James Patterson Talks New 'Alex Cross' Book and Series, Finishing Michael Crichton & Favorite Movie of 2023

James Patterson is at home in Florida, where the world’s best-selling author and his wife are preparing to host Thanksgiving, though he’s more than happy to talk to Los Angeles magazine about his latest thriller, Alex Cross Must Die — the 32nd full-length novel featuring the D.C.-area detective.

“We’ve got a lot of family here, so any excuse I have to go upstairs to my office, I’m there,” joked Patterson, whose Cross novels are no laughing matter.

In the character’s latest adventure, Cross and his partner, John Sampson, match wits with a terrorist who’s using a remote-controlled machine gun to shoot commercial planes out of the sky, all while Alex’s wife, Bree Stone, investigates the case of a missing executive who may or may not have been onboard a doomed flight.

Cross has been played on the big screen by actors Morgan Freeman and Tyler Perry, and this coming spring will bring an Amazon series starring Aldis Hodge (Black Adam) that Patterson has high hopes for, having come away pleased with how the show balances Alex’s caseload and his family life — an element that was understandably but regrettably given short shrift in the movies, which tend to focus on the crime element of Patterson’s books.

Alex Cross Must Die is one of two new books Patterson has out this holiday season. The other is titled What Happens in Vegas, which he co-wrote with Mark Seal. It tells the true stories of the people who make Las Vegas what it is, from the city’s Michelin-starred chefs to its showgirls and blackjack dealers.

And next summer, Patterson is expected to publish Eruption, which is based on an unfinished manuscript by Jurassic Park author Michael Crichton. As a producer, Patterson expects to go out with the rights next year, and he’s also putting together an adaptation of 12 Months to Live titled Jane Effing Smith.

But I’ll let him tell you about that and more — including his favorite movie this year — in the first half of our candid two-part chat.

Los Angeles Magazine: Where’d the premise for Alex Cross Must Die come from?

James Patterson: I don’t know where this stuff comes from. I’ve talked about it before, but I have a big pile of notes, it’s about 7 or 8 inches thick, with the clever title “Ideas” on top of it, and I just keep adding to it. At a certain point… one particular idea grabs me and I want to do a book about it. So I don’t know exactly where it came from — maybe from just driving by an airport, or I’m at an airport and thinking about some crazy idea that would be terrifying or interesting.

For me, especially lately — and I think it’s as true for somebody my age [as] when you’re 20, [but I’ve been thinking about this quote,] “My time here is short. What can I do most beautifully?” And for me, it’s telling stories. I get crazy people who want to do books with me, ranging from someone who just walked into a restaurant and starts to tell you their war story from 40 years ago, to people who are fairly well-known in Hollywood and elsewhere. You just have to make a choice.

I just finished a thing that Michael Crichton had started that’s called Eruption, and the estate approached me and said he had written part of the novel, and ‘Would you be interested in finishing it?’ And I said, ‘I don’t know, let me read what he wrote.’ And I did read it and I thought it had a terrific hook, which he’s very good at — there’s the potential for a volcano to literally destroy the island of Hawaii, but that’s not the worst thing, which is where it really gets interesting to me.

So that was one where I just went, A) I liked the story and B) I have liked most of Crichton’s novels, and I found the challenge interesting because I don’t tend to throw a lot of science into my books. So, all of a sudden, I had to [find] a researcher, and I found a researcher of volcanos in Alaska, of all places — Elizabeth from Alaska, as she is known now — but I liked the challenge of it. To see if I could do it and write something that had a lot of science in it, but the pages would keep turning themselves.

With Cross, I’m not exactly sure where that idea came from, but probably from when I was at an airport or something, and that just seemed like a scary idea to me. One of the things now — spoiled brat that I’ve become — I fly private, and with private, all you have to do is go by and read the number on the plane and you talk to the gate and they let you in, and it’s like, ‘Well, that’s kind of sloppy.’ Stuff like that… I actually wrote about that in one of the short novellas that I did, the [Alex Cross] Bookshots.

I was going to ask how the Bookshots have been performing compared to the full novels...

