The editor who bought The Thomas Berryman Number at Little, Brown was the legendary Ned Bradford, a big deal, a star in the publishing world. Ned Bradford had worked with Norman Mailer, John Fowles, Herman Wouk, and pretty much every major writer that Little, Brown published in those days. And now he was working with twenty-six-year-old me.
Of course, I never felt I was worthy of being included in the same paragraph with Mailer, Fowles, and Herman Wouk. But, hey, all four of us are in this paragraph.
In those days, Little, Brown was located on Beacon Street in Boston. It was winter when I visited their offices in this picturesque brick town house called the Cabot Mansion. A very proper but also sweet receptionist brought me to the library room.
There was a fire blazing. She gave me some tea. It was perfect. I’m not kidding you—perfect.
I walked around the library, light-headed, proud as could be, stunned that I was there. Not completely believing I was.
On the library shelves were The French Lieutenant’s Woman, The Catcher in the Rye, several Norman Mailer books. I’m thinking to myself, Holy shit. This is the best moment of my life. No matter what happens after today, they can’t take this away from me.
It definitely was the best moment of my life—just being allowed in that library room, waiting for my famous editor, Ned Bradford, to come down, see me, and talk for hours about my novel to be published at the Little, Brown, one of America’s most prestigious publishing houses.
Bradford came down the stairs. On time. We put on our overcoats and he took me around the corner to a famous Boston restaurant, the Locke-Ober Café. In the main dining room hung Mlle. Yvonne, a Tommaso Juglaris nude. Even in the 1970s, women could not sit at the bar, although they could eat in the restaurant. I thought it was a crazy rule, but I wasn’t going to make a scene about it.
Ned Bradford told me he’d sent The Thomas Berryman Number—my novel about a black politician in the South targeted by a professional assassin—out for author quotes. Then he showed me the first response he’d gotten.
I set down the fork I was using to eat my perfectly prepared Dover fricking sole at Locke-Ober. I began to read, then quickly reread.
The author who’d sent the blurb was John D. MacDonald, who wrote the Travis McGee mystery series. MacDonald was famous and very well respected. What he wrote about my novel sent a shiver right through me. John D. MacDonald said, “I’m quite sure that James Patterson wrote a million words before he even started this novel.”
I was twenty-six years old, so the million-words part wasn’t exactly true, but what a compliment to receive. Maybe I was going to be a writer after all.
Maybe.
But not yet.