looked askance, he says:

Working with these collaborators, Patterson has been able to publish bestselling novels at a dizzying rate for many years now. He has become a fabulously wealthy man as a result.

Topping the 2012 Forbes list of wealthiest authors, with an annual income of $94 million (beating the next wealthiest writer on the list, Stephen King, by over $50 million), Patterson has sold more books than Stephen King (no slouch himself in number of books published), John Grisham, and Dan Brown combined. An average year of income for Patterson is somewhere in the neighborhood of $80 million (Blum). Patterson also holds the Guinness record for author with the largest number of New York Times #1 bestsellers on the list simultaneously (five every year since 2005) as well as the most New York Times hardcover bestsellers (sixty-three so far). He is, by most counts, the world's top-selling author. It is estimated that he has earned well over one billion in gross income (Wroe). According to his official website, one in four novels in the suspense/thriller genre in 2011 was written by Patterson. Since 2006, according to Jonathan Mahler, one out of every seventeen novels purchased in the United States was written by Patterson. He has sold approximately three hundred million copies of his books.

Additionally, as more consumers buy e-books, Patterson has become an outspoken advocate of the enduring value of libraries and bookstores in the digital reader era. In an interview with CBS This Morning, Patterson pledged to donate one million dollars to American independent bookstores (on the condition the bookstores are viable and contain a children's section) and explained his donation in this way:

Reacting to a recent statement from youth pop culture icon, Justin Bieber, that Bieber is just not that into reading and writing, Patterson explains why bookstores, and reading itself, are of such value, especially to younger people:

To fight against cultural “Bieberism,” Patterson has established a diversity of scholarships, book donation programs, book awards (such as the Page-Turner Awards, which he funds himself), web sites, and many other initiatives that promote reading to young people.

At the center of this spectacular publishing phenomenon is a hard-working man, who writes seven days a week in the early mornings and late afternoons. Of course, an admirable work ethic and top book sales do not insulate him against his many critics, one of whom refers to him as “Mr. Sleaze Fiction himself” (Zaleski 48). In a more temperate voice, David Lazarus writes of Roses Are Red that Patterson's short chapters, while compelling, “do not allow for much depth, though, which prevents Roses Are Red from getting too far into the psychological makeup of the story's characters” (RV-6). Patterson readily acknowledges, as if to disarm his many critics with self-effacing candor, that he is not the best prose writer. He elaborates: “I'm not a writer's writer. I'm not a craftsman. I could be, and that would be a one-book-a-year operation” (Blum). So what, then is his strength, from his perspective? According to Patterson: “In my case I've always been a good storyteller. I'm very good at plot and characterization but there are better stylists” (Edge). Storytelling, to Patterson, is the “one thing that matters. There are a lot of ways to write good books. You can have The Corrections, which is very complicated sociology, or James Joyce, where the allusions and the writing are stunning. But my work is just pure storytelling” (Blum). He admits that “thousands of people hate my stuff, [but] millions of people like it” (Wroe).

In fact, Patterson takes pride in writing prose that is decidedly non-literary, where the language exists simply as a means to plot rather than an end in itself. Joan G. Kotker argues that “even [Patterson's] earliest work shows more emphasis on plot than character, always the sign of an author who is interested above all in the tale rather than in the telling” (5). Key to Patterson's effect on the reader is the emotional experience his tales provide. Through creating strong, decent characters, such as Alex Cross, and then pitting them against evil foes, Patterson guarantees reader engagement with character and plot.

