Interview With James Patterson, Best-selling Author of Gripping Novella ‘The Trial’

His popular Women’s Murder Club mystery series is the product of collaboration

Dina Santorelli

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Published July 19, 2023

Illustration of James Patterson for The Trial

Photo Collage: MOA Staff; (Illustrated Portrait: Michael Hoeweller; (Source: David Burnett); Background: Anson Chan)

There aren’t many authors who can say they have sold 100 million books.

In fact, there’s only one.

In April 2023, thriller extraordinaire James Patterson, 76, became the first author to sell more than 100 million books, according to Publishers Weekly. What’s more, if you also count ebooks and audiobooks, Patterson is estimated to have sold more than 400 million copies, making him the best-selling author of all time. In collaboration with Patterson, AARP is offering the chance for members to read his novella The Trial free on Members Only Access. The Trial is one of the 23 books (and counting) that are part of the Women’s Murder Club, Patterson’s most popular series.

The books in the Women’s Murder Club series are numbered chronologically — 1st To Die, 2nd Chance, 3rd Degree, etc. The series also includes a few shorter, single-sitting reads, like The Trial, which is considered Book Number 15.5. It’s sandwiched between 15th Affair and 16th Seduction.

Courtesy: BookShots

Women’s Murder Club centers around the friendships among four accomplished women: Lindsay Boxer, a San Francisco Police Department homicide detective; Dr. Claire Washburn, chief medical examiner for San Francisco; Yuki Castellano, a San Francisco district attorney; and Cindy Thomas, a crime desk reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle. “The four of them get together and will occasionally work on or help one another on a case,” Patterson tells AARP. He adds that the 24th Women’s Murder Club book has been completed and the 25th book is nearly done.

“I like the series, and every once in a while, I’ll write a shorter one like The Trial,” Patterson says. “I’m probably going to write another shorter one next year. The hope is if people aren’t familiar with the series, they’ll go, ‘Oh, I like those characters. I’d like to know more about those characters.’”

Although Patterson is well known for male protagonists — like Alex Cross, the Washington, D.C., homicide detective who entered the zeitgeist back in 1993 with the novel Along Came a Spider; and Michael Bennett, the Irish American New York City detective who solves crimes as he raises his family — writing women as main characters came easily to him.

“I grew up in a house full of women — a mother, grandmother, three sisters, two female cats — and the buzz and purr is still in my head, and it really has affected me,” he says. “The dialogue, the whole thing. … I don’t believe that you have to be a woman to write about a woman, and you don’t have to be a man to write about a man. I’ve never bought into that. There’s so much art that you’d have to throw out if you wanted to go that way.”

Patterson notes that his former career in advertising also gave him a perspective into the way women work. “I found that women collaborated more than men did,” he says. “They were more willing to listen to the other person’s point of view. … That’s sort of where the idea for this Women’s Murder Club got together.”

Collaboration is also an integral aspect of Patterson’s career. He works with a stable of authors to publish multiple books each year. Some of these coauthors happen to be high-profile — like former president Bill Clinton and country music icon Dolly Parton — but others are writers with whom he works regularly. His process, as detailed in his recent autobiography, James Patterson by James Patterson: The Stories of My Life, goes like this: Each new book starts with a detailed outline — from 50 to 80 pages. Then Patterson asks each coauthor to take over. He asks for pages to be sent to him every two to three weeks, and they tweak as they go.

“A lot of people don’t understand [working with another author on a book]. They think it’s just the oddest thing in the world... The reality is that if our planet is going to be saved, it’s going to be because we learn how to collaborate." — James Patterson

Patterson has written all but three of the Women’s Murder Club novels with Maxine Paetro. He wrote the first book in the series himself and the next two with bestselling author Andrew Gross. Says Paetro: “When Jim asked me if I would like to write the Women’s Murder Club with him, he added that it would be ‘a good and lucky thing.’ I couldn't say yes fast enough. For me, the last 20 years have been an ongoing masterclass with the master of suspense.”

But even the master gets “slapped around a little” for his collaborative approach, Patterson says. “A lot of people don’t understand [working with another author on a book]. They think it’s just the oddest thing in the world,” he notes. “The reality is that if our planet is going to be saved, it’s going to be because we learn how to collaborate. The Sistine Chapel … some wonderful painters [were] up there all collaborating to paint that ceiling. The vaccine, whatever people think of it, collaboration. Almost every TV show writers’ rooms [has] six to nine writers in a room collaborating — so it’s not that unusual.”

He also understands, and plays into, his readers’ voracious appetite for his signature style: short paragraphs, short chapters, a fast pace, bare-bones description — just enough to whet your whistle and keep you guessing. “For some reason, people have decided that for a serious novel, you should know more about that character than you know about your spouse,” says Patterson, who has won nine Emmy Awards, an Edgar Award and the 2019 National Humanities Medal. “Well, I don’t think that’s a rule of the art of fiction. It’s a way. It’s an approach. And my approach is a little truer to life, to be honest with you. We know what we know. We don’t know everything.”

He adds, “I like to pretend I’m just talking to one person, and I don’t want them to get up until I’m finished. And that’s both my strength and my weakness. The strength is that people keep turning the pages, and the weakness could be sometimes I don’t go as deep as I should, because I’m afraid they’ll stop turning the pages.”

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