‘Bill and I got pretty friendly’: James Patterson on writing with Clinton and clashing

Indeed, Patterson tells of an encounter a dozen years ago in which Trump, ebullient at a newspaper article he’d just read, said to him: “Did you see the polls?”

“He was ranked first among who people would like to see as a Republican candidate,” Patterson says. “And he wasn’t running then, nobody knew anything that he stood for, zero. And he looks at me and he goes, ‘Crazy world, huh?’”

Patterson, who claims to be a left-leaning political independent, was no fan of the Trump administration, and admits the pair haven’t spoken since. “There’s a lot of bad stuff that went on there. I don’t get it,” he says. “I’ll leave it at that.”

It’s clearly not a topic Patterson likes to dwell on. But our discussion about Clinton, with whom he co-wrote (at least to some degree) the 2018 bestseller The President is Missing, puts him on a more comfortable footing. Since their first collaboration, which Patterson called “a highlight of my career”, Clinton calls at least a couple of times a month, he says. In June, they will release their second jointly-written thriller, The President’s Daughter, one of many co-authored projects Patterson has become known for.

I meet Patterson at his home, a Mediterranean-style villa in Palm Beach. He greets me dressed in an open-necked shirt and jeans, and guides me through the property to a modest patio set out back. There is no Lamborghini or Ferrari in the driveway – the kind that seems to continually cruise Ocean Boulevard outside – just a simple Tesla in the garage that Patterson says he’s happy to be able to drive again freely now that Trump is no longer president and that there aren’t Secret Service agents closing the road every other weekend.

“Bill and I got pretty friendly, and it’s nice,” Patterson, 74, says, as we chat on the back porch surrounded by lush coconut palms and mango trees. “He gave me Monopoly for socalists for Christmas, which is fun. For my birthday the year before he gave me a humidor, and he knows I don’t smoke. So I said, ‘Bill, you’re the expert on cigars – do I put chocolate or bubble-gum cigars in the humidor?’ And he said, ‘Oh, definitely the bubble gum. At our age, Jim, we need to exercise those teeth.’

“It’s like that. It’s fun. I see the world through the lens of Newburgh, New York, this little town upstate [where Patterson was born], and it’s cool … this Newburgh kid is talking to the former president!”

The banter masks the business side of their relationship, in which Clinton lends the authenticity of detail and experience, while Patterson mostly envisages the story and plays the role of wordsmith. “Imagine in real life if a president’s daughter was kidnapped. It’d be on every news channel forever,” Patterson says.

“And if you have President Clinton to put the authenticity to it, in terms of what the Secret Service would really do, and then the page-turning part of it … they’re good stories, the authenticity is there, and the plots are somewhat over the top, but in this day and age anything could happen. You know, the Capitol building is going to be stormed. If you wrote that you’d be like, ‘Come on, give me a break! That couldn’t happen!’ But now?

As with Clinton, Patterson says he picks his co-authors partly because of the knowledge and detail they can bring to a story.

The latest, Red Book, the sequel to 2017’s Chicago detective novel Black Book, is his fifth collaboration with David Ellis. At least 15 more books, spanning numerous genres with a stable of different authors, are scheduled for release between now and September from an operation the New York Times once dubbed Patterson Inc.

“I have so many ideas. I have files with a ‘Clever Ideas’ title on it that’s about this thick that I’ll never get through,” he says, pushing his finger and thumb widely apart.

“Some I do myself still. But I do have a few people who I really like working with: Maxine Paetro, who I’ve done the the Women’s Murder Club with. We’ve been doing it a long time and I’ve known Maxine forever.

“A couple of people are newer, [such as] Brendan DuBois. The way I found a couple of them was I had this idea to do these Bookshots – 70 or so, it was insane – so all of a sudden I had to find a whole bunch.” Bookshots was Patterson’s series of short novels (150 pages or less), sold for $5 and consumed on devices.

“It’s like the soccer coach who goes, ‘That guy, not that guy’. I don’t know why, you just know. I will invariably write a 40- to 70-page outline. On every book, all my outlines are two, three, four drafts. I remember taking somebody up to the office when I was working on the Bookshots, and I kept pulling out these drawers full of drafts, the guy who was interviewing me said, ‘This is crazy, this is crazy, James, you are crazy.’”

Patterson says he might have up to 30 projects on the go at any one time. “Some Hollywood, some children’s books, a couple of non-fiction. But I don’t find it overwhelming.”

Critics have seized on Patterson’s overdrive production line and fast if not furious literary style. In 2009, Stephen King famously called Patterson “a terrible writer”. Seven years later, Patterson called off a fictional book called The Murder of Stephen King, which some figured was an attempt at revenge.

“The world would be awful if everybody had the same point of view,” Patterson says. “I like his books, most of them. It pisses me off sometimes, but yeah, it’s fine. I think he’s unnecessarily harsh at times and no, I’m not a terrible writer, but my basic approach to life is: it’s OK, it’s all right.

“Somebody said you’re lucky if you find something you like to do, and it’s a miracle if somebody will pay you to do it, and that’s my gig. I love doing it. I’m very quick, and good as a storyteller, I’m not that interested in being a craftsman.”

Patterson has built an estimated $80m (£58m) fortune, according to Forbes, from his writing, but apart from his “absurd” 21,000 sq ft mansion, set on two acres of prime waterfront land and with expansive views across the Atlantic, there is little to suggest extravagance.

“Obviously this is a ridiculously big house, but we wanted to be on the ocean, and once you get on the ocean they tend to be ridiculously big houses. In this town anyway,” he says of the residence he shares with his wife Susan and where their 23-year-old son Jack, who now works in New York finance, grew up.

What gives him more pleasure is directing chunks of his wealth to philanthropic literary causes. Last year he donated $500,000 to indie bookstores as the coronavirus pandemic began to bite.

It is children’s literacy in the US, however, that really concerns him, and which provides the passion for Patterson’s diverse range of comic books, novels and short stories known as Jimmy Books, and the inspiration behind the Read Kiddo Read website.

“The mission for Jimmy Books is when a kid finishes a book, they’ll say, ‘Please give me another’ – as opposed to millions of kids in this country who say they have never read a single book in their lives. You have in this country something like only 46% of kids reading at grade level. It’s a disaster.”

“There are a lot of things in life: global warming … I could do something and preach to the converted if I wrote a book about it. [But] it would only be read by people who are already there. But with the reading, I could actually change something. If we can get 70% of the kids in this country reading at grade level, it would be stunning. And we can. We know how to do it. And it has to do with teaching teachers to be better at teaching reading.”

To that end, Patterson has partnered with the University of Florida’s college of education for five years, and the James Patterson literary challenge funds scholarships for student teachers among other programs. His $2.5m gift to help fund classroom libraries through Scholastic Book Clubs last year brought his lifetime donation to that cause above $11m.

“If you radically…