Chances are he did—and does. Patterson has to juggle his career as a partner at one of the country's largest corporate law firms with single parenthood and writing—as well as his impending marriage to a woman with two small children of her own. Now he also faces all the complications of best-sellerdom. Even before its publication last month, his sexy courtroom thriller Degree of Guilt had become a Big Book, pulling an advance in the high six figures and $2 million in foreign rights, with a first printing of 25000 copies—241,500 more, he jokes, than any of his lour previous suspense novels. Reviews call the juicy read flawed but, in the words of San Francisco Chronicle critic Patricia Holt, "almost impossible to put down."
"I've been blown away [by the attention]," says Patterson, who denies that he was thinking blockbuster while writing his first book in eight years—a literary layoff devoted to parenthood and his legal career. "It's like being hit by a moon rock, only more enjoyable."
The latest attorney to follow Scott Throw and John Grisham onto the best-seller lists, Patterson sees a natural link between his profession and his increasingly lucrative avocation. "I don't think I could have been a writer without being a lawyer," says Patterson, who was already 29 and a partner in a Birmingham, Ala., securities firm when he began his first novel, the award-winning The Lasko Tangent. "The surprise, the revelation of character—lawyers get a wonderful insight into people."
The elder of two children of a now retired corporate executive and a housewife, the Berkeley, Calif.—born Patterson graduated from Ohio Wesleyan University and Case Western Reserve Law School. Soon he was working in Washington for the Securities and Exchange Commission as part of a team investigating whether former SEC chief William Casey had obstructed justice by terminating a politically sensitive investigation of ITT. (Casey was never indicted.) His work on that case inspired The Lasko Tangent, in which a young lawyer named Christopher Paget probes a Watergate-like conspiracy.
Paget returns in Degree of Guilt, racked by personal and ethical conflicts as he struggles to defend a former lover, the mother of his son, from charges she murdered a famous macho writer. Still mirroring the experience of his creator, Paget has by this time moved to San Francisco and become a corporate attorney and single dad with a taste for candlelight dinners as a device to strengthen family ties.
"I think becoming a single parent was probably the most important experience of my adult life," says Patterson, who ultimately took custody of his son Brooke, now 16, after splitting with his first wife. (Her daughter Shannon, 21, whom he adopted, attends the University of Washington.) Suddenly Patterson was trying to duck business trips, schedule appointments around his son's sports activities and "make sure to be home at night and cook dinner." ("Lots of steaks in the broiler—and not very good ones at that," deadpans Brooke.)
Patterson also managed to squeeze in writing sessions, but in 1985, after he joined his current firm of McCutchen, Doyle, Brown & Enersen and remarried, he realized the books had to go. "Being a good dad is not an optional activity," he says. Soon afterward a Washington Post review of his fourth novel, Private Screening, said he was on his way to becoming America's best mystery writer. (Patterson and his second wife divorced in 1989). She retains custody of their 4-year-old son, Adam.)
In the intervening years, says Patterson, "I kept thinking, 'I wonder if I can still write a novel?' " He decided to find out last year—and churned out the bulk of Degree of Guilt on a three-month sabbatical from his job. Afterward, he pushed himself hard to complete it. Live-in fiancée Laurie Anderson, 34, a divorced insurance broker, still shakes her head over the drive that got Patterson up at 4:30 a.m. to write before work.
The couple plan an April wedding. But before that, they and the kids—Brooke, plus Katie, 8, and Steven, 6—will move into a six-bedroom Victorian house, bankrolled by the new book, in tony Pacific Heights. The ending Patterson anticipates is definitely happily ever after. "We almost feel like we've been in training, "he says, "to put our two families together and to make a success of it."
PAM LAMBERT
JOHNNY DODD in San Francisco
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