It began with "Miracle on the 17th Green," a story of a middle-aged man seeking the extraordinary from his ordinary life, written with de Jonge.

"Peter is a better stylist than I am, and I'm a better story teller than he is," Patterson says. He's since worked with five co-authors.

Patterson writes the story outline. The co-author pens a first draft. After a series of back-and-forths, a new book is produced in about half the time.

"If you commit to my style, it's very doable for a collaborator," he says.

Patterson's editor at Little Brown and Company said a bit of nervousness followed the first collaboration.

"We were very careful and watched it very closely," said Michael Pietsch, also Little Brown's publisher. The books have sold just as well, Pietsch said.

As for working with Patterson?

"It's just like working with any other writer except that I do it a lot more often," Pietsch said.

Of critics who say he's industrialized the art of novel writing with an assembly line production style and flashy marketing, Patterson shrugs, yet seems to take offense.

"Just because it's clean prose doesn't mean it's necessarily easy to do," he says. "It's hard to keep people glued to the page. Almost nobody does it . . . and if nobody does it, it can't be that easy."

Patterson was raised in upstate New York, the son of an insurance salesman. At 19, he took a job as a night shift psychiatric aide in a Massachusetts mental hospital, a move that would set off a series of what he calls "accidents" that eventually created the phenomenon of Patterson the master marketer, the man who can write no flop.

"That's when I really started reading a lot, but it was all serious stuff," Patterson says. "I didn't read commercial stuff and somewhere along the way I read 'Ulysses', and I love (James) Joyce anyway, and I thought I'm not even going to try to write serious fiction because I can't get anywhere near here."

In his 20s, he read Frederick Forsyth's "The Day of The Jackal" and William Peter Blatty's "The Exorcist." Something hit him.

"These are good, too, in their own funny way," Patterson recalls thinking to himself. "I could do something like this."

And the "scribbling" began.

Patterson graduated summa cum laude from Manhattan College in the Bronx and later left Vanderbilt University with a masters in English without much of a clue what to do next.

"I thought it was foolhardy of me to think that I could make a living writing," he says.

He took a job as a copywriter with J. Walter Thompson in the ad agency's New York office.