Kill List - Special Interview: A Conversation with Best-Selling Author James Patterson

Episode Date: November 21, 2024

On this special episode, Kill List host Carl Miller sits down for an in-depth conversation with best-selling crime novelist James Patterson, whose long-running Alex Cross book series is the inspiration for the new Amazon Prime series Cross. They’ll discuss where Patterson gets his inspiration, and draw parallels between the challenges Carl faced investigating Kill List, and the obstacles Patterson’s famous fictional detective goes up against when trying to catch his villains. Patterson’s latest Cross novel, The House of Cross, hits shelves this month.Be the first to know about Wondery’s newest podcasts, curated recommendations, and more! Sign up now at https://wondery.fm/wonderynewsletterFollow the Kill List on the Wondery App or wherever you get your podcasts. You can binge all episodes early and ad-free on Wondery+. Join Wondery+ in the Wondery App, Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Start your free trial by visiting www.wondery.com/links/kill-list now.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Wanderi Plus subscribers can binge all episodes of K-Allist early and ad free. Join Wanderi Plus in the Wanderi app or on Apple podcasts. Hey there, it's Karl. K-Allist continues with new episodes dropping weekly on Tuesdays, each of which takes a deep dive into cases from across the investigation and across the world. But today, we've got something different. It's a special interview I recorded with James Patterson, the bestselling author of the Alex Cross series. I hope you enjoy it,

and don't forget to come back on Tuesday for the next episode of Kill List. We'll be taking you to Wisconsin, where a bitter feud threatens to tear a family apart. The series tells the story of a secret dark web Kill List, how we got hold of it and our race against time to warn its targets. It was an investigation that began with a tiny little vulnerability on a darknet murder of a higher site that allowed us to intercept the kill orders in secret that were being sent to the site. The authors of these orders they had no idea that we were able to see them, but we could. There's one guy and I only have his name and the city he lives in. How can I hire a

killer to kill him? I want her to be killed, but it should seem she is dead because of accident, not by murder. Seeking house to be burned down with occupants inside. No survivors. What started there, on the Darknet, soon expanded all over the world. Zurich, Beverly Hills, Berlin, a small fishing village in Spain, a Wisconsin suburb, and it put us in contact with police forces, the FBI, Interpol. But perhaps the weirdest and most disturbing part of all of this was having to comb through the kill orders themselves, having to read the incredibly specific instructions that

were sent and desperately trying to decipher if there were any clues in them that could tell us who was writing them, who was putting these orders onto the site? In many of these moments it genuinely did feel like we had stepped outside of reality and into the pages of some sort of detective novel. And that's why I could not be more excited to be speaking today with the man who practically invented the modern day crime mystery novel. He has sold more than 400 million books. He is one of the best-selling authors of all time. It is the one and only James Patterson. His Alex Cross series began in the 1990s with A Long Came a Spider and is now getting its own Amazon Prime series, Cross, which is available to stream. What do you do, Alex? I'm a detective.

You mean you're a cop? Metro PD. We join the force together. No! I got it! You the doctor? PhD, psychology. Let's see how long you last.

But you can call me Detective Alex Cross. Passant also has a new Alex Cross novel out this month, The House of Cross. And today we're going to be drawing parallels between Patterson's work across all those books and what we experienced when we're making the Kill List. We'll talk about where he gets his inspiration from and also we talk about how Alex Cross deals with all the different kinds of problems and challenges and hurdles that he faces when he's trying to catch his own murderers. That's coming up next on Kill List. I'm Afua Hirsch. I'm Peter Frankopan. And in our podcast Legacy, we explore the lives of some of the biggest characters in

history. This season, we're looking at the life of the British Prime Minister, Winston Churchill. For many people in the UK, he's a national hero. For others, he's a symbol of racist imperialism. It's fair to say he is a complex and controversial character. So almost exactly 150 years since his birth, we are exploring parts of his story you might not be so familiar with. How does his legacy hold up today? What do you think, Afua?

He is worshipped, provokes anger. I actually think it's going to be a really challenging and stimulating discussion for us to have. I can't think of a figure who had more of a front row seat at so many different chapters of the making of the 20th century. So it's going to be fantastic. Follow Legacy now wherever you get your podcasts. Or binge entire seasons early and ad-free on Wondery and Novel, I'm Carl Miller, and this is Kill List. kill list.

