But he may not be cut out to be a nursery teacher.
“A hard thing when you’re young is you tend to sort
of think everything is about you, which is very normal at this stage, but it
isn’t,” he is saying. “And the thing about books is you get to meet so many
different kinds of people and get compassion for their lives.”
His bemused audience of four and five-year-olds are
trying to pay attention but it’s a losing battle. In fairness Patterson was
told to expect an older crowd. He’s written a kids’ book called I Funny, about
a disabled boy who wants to be a comedian and he was planning to read out some
gags but he’s now thinking better of it. “You’re such a young group, I don’t
think I’ll do that. Does anyone here know a joke?” he appeals vainly.
At the last count the 65-year-old American has sold
275 million copies of his books. He has published 98 adult and children’s
novels and has been the most borrowed author from British libraries for the
past six years. This year alone – remember it’s still only February – he has
had three number one best-sellers. According to the Forbes Magazine richest
authors list he earned £62million last year, more than double his nearest rival
Stephen King and five times as much as JK Rowling.
So he really doesn’t need to die on his feet in front
of 16 infants at a public library in Greenwich, Southeast London, and it’s a
mark of his commitment to child literacy that he is bothering.
It’s also a chance to meet the Duchess of Cornwall,
whose charity Booktrust has organised this Get Dads Reading event, which
explains why his publisher Dame Gail Rebuck, u?ber-powerful boss of Random
House, is here too.
“You and I can’t solve global warming or the
healthcare crisis but we can make it our job and responsibility to get our kids
reading,” he tells me once the Clarence House caravan has departed and
everything has calmed down.
“We all know we’re supposed
to teach our kids how to ride a bike and kick a football but the most important
thing we have to do is make sure they can read competently because it helps
them become better, smarter people and gives them a chance in a harder and
harder world.” [Co-op of the corporation]
His personal motto is that life is complicated enough
so if you can make things simple you should. That’s certainly the watchword of
his fiction. In one of his most recent novels, Merry Christmas Alex Cross, his
god-fearing, family-loving African-American detective is called out to deal
with two successive but unrelated cases on Christmas Day: one a domestic
hostage stand-off, the other a terrorist launching an attack at Washington DC’s
main rail station.
These two tales are told in linear order in chapters
of two or three pages that don’t correspond to self-contained chunks of story
and seem designed to make you feel you’re progressing through the story faster
(Patterson’s own slogan, on the back of every book, is “the pages turn
themselves”).
There are no subplots and the main story is so uncluttered
you could probably turn it into a screenplay without omitting anything. The
Arab terrorists are crude racial stereotypes and there is little suspense over
the outcome because you know there’s no way the catastrophe they are planning
will actually happen. But it does impel you to carry on reading, partly by
making everything so easy.
The reason his literary output is so massive, at a
rate of about one book a month, is that in most of his novels he doesn’t do the
line-byline writing himself. He produces a treatment of 60 to 80 pages,
establishing the plot and characters in detail, then hires a writer to turn it
into a full-length book. He sees their work every couple of weeks, sending it
back with notes to speed it up, make it more real etc, and the co-writer ends
up with a decent billing (although not an equal share of the cash). When I ask
if he’s a kind editor he says no writer has ever quit.
He is unapologetic about this collaborative process,
saying it’s completely normal in most other art forms. “I’ll give you the short
answer,” he says.
“Gilbert and Sullivan. Woodward and Bernstein.
Stephen King and Peter Straub. Virtually any TV show there is. I’ll sometimes
get on a TV show to be asked a question and they’ll be reading off a
teleprompter from something they didn’t write. In my case I’ve always been a
good storyteller. I’m very good at plot and characterisation but there are
better stylists.”
He says some of his books are better for the
collaborator’s input but he is keen to dispel any impression he is putting his
feet up while his writing drones do all the hard work. He gets up at the crack
of dawn every day, and his office at his home in Palm Beach, Florida, is
stacked with manuscripts of novels in progress.
He says his life revolves around his wife Susan (he
married late after losing a fiancée to cancer as a young man), his 15-year-old
son Jack, who is at boarding school, and his work.
James Patterson, Alex Cross At the last count the
65-year-old American has sold 275 million copies of his books
Millions of us take his novels on holiday but James
Patterson admits he has more than one helping hand to make him the world’s most
popular read
“We see a couple of movies a week and I will go out
and walk the golf course, five mornings a week from like 7.30 to 9, just a big
walk,” he says. Otherwise it’s writing, writing and more writing.
“I am a freak. I love to do
it. I do it seven days a week. I did it on the plane over here, I did it this
morning and I’ll write when I get back to the hotel.”
He’s an active philanthropist, paying for more than 200
scholarships in 20 universities designed to train teachers and other educators
whom he hopes will end up working in deprived communities. He doesn’t
have a charitable foundation – he just does it all himself – and says the
universities can’t believe how fuss-free he makes it.
After a top career as chair of advertising firm J Walter Thompson and
another one in thriller writing, which he began only in his 40s, does he have
time to develop a third one before he takes a rest?
“The third career is probably the kids’ books,” he says.
“My US publisher says they are my best books by far. It’s right in my
wheelhouse because it’s all imagination and there’s lots of comedy, which I
don’t do that much in the adult books.”
Is he hopeful some of the five-year-olds from his
audience in Greenwich will become Patterson fans eventually? “I don’t care,” he
says. “I don’t need any money. I just want kids to find books they’ll enjoy
because keeping them healthy and making them read are the two most important
things we can do for them.”
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