His 29th Cross novel, Fear No Evil, out this week, features an unsavoury character who closely resembles Jeffrey Epstein, the financier who killed himself in jail in 2019 while awaiting trial on charges of sex trafficking minors. For me, it’s just read the damn thing and come to your own conclusions.” The early reviews all went, ‘What a great thing for a black writer to create this character, it’s so credible and believable’. "In the beginning, LittleBrown didn’t put my picture on the Cross books. William Styron wrote those two books and I thought he did a good job. So do I have the right to write a black character? Sure I do. “I grew up in a small town that was heavily black I had a lot of black kids as my friends. He has no time for the suggestion that, as a white man, he might today fall foul of the Twitterati. “When I started writing, every Hollywood movie had a black guy with a boombox on his shoulder,” he says, by way of explaining his desire to write a different sort of black character in his books. Several film adaptations, two with Morgan Freeman and one with Tyler Perry, followed. Now 74, Patterson wrote his first Alex Cross novel, featuring the eponymous African-American detective struggling to balance a stressful career with family life, in 1993. You read it for the fast moving plots, bite-sized chapters and relatable heroes. You don’t read a James Patterson thriller for the beauty of its similes. Sometimes if someone is a really great writer, readers keep reading because they get hooked on the language. John Grisham does the same thing, but he doesn’t boil things down as much as I do. “They start by asking a question that the reader must have answered. “What do all great stories do?” he asks rhetorically, when I contact him via Zoom in his Florida home. He doesn’t even really write his books, which include the Alex Cross, Michael Bennett and The Women’s Murder Club detective series, instead farming out story lines to a team of collaborators, and changing what he gets back if he doesn’t like it. He’s made $700 million out of a career stretching back four decades. What is it that makes James Patterson one of the world’s most successful authors? He’s produced so many books his Wikipedia page doesn’t bother trying to list them.
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