Patterson's lean style is further accessible to readers who otherwise would not read much fiction, popular or otherwise. In this sense, his style has been compared to that of Jeffrey Deaver, another thriller writer best known for creating the character of Lincoln Rhyme, a quadriplegic detective introduced in The Bone Collector (1997). Jeff Zaleski describes Patterson's style in this way: “Patterson's novels are sleek entertainment machines, the Porsches of commercial fiction, expertly engineered and lightning fast” (54). His sentences and paragraphs are short, his plots straightforward and linear. Description and exposition are limited, practically non-existent. His short, two-to-four page chapters are entirely dedicated to the principle of getting the reader to turn the pages as quickly as possible, all the better to advance the slickly streamlined plot. He uses detailed outlines to keep track of all the plot twists and turns, the better to save himself time-wasting detours during the writing process. One of his many co-authors, Andrew Gross, describes what he learned about the art of best-selling storytelling from Patterson:

Another co-author, Mark Sullivan, adds the following about Patterson's formula for reader engagement: “Exposition was severely limited. Each chapter … had to deepen a character, advance the plot, or turn the tale on its head. You began every scene with the end in mind; and the end had better blow the reader's mind or it would be revised and tossed” (64). As Gross and Sullivan make clear, Patterson has relentlessly honed his style into the service of commercialism, a move guaranteed to raise the hackles of many critics—but it has also guaranteed a huge audience, one that has elevated Patterson to the financial pinnacle of the fiction publishing world.

Probably the most important key to Patterson's success with readers of thrillers is his focus on a swiftly moving plot and emotionally engaging characters. Of his approach to writing, he says, “I didn't study it. A lot of it is emotional with me. You have to care. So many thrillers don't work because you don't care about the characters or the situation. … when someone condescends to the genre you can smell it straight away” (Wroe). This earnest desire to write stories that connect emotionally to readers is also something that he insists upon with his collaborators. The end result is a body of fiction that connects with millions, much to the delight of Patterson's publisher, but offends or otherwise disconcerts critics who value what they would call “high art” over Patterson's brand of commercialism. As Lev Grossman puts it, “[Patterson] will never get respect from the literati. Most reviewers ignore him. In a culture that values high style over storytelling, pretty prose over popularity and pulse-pounding plots, he's at the extreme wrong end of the spectrum, and he knows it.” Typical is the response of James Yates, who calls Patterson's output “literary junk food” and calls Patterson “a corporation all to himself … He's going to keep churning out his works … People are going to keep buying them. But at the same time, actual writers are going to be doing the same thing. … The other writers will never match his sales numbers, but the fact that their focus is primarily on creativity says it all.” Yates' stance obviously privileges the time-honored portrait of the solitary writer toiling away on works of genius to be savored by an elitist audience over Patterson's “corporate” model, which Yates derides as assembly-line writing-by-committee, mass-producing fluff product for mindless consumption. In general, Patterson remains above such criticism, content to receive the rewards of his industry from his readers instead of waiting for critical plaudits and literary awards.

Unlike his next-richest rival Stephen King, who in spite of commercial success has been creeping over the years into some semblance of literary respectability (notwithstanding critic Harold Bloom's serial vociferous attacks on the literary deficits of King's work), Patterson seems not only cognizant of, but content with the reality that he will not be winning anytime soon the National Book Foundation's Medal of Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, as King did in 2003, or the O. Henry Award, as King did in 1996. Even King, who has suffered his own share of critical brickbats over the years before making his halting ascent to grudging respectability in some circles of the literary establishment, has criticized Patterson for formulaic writing. After accepting a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Canadian Booksellers' Association in 2007, King stated bluntly: “I don't like [Patterson], every book is the same” (“Stephen King Is No Fan”). Then in 2009, he slammed Patterson again, as an aside in a lengthier denunciation of Twilight author Stephanie Meyer's authorial skill, “as a terrible writer, but he's very successful” (Flood). Patterson's equanimity toward negative criticism of his work is evident in his response to King's verbal ripostes: “Recently Stephen King stated he doesn't have any respect for me. Doesn't make too much sense—I'm a good dad, a nice husband—my only crime is that I've sold millions of books. I'm … in terms of the books anyway, a Stephen King fan” (“James Patterson Responds”). In an interview with Lauren Schuker Blum, he says of King: “I read his stuff. I like breaking his balls by saying positive things about him… he's taken shots at me for years. It's fine, but my approach is to do the opposite with him—to heap praise… I like a lot of his earlier stuff better.”

