His Success Key: Write Novel Before Work

James B. Patterson is president of J. Walter Thompson USA, an advertising giant with $1.6 billion a year in billings. He calls himself “a late bloomer.” But he’s an early riser.

The reason: At 5:30 a.m. most weekdays, he starts the day by working on a mystery novel. He types until 7 a.m., then departs his Manhattan penthouse for the hurly-burly of big-league advertising.

The novel business has been good for him--he’s had five published. The latest, “The Midnight Club,” was optioned in December by film producer David Brown, whose dossier includes “Jaws” and “Cocoon.”

The book is about a tough, streetwise New York detective who works from a wheelchair. He was put there after being shot and crippled--and his wife killed--in retaliation for his efforts to nail a sleek, well-tailored, international criminal nicknamed the “Grave Dancer.”

The novel contains a good measure of hard-boiled suspense, the international drug trade, rogue cops, rotten officials, a dab of kinky sex and a love interest that evolves as the tale is told.

Patterson joined J. Walter Thompson in 1971 as a junior copywriter. He graduated to published novelist five years later.

A trim, bearded man who calls his reveille scrivening a form of recreation, he now is branching out to film, working on a screenplay as well as a sixth novel.

“I like it,” he says of screen-scripting. “I feel that it’s a better genre for me. I think I have a lot of stories. I think I know what I’m doing in the film area, because I’ve made so damn many films. . . .”

He refers to the 30-second kind for such entities as Burger King, Kodak, Slice and the Red Cross. That is a world from which more than a few now-hot directors in Hollywood have come.

Patterson got the suspense world’s equivalent of the Oscar his first time out with “The Thomas Berryman Number”--an Edgar Award in 1976 from the Mystery Writers of America for the best first mystery novel. About the assassination of an important black leader in the South, it’s the only book he ever wrote at night.

“Maybe there’s a lesson here,” he wryly observes. His first success stemmed from three things: a love of reading and writing that he discovered in college, a need for a spare-time outlet and loneliness.

At the time he began “Berryman,” Patterson--a graduate of Manhattan College who also has a master’s degree in English from Vanderbilt--was working his way up through the creative ranks at JWT.

His days were busy. Nighttime was another matter.

“I had no one to love, so I’d go home and write in the kitchen, sitting on an iron chair, writing on a table too high to really reach,” he recalls.

The next novel, “The Jericho Commandment,” was put together under happier circumstances, and in the process set the pattern for what now are his pre-dawn tussles with the muse.

There was a lady in his life by then. The nights were for her. “So I started writing in the morning. I’d found that if you want to have somebody in your life, better have some time for them.”

It helps, he observes, that “generally, people do not want to get up at 5:30 a.m.”

That the hero of his “The Midnight Club” is in a wheelchair is due to the experiences of a woman with whom Patterson once lived.

“About 6 1/2, 7 years into our relationship, she developed a brain tumor,” he says, softly and quickly. “It put her in a wheelchair for 2 1/2 years, and then she died.”

While alive, she remained vital, full of life despite her disability, he recalls, with a spirit that refused to quit. It was that spirit he put in the book, he says--that and his close-up awareness of the difficulties of life in a wheelchair.

“Society is just not geared for handicapped people,” he says, noting, for example, how on bitter cold nights “the cabs won’t stop because it’s going to take an extra two minutes to deal with the wheelchair and a handicapped person.”