There are moments in interviews when the interviewer wonders if he or she may have overstepped the mark. They happen occasionally because one-on-one interviews are strange, frequently artificial affairs: two strangers in a room, one of whom has the task of finding out as much as possible about the other in two hours, or an hour, sometimes even less. Interview subjects don't always want to give too much away, especially when they are aware that their comments will then be read by hundreds of thousands of people, all of whom are ready to pass some form of judgment upon them. Interviewers, meanwhile, want something more than the usual pitch, some little nugget of truth or revelation to bring the subject to life. And so, on occasion, a point is reached when the subject may or may not choose to answer a given question, and an awkward silence descends.
The writer James Patterson looks away from me for a moment, and there is one of those silences.
"Charles," he says at last. "My father's name was Charles."
Look, this may not be important. It may be that I've misinterpreted aspects of previous interviews with Patterson, and even aspects of this one.
I'm not a therapist, so I don't know. But in researching Patterson, it seemed to me at times that I was viewing a life depicted through time-lapse photography. James Patterson is born in 1947 in Newburgh, New York, a tough town on the Hudson known as the "Little Apple". Flash forward to the 1980s, and Patterson becomes the youngest creative director in the history of the huge J. Walter Thompson advertising agency. He tops that by becoming the youngest ever CEO. He writes novels. Flash forward again and, at 53, he is one of the three or four best-selling thriller writers in the world, creator of the black homicide detective Alex Cross, and married with a son who is not yet three years old. Finally, we join him in a hotel room in Dublin, slightly jet-lagged but still courteous, gentlemanly and complimentary, where the young man sitting before him, whom he has never met or spoken to before, has just asked him about his childhood and his father. He could, therefore, probably be forgiven for experiencing a brief moment of tension.
The reason I raised the subject at all was that, when asked once what was the best thing about his childhood, Patterson had replied: "Coming out of it". I'm sorry, but I just found that interesting, which is why the question about his youth and his father arose.
"In a way, I grew up in a house full of women," he explains, "a grandmother, mother, three sisters, two cats (pause) and a very strong father. He started out in social work then wound up in insurance. He was tough, `my way or the highway', the man, the boss. We were OK, but we never got close. I was very close to my sisters and my grandmother. My grandmother - her name was Isabelle - she was the key. She was the one who always said you can do anything you want to do."
Images of strong women recur in the novels: Nana Mama in the Cross books, matriarch of the family and an obvious nod to Patterson's own grandmother; the private detective Anne Fitzgerald in Cradle and All; the kidnap victim Kate in Kiss the Girls; the four women who make up the Women's Murder Club in the forthcoming First to Die. "I like women talking," says Patterson. "I prefer women to men generally." We return to his father, he gives me his name, and, well, by unspoken mutual consent the subject is closed.
After graduating in English from Manhattan College and Vanderbilt, and following a brief stint working in a mental hospital in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Patterson joined the Thompson agency in 1971 as a general copywriter. "I went over and spoke to this woman in the agency, who was a friend of a friend. She was funny, she was wearing sneakers and jeans, she had a Vietcong flag on the wall, she was making a lot of money and I thought, well, OK."
Eventually Patterson would assume responsibility for some of the agency's largest corporate clients, including Kodak, Burger King and Toys-R-Us, but he was far from being the company man that this might suggest. "It was OK, but I never got completely emotionally involved in it. I wanted to give people their money's worth. I wanted to do ads that other human beings would look at and say, `I got it and it was semi-pleasurable to watch'."
Patterson was also writing in his spare time, eventually publishing his first novel, The Thomas Berryman Number, in 1976. It had previously been rejected by almost 30 publishing houses, and Patterson followed his debut with both fiction and non-fiction books while continuing to hold down his job at the agency. But his success in business and his growing reputation as a novelist were direct consequences of tragedy in his personal life.
"I think what happened was that I had been very much in love when I was younger. I had a terrific relationship with a woman, Jane, for about seven years. She developed a brain tumour and died (in 1983). And that was really when I shot to the top in advertising, because after she died I just didn't want to have a minute to myself. I never went on vacation. I couldn't stand to be by myself. I threw myself into advertising and, within a couple of years, I had catapulted up the ladder."
Patterson finally became chairman of the agency in 1990, a position he held until 1996. The nursery rhyme-themed Alex Cross novels, which began with Along Came a Spider in 1993 and continued with Kiss the Girls and Jack and Jill, had by then made him a bestselling writer. He was, as is frequently the case with such tales, still unhappy.
"At the point just before I got out of advertising, I was with another woman and I said this is not the relationship that I really want. The best thing I had ever been in was that other relationship with Jane, where my priorities at the time were coming home to this woman, scribbling the fiction and writing ads, in that order. So I thought, let's try to get another relationship that really does work. So I went out and met a lot of other women for a couple of years." (It's possible that this wasn't as much fun as it sounds, although Patterson's chuckle leads one to suspect that it was even more fun that it sounds.)
Eventually, Patterson met Sue, they married, and they now have a son, Jack, aged two and a half. Patterson's marriage, and his near-simultaneous decision to leave advertising, appear to have resulted in both contentment and an increase in his literary output. He is currently working on about eight books simultaneously, and has just published two novels, Cradle and All and the latest Cross thriller, Roses Are Red. They will be followed early next year by First to Die and a love story, Suzanne's Diary for Nicholas, partly inspired by the diary Sue is compiling for their son.
Cradle and All is an oddity, a millennial tale of the birth of the anti-Christ set partly in Maam Cross, Co Galway, kind of Rose- mary's Baby meets The Quiet Man. A reworking of an earlier Patterson novel, Virgin, it is not the best thing that he has ever done - and how the residents of Maam Cross might feel about their town being referred to as a "medieval hamlet" and its denizens being described as "the last real peasantry in all of Western Europe" is open to question.
Thankfully, Roses Are Red is much better, and sees Cross pursuing a vicious bank robber who calls himself the Mastermind. Patterson's writing style - short chapters, stripped-down prose, frequent use of italics and internal questioning - is distinctive and keeps his readers turning the pages. And that, refreshingly, is precisely what the modest, unpretentious Patterson ("I'm out to give the reader a good time. I'm in the business of making rollercoaster rides.") sets out to do. Cross - intelligent, well-spoken, a good father - is a change both from the stereotypical troubled hero and the usual depiction of black urban males. It's no surprise that Morgan Freeman, who played Cross in the film of Kiss The Girls and could lend gravitas to a wet T-shirt competition, has reprised the role for the forthcoming Along Came A Spider.
According to Patterson, Cross's family life was inspired in part by the family of a black cook named Laura, who came to live with the Pattersons after she split up with her husband. "The warmth I liked in that family I didn't necessarily see in my own," he says. It's also possible to see in Cross, and his relationship with his children, a version of Charles Patterson that might have been, and a version of his son that recent fatherhood has brought into being. "I'm home more, so I get to see this little guy grow up, and that's something that a lot of fathers don't get to see," reflects Patterson. "It rounds things off, somehow. It just feels right."
Roses are Red by James Patterson is published by Headline (£16.99 in UK)