James Patterson is a crime fiction writer who occasionally branches out into Romance and kids fiction. His books are unspeakably hilarious easy-to-digest blue funks of inanity. They're remedial blips on the stratosphere of intellect. They're unmitigated, mindless drivel, and are monolithically popular and I know exactly why. The man is a genius. Each of his books can be read in the same time it takes a seven year old to read a Roald Dal book. They're essentially Doctor Suess for literates. Each book is basically your serial killer-with-a-grudge-against-bugger-all terrorises the locals, and it's only down to local alcoholic/paraplegic/grief-stricken/single father/diabetic/decapitated/ibred/etc law enforcer with a person agenda to right justice because his cat got run over/wife got mugged/he lost his car keys etc to put a stop to it all. James Patterson has written like, a stupendous number of books. He's got at least 12 (!) coming out this year. That's one a month the frothing, raving fool is pumping out into your local bookshelves. The secret is, of course, contained within the pages.
James Patterson books are not very long, but they do have lots and lots of chapters, and each chapter is very very short. Like when you write stories at primary school and you're so excited you get to put chapters in, that you write chapters that are three lines long. It's a simple concept, and if you combine the length with no words longer than two syllables, and insert a fascinatingly vile murder sequence every third page, and hey presto, you've got Real Lives Magazine - the novel. There are so many of these fucking books doing the rounds that you can segregate them all off into different genres. The Womens Murder Club, or Ladies Death Club or whatever it's called, is dubious sexist tosh, natch. The Maximum Ride series were his piss poor attempt to emulate Stormbreaker (key character Alex Rider - get it?) but these were a flop, all book shops had to shift the kids titles back into the adult crime section - partly because none of the kids wanted to read them, but mainly because they weren't actually significantly different from the adult titles, what with an average reading age of three. I'm surprised they don't keep a glossary of basic english in the back, just incase any decrepit old buggers reading the titles aloud think you have to pronounce the 'K' in 'knife wound's a-plenty" or the 'G' in 'Drexel Marcovius had a face like a Gnome". The third 'series' of Patterson classics are the Cross book. Cross, whose first name escapes me at present (Alex?) is a detective with anger management issues, seriously. Almost all the 'Cross' books have pathetic nursery rhyme themed titles; Pop Goes the Weasel, Kiss the Girls, Roses are Red. You may have seen the big screen adaptation of 'Along Came a Spider'. You may also probably wish you hadn't bothered. I've sat through the entirety of that, and I can't remember a damn thing about it, apart from that it was a murder mystery with Morgan Freeman in, and it wasn't Seven, so what's the point?
His new schtick, and how he's managing to squeeze 12 books out in a year, is the biggest stroke of genius of the lot. What's he doing? Answer - absolute four-to-the-floor you'd-better-believe-it solid hard round-the-clock working class NOTHING! Taking a lead from the worlds of both Andrew Ridgeley, and Hollywood Marketing, Patterson has twigged that he doesn't have to do anything except slap his name on the front of a book, so he's getting an army of presumably teenagers doing an English Language Textual Reconstruction module to rewrite his books with different character names and even more preposturous murder scenes, and claiming to have co-written them. I'm assuming he wrote one chapter, or he wrote the last line ("Then he woke up and it was all a dream"), dug another moronic black and white jacket-shot of him stood arms folded against a Buick out from his family album, and by Jim, another guaranteed bestseller because his fans are too thick to notice they're reading a derivative of a derivative of a derivative of his fifthteenth indentical novel.
Jeffrey Deaver, who looks like the sort of person who'd jump out of the pages of one of his books and papercut your tongue off, at least, writes all his own work. Which is why they only surface at a rate of one a year, maybe two if you don't realise the plots are nearly identical. It's also why they're completely barmy, and morbidly enjoyable. The last one I read ('The Cold Moon') had so many twists, at one point I was left wondering if I'd even started reading the book in the first place, and then deftly ruined the previous 300 pages or so, in the last ten. But at least he was for real. Like how Andrew WK was worth a million Darknesses
James Patterson books are not very long, but they do have lots and lots of chapters, and each chapter is very very short. Like when you write stories at primary school and you're so excited you get to put chapters in, that you write chapters that are three lines long. It's a simple concept, and if you combine the length with no words longer than two syllables, and insert a fascinatingly vile murder sequence every third page, and hey presto, you've got Real Lives Magazine - the novel. There are so many of these fucking books doing the rounds that you can segregate them all off into different genres. The Womens Murder Club, or Ladies Death Club or whatever it's called, is dubious sexist tosh, natch. The Maximum Ride series were his piss poor attempt to emulate Stormbreaker (key character Alex Rider - get it?) but these were a flop, all book shops had to shift the kids titles back into the adult crime section - partly because none of the kids wanted to read them, but mainly because they weren't actually significantly different from the adult titles, what with an average reading age of three. I'm surprised they don't keep a glossary of basic english in the back, just incase any decrepit old buggers reading the titles aloud think you have to pronounce the 'K' in 'knife wound's a-plenty" or the 'G' in 'Drexel Marcovius had a face like a Gnome". The third 'series' of Patterson classics are the Cross book. Cross, whose first name escapes me at present (Alex?) is a detective with anger management issues, seriously. Almost all the 'Cross' books have pathetic nursery rhyme themed titles; Pop Goes the Weasel, Kiss the Girls, Roses are Red. You may have seen the big screen adaptation of 'Along Came a Spider'. You may also probably wish you hadn't bothered. I've sat through the entirety of that, and I can't remember a damn thing about it, apart from that it was a murder mystery with Morgan Freeman in, and it wasn't Seven, so what's the point?
His new schtick, and how he's managing to squeeze 12 books out in a year, is the biggest stroke of genius of the lot. What's he doing? Answer - absolute four-to-the-floor you'd-better-believe-it solid hard round-the-clock working class NOTHING! Taking a lead from the worlds of both Andrew Ridgeley, and Hollywood Marketing, Patterson has twigged that he doesn't have to do anything except slap his name on the front of a book, so he's getting an army of presumably teenagers doing an English Language Textual Reconstruction module to rewrite his books with different character names and even more preposturous murder scenes, and claiming to have co-written them. I'm assuming he wrote one chapter, or he wrote the last line ("Then he woke up and it was all a dream"), dug another moronic black and white jacket-shot of him stood arms folded against a Buick out from his family album, and by Jim, another guaranteed bestseller because his fans are too thick to notice they're reading a derivative of a derivative of a derivative of his fifthteenth indentical novel.
Jeffrey Deaver, who looks like the sort of person who'd jump out of the pages of one of his books and papercut your tongue off, at least, writes all his own work. Which is why they only surface at a rate of one a year, maybe two if you don't realise the plots are nearly identical. It's also why they're completely barmy, and morbidly enjoyable. The last one I read ('The Cold Moon') had so many twists, at one point I was left wondering if I'd even started reading the book in the first place, and then deftly ruined the previous 300 pages or so, in the last ten. But at least he was for real. Like how Andrew WK was worth a million Darknesses
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