What makes this polite little feud between the United States' two most successful fiction writers more remarkable is how often the arbiters of critical acceptance, such as the aforementioned Harold Bloom, have accused King of the same lack of originality and, by implication, creativity or skill that King attributes to Patterson. King, in other contexts, such as his acceptance speech for the Medal of Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, has made impassioned pleas for the reconsideration, if not the erasure, of the distinction between popular and literary fiction. Just because it is popular, King argues, does not mean that it's not also good. While King is certainly entitled to his critical appraisal of Patterson's work, it is striking to see King deploy the same kind of disparaging language against Patterson's work that has, over many years, been directed toward that of King. Patterson indirectly references, with only a tinge of passive aggressiveness, King's rise from the literary basement to a penthouse suite when speaking of King's recent bestseller 11/22/63: “I think his latest book … is pretty good. It's done well and it's also closer to what he was writing fifteen years ago. But if he had written it fifteen years ago, the critics would have torn it up, said ‘schlockmeister writes more schlock.’ Instead, they ate it up” (Blum).

It should be noted that, for a formulaic “hack,” Patterson engages in more daring stylistic experiments than he is given credit for. It could be argued that his minimalist style in itself, at least at first—before it paid such dividends—was taking a chance in a publishing market that awards its literary stars, such as a Thomas Pynchon, with prestige, if not fabulous wealth. His short chapters are modeled, he says, after those of Evan S. Connell and Jerzy Kosinski, two writers who have certainly received more credit as stylists than Patterson has.

He credits Tristram Shandy with inspiring him to break “the rules whenever I damn well felt like it. Mix first person and third person? Sure, if it helps the story. Sentence fragments? Hell, yes” (“By the Book”). Patterson routinely switches between first- and third-person narrative voices within the same novel, or introduces a different first-person narrator within the same novel, such as in Cat and Mouse. It also would have been far easier and less risky for the Patterson “brand” had he settled comfortably into writing cop thrillers, but his success writing in other genres (such as historical fiction, science fiction, and romance) proves his versatility.

He has also won his fair share of writing awards over the years. His first novel won the Edgar Award, given annually by the Mystery Writers of America to first-time writers, in 1977. Since then, he has won the Reader's Digest Readers' Choice Award for fiction in 2003, based on a nationwide poll; the Children's Choice Book Awards' Author of the Year for Max (A Maximum Ride Novel) in 2010, an award chosen exclusively by children. One begins to notice a theme with Patterson's writing awards—that they are selected by popular fiction readers, young and old alike, not by the critics.

To date, there have been a handful of scholarly examinations of Patterson's work and only one full-length critical study, which in itself attests to the degree to which this prolific and staggeringly popular writer has been ignored or disregarded by the literary establishment. One scholarly essay by Rhonda Harris Taylor uses the Women's Murder Club novel, Second Chance (2002), as a case study to illustrate Taylor's thesis that, in the post-9/11 twenty-first century, American mysteries and crime thrillers pit the detective against an antagonist “who seeks to disrupt … society's natural order through the misuse of vital information.” In Second Chance, the serial killer targets law enforcement personnel or their families by using “information gathered via a classic strategy—personal networking—to select, stalk, and kill his victims” (Taylor). Thus, the villain is “extraordinarily clever at acquiring and manipulating information for … nefarious purposes,” which makes Second Chance, among the other thrillers examined by Taylor, a parable for the post-9/11 era in which society “cannot tell from appearances who holds the dangerous information and has the evil intentions” (Taylor). Another academic essay by Christiana Gregoriou explores the criminal mind as portrayed by in the fourth Alex Cross novel, Cat and Mouse (1997) and how Patterson's stylistic choices present an impression of the serial killer, Gary Soneji, as a born criminal, rather than his having become one. Specifically, Patterson's third-person narration technique allows the reader sympathetic access into Soneji's thoughts, but simultaneously creates a certain distance through which the narrator (and the reader) avoid overt sympathy with the criminal perspective. In the passages given through Soneji's point of view, as Gregoriou notes, no “justifications for his actions are provided and no excuses given,” which portrays the killer as not only remorseless, but taking childish joy in his criminal actions. Patterson's technique, then, allows him to create malevolent characters, such as Soneji, who present depraved contrasts to the human decency of Alex Cross.