James, it's such an honor to speak to you. Very warm welcome to the Kill List. Thank you, thank you. The only thing I want to know is, am I on the Kill List? Because this is frightening for me and I'd like you to straighten that out for me. You are not. I actually did confirm. I genuinely did.

I searched for whether you were in any of the files that we got and I'm happy to say definitively you're not and neither is Alex Cross. Phew. I know that I don't have to worry about dying during our talk together. Yeah. So James, question number one. You've been writing Alex Cross series for 30 years now, and can you just kind of introduce us to Alex Cross and the initial inspiration behind him?

Because he's not your typical detective, is he? He's someone who is also a kind of forensic psychologist, you know, a PhD as well as a detective. Well, a piece of it is I worked my way through college at one of the best mental hospitals. I was an aide there. This was McLean in Belmont, Massachusetts, really, really good hospital, a lot of staff out of Harvard. And so I got to study a lot of psychologists and psychiatrists and mental patients, a lot

of first-hand experience. Get to talk to people who are having problems all day. And so I really got interested in that area. So that was a piece of it, a big piece of it. And one of the reasons that Morgan Freeman wanted to play him is that Alex solves stuff with his head more than his fist. One of the things in the books, and it's also true

about the series on prime, is Alex is always the smartest person in the books, and it's also true about the series on prime, is Alex is always the smartest person in the room. And when I started the series, Hollywood, in those days, pretty much every black person other than Sidney Portier that was in a movie, had a boombox on their shoulder. And I'm going like, that's not accurate, that's not the way it is. And I started writing about Alice Cross. I grew up in a town that was on the Hudson River, a pretty large black population.

My grandparents owned this very small restaurant and the chef was a black woman. And when I was a little kid, she was having problems with her husband and she just moved in with us. And I just, I loved her family and the spirit of them and they were smart and they were funny and the music was good and the food was good. And I preferred being with her family than being with my family.

And that's, I think a little bit of where the cross family comes from in the books. So James, how do you get into the heads of these serial and pattern murderers? Cause that seems to be kind of one of the big the big arcs that stretches throughout each of your novels, is the way that Alex can get into the interior worlds of these people who, by definition, have such an unfamiliar internal life to the rest of us. Well, the key to the villains, it's an interesting thing.

Somebody in Hollywood, a very famous Hollywood person said the key to all great stories is a great villain. And the person that said that was Walt Disney. And it certainly is, from my books anyway, and it has to be a worthy villain. So Alex is very smart, but the villain isn't a worthy villain. It just doesn't work. I write with an outline, but I'm not a slave to the outline.

It's always going to change. Things are going to surprise me. I'm going to fall in love with the character. I'm going to like a villain and the villain will survive and go to the next book, et cetera. And by worthy villain, they of course have to be kind of intellectually formidable. Yeah, it can be physical. Just can be their madness is interesting, and there's some cleverness to it.

They just have to be somebody where you go like, I don't know how Alex will triumph here. Well, this brings us to kind of one of the first crossovers between Alex Cross and Kill List, or at least possible crossovers. And that's where we found ourselves to be, where we were trying to, in our own ways, transport ourselves into the minds of the people that were trying to have another person killed. I think probably in a way that was similar to While It's Cross. You think you can stop him?

I know I can. Because I know him better than he knows himself. When we were combing through these kill orders we were intercepting, we were kind of obsessing about how serious they were, like did they have the means to do it, might they take matters into their own hands, and each and every time we were having to make those kinds of determinations or decisions or judgments always against the clock, like always very urgently and at a tempo that was being dictated by the adversary in many ways, not by us. So we've got a clip to play you that hopefully brings us to life a little bit.

The voice that you're about to hear is from a woman called Elena. And it was her estranged husband that wired Bitcoin to the site that we were broken into in order to have her murdered. And we reached her in time to warn her. Thank God, thank God. But it was only later that we realized what the husband might have been capable of. We're about to say goodbye

when Elena remembers a detail about the police investigation she wants me to know. They found that he had rented a room where he had weapons and ammunition. It looks like he was actually thinking about doing it himself. My god, where is this room in relation to where you are? Oh, quite near actually. Oh my God, that is absolutely terrifying. I think he was planning it and then in the end he decided it was too dangerous.

