Today’s best thriller writers on one hundred classics of the genre…
My goal is to eventually make my way through all of these must-read titles. These books have been around for so long and read by so many that another generic review from your average reader seems unnecessary. Instead, I thought it would be fun to take a look at what some of the experts have to say about the stories that paved the way for their own success… and how their perspective compares to my own reading experience. Today, I’m looking at James Patterson’s Along Came a Spider.
It begins with the double kidnapping of the daughter of a famous Hollywood actress and the young son of the Secretary of the Treasury…. Gary Soneji is a murderous serial kidnapper who wants to commit the crime of the century. Alex Cross is the brilliant homicide detective pitted against him. Jezzie Flanagan is the female supervisor of the Secret Service who completes one of the most unusual suspense triangles in any thriller you have ever read.
Mary SanGiovanni has this to say in her essay on Patterson’s novel: “The true mark of a magician is to make the magic look easy and effortless. And the mark of a good thriller is to make readers forget that they are reading a story…” I absolutely agree, and many of my favorite books have done just that. But, did this one?
One of the quickest ways to remind me that I’m reading a story is inconsistent storytelling, and one of my biggest pet peeves involves switching point of view. I’m not talking about jumping around from one character to another; many (maybe even most) thrillers do that. What really gets me is when one of those character POVs is told in first person, with all the other characters in third. It’s confusing, and it’s ruined many a book for me. And though Patterson chooses to use this bizarre technique — I still don’t understand why Alex’s chapters couldn’t be told from a close third person — the story was strong enough to eventually break through my bias.
SanGiovanni mainly focuses on Alex Cross as a larger-than-life hero, but to be honest, the villain of the story made much more of an impression on me. With so many stories, villains are made to be noble in their own way, staunch supporters of whatever their cause is. I’ve heard time and time again that a villain who believes he’s in the right is much more interesting than one who’s evil just for the sake of being evil.
Soneji falls much closer to the latter than the former… but we can see almost from the beginning how disturbed he is. This kidnapper knows what he does is wrong, and yet he still manages to make himself the hero of his own story. It’s his combination of brilliance and insanity that makes him such a danger… and, in an admittedly twisted way, a thrill to read about.
I avoided James Patterson for a long time, just on principle. It doesn’t seem right to become such a huge name, while your co-authors get minimal credit, and no one knows the details of how much work each of you actually puts into these books that roll out every month. But, he obviously started somewhere, and I think even now he does actually write the Alex Cross novels himself (though I might be wrong on that).
When I saw the first in the series on the ITW list, I knew I’d have to give it a chance. And it ended up being better, much better, than I’d anticipated. Whatever his career has become, his reputation as a master of the genre is well-founded.
Four down, ninety-six to go…
Cheap Thrills 
Cheering you on! Many of my friends don’t understand what I like about thrillers. For me, they act as a catharsis.
Thanks, Susan. I just think they’re fun.
I’ve never read any James Patterson- I wasn’t even aware of the co-authoring scandal. Fascinating.
I wouldn’t call it a scandal, exactly. It’s just that he puts out an insane number of books, nearly all of them have more than one author on the cover, and these co-authors have it in their contracts that they’re not to disclose what exactly the writing relationship is (or at least that was the arrangement the last I’d heard anything about it). And if they’re good books and people like them, then that’s great. But it just rubs me the wrong way. I know writing books is also a business, but Patterson seems to have taken that to the extreme.
Interesting… Reminds me of how The Babysitter’s Club stopped being by the original author after a while, though they were still published under her name… Tricksy.
Personally, I found Kiss the Girls to be a much better book than Along Came a Spider. Although they were both pretty good. Definitely a lot better than any of the stuff Patterson’s churned out in the past 5-10 years, that’s for sure!! My biggest peeve with his books is that all the chapters are like two pages long, so you tell yourself you’re just going to read one more chapter, but that only takes one minute so you read another chapter, and the next thing you know, it’s 3am and you’ve finished the book…
I kind of like short chapters… yeah, they suck you in, but when you do need or want to stop you’ll never be searching for a good place to do it (it drives me crazy to stop anywhere but a chapter break).
I once read that he produces very detailed outlines and then the co-authors write the actual book. I’m not sure that’s true or not, though. But I think the Alex Cross books are the only ones he writes by himself, and they are the best ones in my opinion. Patterson is my go-to author when I’m in a slump and need something to jump start my reading again.
That pretty much what I assumed, that Patterson is the “idea man” with the co-authors doing the writing. I don’t know why it bugs me as much as it does. At any rate, maybe I’ll continue the Alex Cross series, but it’s not very high on my priority list.
His early Alex Cross novels are very good, even his early women’s murder club books are good. But (and this is a big but), the later Alex Cross novels are laughably bad. It’s such a shame too, that a perfectly good series become so terrible. I’ve only read one or two of his co-authored books and I was not impressed.
I once read a book by one of his previous co-authors, now writing on his own. It was… eh. Not terrible, but definitely nothing special. I’d probably feel the same way about most of Patterson’s more recent novels.
I used to enjoy the Alex Cross books, then stopped reading them as they got more and more outrageous. All I could think was “that poor man” as tragedy after tragedy befell him. Give Alex Cross some peace already!
Yeah, that comes with the territory of being the hero of a long-running series. Sympathy for fictional characters aside, it seems the consensus is that his earlier books were overall better than they are now.
I remember reading this book when I was young, and I was SO MAD because I wanted to write a murder mystery series based on nursery rhymes, and I was convinced he stole my title. Ha!
That’s too funny. Though he later moved onto the “Cross” theme for his titles… which is a little more on the nose. Easier for people to identify, I guess. (Or maybe he just ran out of nursery rhymes.)