Joan G. Kotker's book James Patterson: A Critical Companion unequivocally places Patterson's work within the realm of popular fiction, as distinguished from mainstream (or literary) fiction. According to Kotker, popular fiction is “intended for a mass audience … to meet the already-established expectations of a particular group… popular fiction is a comforting fiction in that it seldom challenges the reader's preconceptions of how the world works: … Readers leave these stories entertained and unchallenged in their basic conceptions.” Mainstream fiction, however, “has no clearly defined audience with clearly defined expectations … [The audience] must be active readers, willing to participate in the story with the author by taking an active role in working out its meaning … mainstream fiction is without doubt the more difficult of these two fictions because of the demands it places on the reader” (8).

Kotker further identifies Patterson as, in spite of his forays into different genres, a mystery writer, in that this is the genre Patterson began with in The Thomas Berryman Number and returns to repeatedly. Kotker defines the mystery genre's basic conventions: “a serious crime, usually a murder, is committed; a detective, who may be either an amateur or a member of the police is brought in to investigate the crime; the focus of the story then shifts to the gathering of clues … the solution to the crime is announced; finally, the fate of the criminal is resolved in some manner” (9). Patterson's first published novel, Kotker says, follows this basic mystery formula. For Kotker, later novels, such as the Alex Cross stories, follow a variant on the mystery genre, known as the police procedural, what most would deem a subgenre of the detective story. Simply put, the police procedural focuses, presumably in a realistic or at least plausible manner, on the process of a professional police investigator (or police force) as he or she attempts to solve a crime or crimes. The earliest full-length study of the subgenre, George Dove's aptly titled The Police Procedural (1982), outlines the formulaic conventions that structure most procedurals, such as “The Tyranny of Time,” meaning that these stories are built upon the “supposition that time is always working against the police detective” (113). Certainly The Tyranny of Time and other such procedural conventions can be identified in the DNA of Patterson's novels. Given that Patterson's work does not center on traditional police officers or detectives, however, Kotker's classification must be tweaked somewhat. Peter Messent prefers the label “police novel” to “police procedural,” the better to “describe the variety of fictions focusing on crime and police work: novels of detection, thrillers, psychological and/or sociological novels, narratives reliant on Gothic effects, and so on” (177).

Identifying Thomas Harris' serial-killer novel The Silence of the Lambs (1988) as one such work that includes elements of the procedural, but also disrupts them to foil reader expectations, Messent provides an indirect connection to Patterson's thrillers, specifically Along Came a Spider, which Patterson and his publisher advertised none-too-subtly as the next Silence of the Lambs that readers were waiting for. Patterson's second Alex Cross novel, Kiss the Girls, with its storyline of women imprisoned by a serial killer, is even more clearly influenced by (or derivative of) the serial killer captivity narrative found in The Silence of the Lambs.

In conclusion, while the literary establishment has not embraced Patterson, and the scholarly analysis has just started, it is clear the reading public has. They reward him every year by buying his books more than those of any other author. In turn, Patterson reaches millions more readers every year than any other popular fiction writer, let alone the literary critics who refuse to review him in venues such as the New York Times Book Review. While Patterson's ultimate legacy is still uncertain, and the artistic or creative merit of his work is certainly debated (when it even rises to critical attention, that is), he has undoubtedly been awarded the status of most popular author by the general reading public.

Works Cited