They would suspect him, you know, if something happened to me. So in the end he decided not to do it himself. Oh my God. Okay, yeah, of course. No, of course they would suspect the husband. Does Alex Cross ever struggle to have people in danger believe him that they're in danger? Because one of the things that we really struggled with

actually was to convince Elena to leave her home. Sure. You know, to actually take positive action to make herself safer. Part of it is always, you know, with my books, it's going to be exactly that, and figuring out what's going to work best for the story. There are some of the cross stories where that would be an element. Motivation is a big thing. I think there was probably two layers of motivation, really.

And let me put them to you, because I wonder how they interact in your own villains. Sure the surface, it was money. So Elena's husband stood to lose a lot of money from this divorce. He simply didn't want to. And actually when he was dragged into court later on, that was the reason that he gave. But really, I think what drove him and actually drove many of the people, dozens of them, that we ended up learning about the perpetrators was actually something a bit deeper and more subtle, and that was control. I think they often were trying to kill the target because they were trying to gain control

back. You know, they were losing it somehow, like either the person was going away, the marriage was breaking apart. Yeah, the control, that's absolutely, that's emotive for sure. And then the hatred, it can reveal that the person really has some real flaws, unbelievable flaws that the killer has. But I'll always go to the four or five, six different things. It's never as simple in terms of what might be motivating the killer.

I think when I read your books, James, I can often see this in the villains and that's this kind of combination, which I saw so often with the perpetrators in the kill list, between on the one hand, being quite delusional and unstable and unpredictable, but then also like somehow forensic and calculating and rational in another way.

And it often feels like that combination is what makes these people so dangerous, that they're able to be both at the same time. And how often are your villains hiding in plain sight? Because that's another thing that we realized, is that actually they manage to maintain this kind of veneer of respectability. You know, I don't remember how many, but there have been several books where I've written and We know who the villain is but we can't prove it We know and they're really bad and they're doing bad things, but we just can't prove it There was one of the cross books where he was a diplomat. Oh, really? We had diplomatic immunity

So they couldn't go after him even though they really believed that he was a murderer But they couldn't go after him even though they really believed that he was a murderer, but they couldn't go after him because he had a diplomatic community in DC. All right. Well, we're going to move onwards. We've got a second clip, James, to play you. Okay. And this is really looking at a moment in our investigation when we were really struggling, not actually to get the targets to take us seriously this time, but the police. Okay. So we'd been time after time kind of hitting these walls with the police,

which actually really surprised me where they just simply did not think that the evidence we were presenting was real. And in fact, actually began to get increasingly skeptical and suspicious of us. So I want to play a clip from, uh, from, from the show where one of our reporters is in Spain and we've gone with the target into a police station physically to report the threat. We entered this very old fashioned waiting room full of banners with different campaigns against gender violence.

And that's when we heard the police inside talking about the case. The dark web, whoa, the dark web hired someone to kill her. What is this? It's a science fiction movie. And they were laughing. Those creeps. Does that surprise you, James? Because it often feels that Alex... No, no. It's all over the lot with the police.

The police are really going to get in the way or they're going to help or do both. And you know, look, it's like any other profession. You're going to run into really good ones. You're going to run some that are awful. And a lot of times the police, they'll get there, you know, and it's this person or no, no, no, get out of here. This couldn't happen this way, you know? So the cops, they would definitely have some questions and want some proof.

And they might well laugh at it. They might like, this is, you know, no, this would never happen, blah, blah, blah, blah. And you're going to convince them that they're wrong. It seems that Alex Cross has to not only kind of have colleagues, obviously, that get in the way actively for whatever reason, but also has to kind of step outside of the normal channels and sometimes rules in order to have effective investigations occurring. I've just finished reading Jack and Jill. That's a story about how he's being dragged into a series of high profile murders of primarily white celebrities in DC, but there's another serial killer killing black

children in a much poorer part. And nobody cares. And nobody cares, yeah. And he has to kind of begin that kind of shadow investigation, doesn't he? Yeah. So when Cross is struggling to get the police to say, believe him, or the institution to work with him, how does he tend to kind of deal with that? One of the reasons that I set the Cross series in DC is that Alex would have a number of agencies to deal with.