Well, it’s one of those things that scared the publisher because [they said], ‘Oh my god, what if people want to buy these $7-8 dollar things,’ and ‘What’ll happen to the hardcovers?’ rather than saying, ’It’ll have its own place and drive more people to the stories.’ A lot of people don’t have 5-7 hours to put into reading a book, and with these things, you can kind of do them in a couple of hours, and it’s like going to the movies.

But the weird thing is, it made money the first year, and a lot of new things don’t. And the thing of it is that, basically, here’s a Barnes & Noble, which is a big store, and this was in something the size of a bread box. So you have a bread box in a big store, and it still did fairly well. So it did scare them, but then, ultimately, it was also too much for me to handle. That year — I’m gonna make up the number but it’s close — I did over 2700 pages of outlines. It’s insane.

Oh my god, you’re a machine.

I don’t know what it is, but I remember having a journalist up here — this was actually during the Bookshots — and I kept pulling out all these drawers with all these manuscripts in them, and he was going, ‘This is crazy, this is crazy,’ and then he said, ‘James, you are crazy.’

Well, as a fan, I do appreciate the Bookshots because it’s frustrating to have to wait a year or sometimes two for a new Alex Cross book, so I loved having those Bookshots to break up that wait.

Well, some of the offbeat ones, like 12 Months to Live, turned out really well. You never know. You hope they’ll all turn out well, but that one has the best character I’ve been involved with in a long time.

After writing more than 30 Alex Cross books, what is it about that character that still gets you excited to get out of bed and write him?

You never know when, all of a sudden, you’re gonna wake up and say, ‘You know what, I don’t want to do it anymore.’ But I think I identify with Alex in the way that a lot of the readers do, which is, his life relates to most — not everybody’s — but we have our families and then we have our jobs, and it’s about trying to find a balance between the two. Now, obviously, our jobs are not as dangerous or as ridiculous as Alex’s, but we do face that — ‘Oh my God, how do I balance this thing? I have all these things I have to do at work, but I want to be reasonable with my family.’ So I think that’s one of the attractions of the Cross books.

A lot of people really like the family. They love Nana Mama. They like Brie a lot. Brie, I think, is a pretty good character who came late in the series. And the kids are getting older, and Alex is getting older and changing somewhat, [too].

We have an Amazon series coming in either March or April, I think, and it’s somewhat different. It’s a little edgier, which I really like, and it’s a little more realistic. I’ve said it before, but I don’t really write realism. Sometimes, people will go, ‘Well, this isn’t very realistic,’ and I go, ‘Well, that’s not really a relevant criticism because I don’t write realism.’ You can say, ‘I don’t like it,’ and that’s a reasonable criticism, but it’s not realism because I don’t write realism.

Clearly, Alex Cross Must Die is not a realistic novel, it’s an opera; it’s larger than life. But I think the key to Alex Cross is really the family and the [personal] relationships, like, Sampson is his extended family too, of course.

And that’s why I’m excited about the series, because when you’re making a two-hour movie, the family gets lost in favor of the crime elements, but that’s not what makes these books special.

Yeah, it’s doable, but once again… one of the nice things about the Amazon series is, because it’s basically eight hours, you do have plenty of time for the family. The family is crucial in there, and you feel it. I’m very happy with the way the series turned out. It is edgier.

Generally, the book audiences are a little older, a little more affluent — at least the hardbacks anyway — and with Amazon, it was kind of a different thing, and kind of more realistic about the positives and the negatives of police in our society now. So I like the way it turned out. I’m sure some people will go, ‘Oh, well, Patterson probably doesn’t like the series.' I do like the series, I think it’s quite good.

What made Aldis Hodge the right guy to play Alex Cross in your mind?

Well, he’s a good actor. That helps. And he was good in the Showtime series City on a Hill — very different than he is in this because he played kind of an uptight lawyer on City on a Hill. But he was good in it. And he was good in One Night in Miami, where he played the football player, Jimmy Brown.

He’s good. He’s a good actor, he’s very intense, and he has range — he can be very serious and he can be very tough. And he lights up with the family, which is nice. He’s very good with the kids. And he doesn’t have kids, but he’s very good with the kids. And he grounds the character. And that’s one of the keys to the books. And you’re right, [the family] wasn’t in the movies, really, at all.