HEMISPHERESMAGAZINE.COM
•
JANUARY 2013
65
HEMISPHERES:
You represent a good
chunk of the entire book industry.
Shouldn’t you have “people” to answer
the phone for you?
PATTERSON:
I should. I was making
an appearance at a New York college,
and the kid who arranged it asked
me, “Where is your entourage?” I
don’t have one. I like to travel light.
I parked in the lot and just went in.
HEMISPHERES:
With
Alex Cross
coming out, an entourage would seem
to be required.
PATTERSON:
Nah, I’m just here
and doing whatever I can to help
the movie.
HEMISPHERES:
It’s been more than
10
years since the last Cross movie,
Along Came a Spider
.
Given how
cinematic your books are—driven
by action, making detours for back-
story only when necessary—you’d
expect there to be more filmed
versions of them.
PATTERSON:
The Hollywood thing
drives me insane. There are so
many people involved in the pro-
cess who shouldn’t be. It’s not that
they aren’t smart; it’s just that they
aren’t
street-
smart. When I was in
advertising, I simply assumed there
were more people out there who
were both creative
and
analytical,
and that those people would be
able to stand back and go, “Well,
that one really isn’t that good; that
one is.” You’d think that would be
necessary for decision-makers in
the movies.
HEMISPHERES:
But since your stories
dominate popular culture in print,
it seems a given that the big screen
would gobble them up, too.
PATTERSON:
I think I’ve been
“
caricature assassinated.” Movies
are a funny business in that they
do these things that are much more
commercial than most books, and
yet somehow they think of the
results as high art. They think of
me as an “airplane author.”
HEMISPHERES:
That hurts a bit,
seeing as I’m interviewing you for an
in-flight magazine.
PATTERSON:
I guess I’m going to have
to live with that. My son, Jack, who’s
14
now, is an absolute maniac about
United Airlines—he insists that I fly
them. He was very excited that I was
going to be in their magazine.
HEMISPHERES:
Tell him thanks for that.
So how exactly did you end up being the
kind of guy who sells more books than
Stephen King, John Grisham and Dan
Brown combined?
PATTERSON:
I grew up in Newburgh,
N.Y., a small town. Then my family
moved to Lexington, Mass., and I got
a job at McLean Hospital, just outside
Cambridge. At that point I had done
well in school, but I wasn’t a big
reader. I worked a lot of night shi s,
so I started reading my brains out.
It was all serious stuff. A er reading
Ulysses
and
One Hundred Years of
Solitude
,
I said, “I can’t do that—I’m
not good enough, I’m just not smart
enough.” And then I started reading
commercial novels like
The Exorcist
and
The Day of the Jackal
.
I liked
them. I thought I might be able to
do something like that.
HEMISPHERES:
You do a good amount
of young adult fiction, and you’ve been
very successful in getting kids interested
in books at a time when conventional
wisdom suggests they’re only interested
in what’s onscreen.
PATTERSON:
I’m very tight with
my teenager. I love writing for that
audience. I think it’s some of the
best work that I do, and I think it’s
important. We can’t solve healthcare
problems, we can’t solve the eco-
nomic situation, we can’t solve global
warming, but we can get our kids
reading. People need to understand
that it’s not the school’s job to find
books for our kids—it’s
our
job. They
don’t need another phone; they need
books. That’s what I’m trying to do.
We’re running a program in Palm
Beach, Fla. [where Pa erson lives],
where we provide books and teachers
for a er-school reading.
HEMISPHERES:
So kids read you, adults
read you, and if you looked at a Venn
diagram of, say, the Bushes and the
Clintons, a love of your books is about
the only place they’d overlap. What
is it that gives your work such universal
appeal?
CONTINUED ON PAGE 126
»
KEVIN WINTER/GETTY IMAGES (MOVIE PREMIERE)
JAMES PATTERSON
BY THE NUMBERS
Number of books wri en
(
alone or with a co-author)
109
Number of books sold worldwide
≈275MILLION
Annual earnings, as
Forbes
’
No. 1 top-selling author in 2012
$94MILLION
Consecutive
New York Time
s No. 1
bestselling novels
19
Number of publishers
that rejected his first book
31
Estimated amount of three-year
contract with current publisher
$150MILLION
Number of books required
in those three years
17
Number of novels Charles Dickens
wrote in his lifetime
20