So he's got the FBI, he's got the CIA, he's got the DEA, he's got, you know, you name it, they're there. But Alex or any police person is going to have to deal with bureaucracies. In the case of a lot of the books, it can be the bureaucracy inside the Washington Police Department, it can be the bureaucracy at the FBI. It can be the bureaucracy at the CIA. It's not just bureaucracy. Sometimes it's just, you know, one of these organizations has secrets

they don't want out there. And every time he has to work with an agency, he's got to convince them. A lot of them, they don't really want to work with the DC police. And even when he has a case that he wants to follow, a lot of times, you know, at the top, they don't want to follow it. You mentioned in one of the cases where, you know, the police department

didn't really want to deal with deaths of black kids. Now that's changed, I think, currently, but that was an issue getting the police a lot of times to deal with crime in the black parts of Washington. Do you think the way that you've thought about and written about the police since the 90s has changed at all? Or is this 100 percent? Really? How's it evolved? Yeah, and that's a big thing in terms of the difference between Alex Cross in the books and Alex Cross in the prime series. In the series, Alex is much more relevant and real. You know, I don't write realism for the most part. I mean, Alice Cross, in your career,

you're not gonna be solving a different murder every week. It's kind of crazy that this doesn't happen. So it's not realistic. The series on Amazon is closer to reality in terms of the kinds of things that a cop has to go through in modern day Washington, DC. It's a tough place. There's a lot of distrust of the kinds of things that a cop has to go through in modern day Washington, DC. It's a tough place. There's a lot of distrust of the police.

Alex in the series, especially in this first series, he's done something that's beyond the pale and he's struggling with it. And he struggles with it through all the episodes. That was exactly my next question, which is the implications for Alex when he does step outside of institutions. Because where we found ourselves was in a place that I think felt very lonely. Because on the one hand,

you've got the people running the site, the cyber criminals, you know, and they were scary. You've got the perpetrators that we obviously were desperately trying to stay hidden from, but then you also had the police that seemed in many cases to be quite suspicious of us and were telling the targets that we'd set the site up or we were scammers or we were just after a story. And I think kind of stepping outside of institutional boundaries and in our case of journalists, I think in Alex's case of a detective, suddenly you kind

of lose your compass. It's kind of a detective, suddenly you kind of lose your compass. It's kind of hard to tell exactly what the right thing to do is. Yes. And also with Alex and a big part of the success of Alex Frost is, not all of us, but a lot of us have that issue of balancing our work life with our personal life or our family life. And for Alex, that's enormous because his job as a cop, it's life threatening, it's all the time. And his family has been threatened several times during the series. And there's another threat in the prime series,

is another threat to his family, but he has to balance that, he has to protect his family. So that's a piece of the puzzle whenever there's an Alice Cross movie or book. And that's always a big deal. When you look at true crime cases for inspiration or for research, are there elements of it that you dispense with? Because it's actually not useful to you as a crime writer. Occasionally, you look at a case like the American football player with the Patriots,

and you just go like, oh my God, this guy was like a major football player and he was a murderer on the side. That kind of thing, you suddenly go, well, you know, that could be a novel too, because it's so over the top. I think you touched on this a little bit, but in making the series, is it introducing a kind of darker realism than you would have in the books? I don't know that it's darker, it's more relevant, it's closer to reality. And I talked, the showrunner Ben Watkins,

he and I talked a lot about one, that he wanted to write new stories and I was all for that. One of the things that I don't like is when somebody wants to take over one of my series and all they do is lay out like what that book was. I don't really love that. I think it worked fine with Along Came a Spider and Kissed the Girls with Morgan Freeman,

partly because if you have Morgan Freeman, it's gonna work. He's gonna make it work. And once again, starting with this idea that Alice is the smartest person in the room, Morgan is very believable as the smartest person in the world. And in the new series on Amazon, Aldous Hodge,

who is a very, very talented actor, really talented. There was an audience screening that I went to in New York and I've been to a lot of screenings of movies and TV shows and whatever. I've never seen a crowd screaming and yelling and clapping during the show the way they did for this. And there's an early scene where Aldous does, he is the smartest person in the room.

