Fifteen minutes before James Patterson picked up the phone, he was on a call with Dolly Parton.
Patterson speaks to her “maybe once a month or so”, the thriller writer told the PA news agency.
Parton co-wrote her first book, Run Rose Run, with Patterson in 2022 – telling the story of AnnieLee Keyes, a talented young country singer with a dark past.
“We’re very similar in terms of [being] really, really hard workers,” Patterson said from Florida.
“She gets up at 4:30 in the morning and she’s working… I remember the first time we got together, I talked about a possible outline and left her some pages, then I went home. Two days later, she had her notes on the outline and had already written seven songs that appear in the book. That’s Dolly.”
Patterson, 76, has sold more than 300 million copies of his own novels – including the Alex Cross, Michael Bennett and Women’s Murder Club series – and Parton isn’t his first high-profile collaboration.
He’s written two novels with Bill Clinton (The President Is Missing and The President’s Daughter), and there are plenty of benefits to working with a former president.
“Fiction writers, we tend to make things up. But if you have the president there and you’re writing about a president, that’s wonderful because he’ll tell you, ‘This is what the Secret Service would do, here’s what they wouldn’t do, here’s what might happen at the White House, here’s how it wouldn’t happen’ – so that’s fun.”
Writing is largely seen as a solitary endeavour, but Patterson enjoys collaborating – and suggested it’s more common than you might think.
“The funny thing is, most television is collaboration – certainly in the United States. A lot of movies, it’s collaboration – more than one person working together. Some fiction and non-fiction works are also collaboration – Stephen King wrote a couple with Peter Straub [The Talisman and Black House]. So it’s done, but people go, ‘That’s so weird’. It really isn’t that weird, it’s pretty common around the world.”
One of Patterson’s best-known series – centred around detective Alex Cross and his family – is written solo, with the 31st instalment, Alex Cross Must Die, due to be published this month.
Morgan Freeman starred in film adaptations of novels from the series, including Kiss The Girls in 1997, and its sequel, Along Came A Spider, in 2001. The series was rebooted in 2012 with film Alex Cross, and now Amazon’s Prime Video is developing a TV series with Aldis Hodge in the titular role, “Who you may not know yet, but you’ll know”, says Patterson.
He’s hoping the new show will “compete with some of the wonderful detective stuff you already have on the BBC. Happy Valley – that’s one of my favourites.”
But how has Alex Cross captured the public’s imagination for three decades?
“People identify with the family – the kids, Bree [his wife and a fellow detective], Nana Mama his grandma, and Alex keeps growing,” Patterson said.
“I think on some level, we all identify with Alex – he’s always juggling his work and his family, which is what most of us – not all of us – but a lot of us do. We’re juggling and we spend our lives juggling – Alex has to do that on a very intense plane.”
With kidnappings, killing sprees and plane crashes, a lot of Patterson’s books “are about our darkest fears – things that go bump in the night and night terrors” – and he admitted getting scared by his own writing.
“When I’m writing, if I don’t feel it, my fear is the reader won’t either. So if it’s supposed to be a frightening scene, if I’m not feeling it, if I’m not surprised then I don’t think the reader will be either,” he said.
“I always try to pretend there’s one person sitting across from me when I’m telling a story and I don’t want them to get up until I’m finished.”
These fears are being translated from the page to a real life Alex Cross experience in London on October 19. Patterson said he won’t make it as he’ll be in the US, and added: “I’m kind of OK I’m not actually going to be at it – although I do a little voiceover – but I don’t have to actually sit in the pitch black like these other brave folks.”
Patterson has enough to be getting on with – he’s always working on “four or five things at the same time”, which he argues is the key to not getting stuck.
“I never have writer’s block. Part of the reason is I can just jump to another project. If I get to a chapter and I’m not getting it, I don’t stress over it. I just go to the next chapter and figure I’ll get it on the next rewrite.
“Stressing over things is not helpful, I think. Sometimes when you let it go and you keep writing, all of a sudden something would pop out of thin air.”
For Patterson, inspiration can come in strange places – such as during a recent visit to the Jersey Shore with his wife, Susan, and one of his co-writers, Mike Lupica, on a “really windy, cold, rainy day”.
“We all went for a walk over to the ocean and got on the beach. I was out there about 10 minutes and I said, ‘Screw this, I’m going back to the hotel’. There was a little road right in front of the hotel and this man was going by on a bicycle in the rain, in the wind. I waved to him and a word came into my mind.
“Just based on that word, I went to the hotel room and wrote five pages for a new novel.”
Alex Cross: The Dead Hours Experience celebrates James Patterson’s new novel, Alex Cross Must Die (Century, £20), available from October 26.
