The staggering commercial success of top commodity fiction intrigues me. Why do millions of readers devour the works of a small number of writers of very thin literary merit or emotional conviction? Those I have read have obvious qualities: energy, invitation to escape, nourishment of harmless fantasies and plots that seize readers' attention from the opening page. But so do hundreds of other mass-market aspiring writers. Why these?
Now comes my most recent foray into that mysterious territory: Four Blind Mice by James Patterson (Little, Brown, 400 pages, $27.95). I had hopes for it. Two years ago, I read and wrote about Patterson's Roses Are Red. I found it intricately and compellingly put together. The cop material was convincingly valid, and the narrative had powerful drive.
Mice revolves around the same hero, Alex Cross, an African-American detective with the Washington, D.C., police department. But there, distressingly, the similarities to Roses end.
The action begins when Cross's friend, John Sampson, also a detective, talks him into going to North Carolina to try to save an old Army buddy who is scheduled to be executed. The vantage point of the book is usually Cross' -- what he knows and sees and feels. But the reader is often taken into the presence of a mysterious murderous trio whose crimes are the armature of the book. Sampson and his thoughts also are talked out by an anonymous narratior.
The killers' motives are the main mystery. There is no real question of whodunit. The perps' actions are presented in detail, but not their rationalizations. They seem to kill almost for sport -- mostly military men, but also women for the pure joy of it here and there. For me, there was an eerie evocation of the almost maddeningly incomprehensible horror of the very recent real-life sniper terror in this area.
No Doubt
But in the book, gradually the reader learns there is a method, a purpose, which remains undeclared until near the end. Throughout, good is good and bad is bad, and the twain meet only in combat or conflict.
The chapters are short -- two to four pages. The pace is very brisk, the vocabulary simple. There is a lot of dialogue, convincingly colloquial. Take one moment in Rocky Mount, N.C., where Cross and Sampson have gone, convinced of the identity of the killers, who are retired Ranger veterans of Vietnam. They work as a sales team for an arms manufacturer, Heckler & Koch. One of them is named Harris. Cross and Sampson happen into a scratch baseball game on a company field. Cross hits a long ball and slides skillfully past the catcher to score.
"'Safe!' the umpire yelled, and spread his arms wide.
"As I was getting up, I caught sight of Harris out of the corner of my eye. He was moving toward me fast. This could be trouble. No more friendly little game.
'"His right arm suddenly shot forward and he slapped me five.
"'Nice play,' he said. 'You got us that time, partner. Be ready for you next time. Hell, we're all on the same team anyway, right? H and K all the way.'
"Jesus, he actually seemed like a nice guy.
"For a killer."
End of chapter.
It moves like that. But it is often scratchy, sketchy, too easy. The story line has enough coherence and suspense to have carried me along. But there are few if any real surprises, few if any flashes of insight or delight or irony -- qualities that I found in Roses Are Red.
At the end, good prevails and, as a bonus, romance rewards the worthy. Evil is punished -- but not before roughly four out of every five characters who appear in the book die, mostly horribly.
So why not love the yarn, for what it is -- or, rather, what its predecessor promised?
The answer, I suspect, lies in industry, not art.
James Patterson is a piece of work. In 1988, at 41, he became the youngest CEO of J. Walter Thompson in the massive ad and marketing firm's history. His first book, in 1976, was The Thomas Berryman Affair, which won him a national award for the best first mystery novel. He wrote more books while directing the Burger King and Toys 'R' Us and other such accounts, but they did not hit best-seller lists. Then, in 1993, the first Alex Cross book, Along Came a Spider, took off.
Top Gun
He is now up to 20 books, which his publisher told Publishers Weekly makes Patterson "the number one bestselling author in America and, I think globally too." A recent exhaustive and excellent profile of Patterson in Publishers Weekly was titled "The James Patterson Business."
And a business he is. The Wall Street Journal estimates he is currently earning $25 million a year. Forbes puts the figure at $50 million. It's industrial production. He has had 13 books ascend to the top of the national best-seller lists, with Mice headed in that direction. He is now regularly turning out three new hard covers a year, with all sorts of peripheral deals pulling in massive bucks.
His industrial business has become a virtual assembly line production company. Several recent books have carried the names of co-authors on their covers and title pages. Neither Patterson nor his collaborators will discuss their roles. But Patterson has said he had help with Mice as well as the books with declared co-authors. That, I suspect, accounts for the drop in quality that I found.
But the Patterson industry may benefit more from marketing brilliance than from assembly-line productivity or quality. Its CEO goes to -- and hands-on manages -- almost ceaseless public and broadcast appearances. He methodically seeks, and apparently takes, advice from booksellers, readers and others. He has applied an extraordinarily successful career as one of the top marketers in the U.S. to this second career.
It's light years from great literature. But it is great business.