“I was a snob,” the best-selling author James
Patterson told a magazine writer in 2010. As a young man, working night shifts
as an aide at McLean Hospital in Belmont, he read novels by Jerzy Kosinski and
Jean Genet.
Clearly, he grew out of it. Each year the 66-year-old
Patterson adds to his Guinness World Record total of hardcover novel
bestsellers, which now numbers somewhere in the 70s. He’ll almost surely do it
again with his latest, “Private L.A.,” a thriller involving a Hollywood couple
gone missing.
Patterson won an Edgar Award for Best First Novel By
an American for his noirish 1976 debut, “The Thomas Berryman Number,” an
investigation into the murder of a fictional Nashville mayor with stops in
Revere and Provincetown. The book was compared favorably to the late George V.
Higgins’s “The Friends of Eddie Coyle” as an example of the new literary crime
fiction.
Since then, however, Patterson has not won many
awards. By his own admission, his next few books were not especially
well-written; he actively discourages fans from reading one of them, “Season of
the Machete.” It wasn’t until the 1990s that he hit his stride, publishing a
book a year, then a couple each year, and now, with the help of a stable of
co-writers, an absurd annual output in the double digits.
It’s a business model
overseen by the author-CEO, a former advertising executive (we’re told he came
up with the slogan “I’m a Toys ‘R’ Us kid!”), that has irked more than a few of
his fellow novelists. Stephen King once infamously dissed Patterson as a
“terrible” writer. [Unlike Stephen King?] In a New York Times profile in 2010,
Patterson was quoted joking to his audience at a publishing party that he was
sorry King couldn’t be there: “It must be bingo night in Bangor.” (Note the
alliteration!)
But Patterson, who now lives in Florida, makes no
claim to literary pretension, just good storytelling. “The sentences are
superior to a lot of the stuff I write now,” he told the Times about his first
novel, “but the story isn’t as good.”
That approach has earned him a readership as devoted
to his “brand” as someone is to a favorite ice cream flavor. You don’t sell
nearly 300 million books – heck, you don’t sell 10,000 – without doing
something right by your readers. Patterson is up to 21 titles in his most
popular series, the Alex Cross novels, which follow the work of the homicide
detective who “looks like Muhammad Ali in his prime.” Soon he’ll publish the
13th title in his Women’s Murder Club series. And he has made himself the
top-selling name in young adult and “middle grade” fiction, too.
Literacy advocates will tell you that it doesn’t
matter what a kid reads, as long as he does read. Patterson – who stumps for
books of all kinds in several initiatives, including the website called
ReadKiddoRead.com – brings that notion into adulthood. If his pulpy stories are
compelling enough to lure casual readers who might not otherwise be bothered,
and to give some serious readers a bit of downtime (as a film connoisseur might
appreciate an occasional sitcom), well, you’d have to be the real snob to deny
them.
James Sullivan can be reached at
jamesgsullivan@gmail.com. Follow him on Twitter @sullivanjames.
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