This kind of a white nationalist that he's doing a Q&A with and just the way he handles it, just had the audience going nuts. But Alex does in the course of the series, he really does deal with the problems of right now of being a cop in DC. The effect on your family, the effect on you, the effect of making a mistake. Well, we in fact actually have that clip from the show. Okay. Which plays into what we talked about earlier about Cross being able to use psychology to worm their way into the head of a suspect.

So let's play that. You thought you were special. You're not in my head, boy. And you're not getting a confession. Oh, I'm definitely living red free. And you're not getting a confession. Oh, I'm definitely living rent-free. And you already confessed. I'm just amusing myself right now. I didn't say anything.

Yeah, you did. Life's fitful fever. Yeah, I caught that. It's Macbeth, right? It's the affliction caused by the burden of guilt. You said that's what's making you sick. That's a confession on tape. Wow.

Yeah, it was one of the highest testing series they've ever done, which is cool. That's really cool. So they're really behind it. And I'm just delighted with it. I really liked the way it turned out. And how would you say that this vision of Alex Cross is different from the Morgan Freeman vision? It's more realistic.

Look, I mean, I've been very lucky to have three talented actors play Alex, Morgan, Tyler Perry, and now Aldous Hodge. And they're all good. And every once in a while, somebody will create a character and you get a few different actors playing them. And that's really, I don't know how many have played Sherlock Holmes now, but it just says something about the character.

So I'm ecstatic about this. Brilliant. Well, let's turn to the book two, James, which is coming out, I think, on the 25th of November. Why are these books still resonating with people, do you think? Well I think the character has legs, the character, and I think people, it's a combination of they know that the stories are going to keep them turning the pages. There's going to be a good villain in almost every book. And people love Alex's connection to his family

and they identify with it. And the family is always a big part of the books. And the family is a really big part of the series on Amazon. And Samson was not a big part in the movies. Samson was very minor. In the series, the family is huge, the kids are great and Samson is great.

Mustafa, he's wonderful, wonderful Samson. Well, to bring this full circle then, so my biggest challenge in Kill List was basically figuring out what to do with these kill orders with the information that we had. You know, how to tell the targets, how to approach law enforcement. I think with all of your kind of massive experience writing about those kinds of dilemmas, do

you think that would have kind of equipped you to be able to kind of navigate those kinds of decisions in a better way? Because I felt myself kind of very underpowered often when trying to do that. You know, life in general, but especially as a writer, I think it's just a series of solving problems, problems to be solved. You know, people that succeed at this game, I think are pretty good problem solvers.

Because it's just nothing but problems to be solved. Indeed. And pretty much every chapter, there's a problem to be solved. It's just new problems and opportunities. Brilliant. Well, James, thank you so much for joining us. I've absolutely loved talking to you. Thank you. This was great. It was really cool. So I have, of course, just been speaking to James Patterson, the best-selling author of

the Alex Cross novels. Season 1 of Cross is now available to stream on Amazon Prime. Every day hundreds of people go about their lives with no idea that someone has paid to have them killed. The first six episodes of Kill List follow our race against time to warn those in danger and to uncover the truth behind the site before it is too late. But that is not the whole story. Starting with episode 7, we investigate the ripple effects that the murder of a higher site has had on its victims by diving into individual cases in depth. Follow Kill List on the Wondry app or wherever you get your podcasts.

You can binge all episodes early and ad free on Wondry+. Join Wondry Plus in the Wondry app, Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Wondry Plus in the Wondry app, Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Start your free trial by visiting www.wondry.com slash links slash kill hyphen list now. If you like Kill List, you can binge all episodes ad free right now by joining Wondry Plus in the Wondry app or on Apple Podcasts. Prime members can listen ad free on Amazon Music. Before you go, tell us about yourself by filling out a short survey at Wondry.com This special episode of Kill List is hosted by me, Karl Miller.

For novel, our series producer is Tom Wright. Our managing producer is Cherie Houston. Sound design and mixing by Nicholas Alexander. For Wandery, our senior producers are Peter Arcuni and Mandy Gorenstein. Sarah Mathers is our managing producer. Executive producers are George Lavender, Marshall Louis, Erin O'Flaher T and Jen Sargent.