"My rise in advertising was another accident. I had no interest in really going up the corporate ladder at all," Patterson says. "I'd gotten my first book published ('The Thomas Berryman Number'). It got turned down by 30-some publishers and then it won an Edgar (Award) as the best first mystery."

At 27, he thought he was on his way. "Then I fall in love with this woman and she developed a brain tumor. It was devastating to me."

After her death, Patterson threw himself into ad work, rising to chairman in about three years.

"I couldn't write, and I didn't want to be spend any time by myself," he recalls.

As the pain numbed, Patterson again took up writing but soon realized something was missing.

"I'm spending all this time writing and all the rest of the time, you know, doing this advertising stuff and I'm spending no time trying to find somebody," he says. "That's why I left. I left to find somebody."

Love, it seemed, was integral to his happiness and ultimately, to his personal success. He married his wife eight years ago and they now have an 8-year-old son, Jack.

Much like his accidents in life and love, Patterson's writing style — short, punchy sentences, less detail and more plot jammed into two-page chapters — also came by chance. He had written about 150 pages of "The Midnight Club," a story about a killer, a journalist and a cop published in 1999, when he got an idea.

He was planning to add details and descriptions "because that's the way we are all taught to do it, and I said, 'Ya know, I kinda like this.' There's way too much . . . that feels like it was taught somewhere," Patterson says. "I think that's a big bore."

For the most part, Patterson is laid back, unpretentious but also seemingly charmed by himself. Almost six feet tall with blue eyes barely peeking through the droops of his eyelids, he has an uncombed head of hair and crooked teeth.

Patterson does most of his writing longhand, in pencil, ("Me and Hemingway," he quips) at a round pine table in a small second-floor office in his home overlooking the Intracoastal Waterway. Some of it he does in bed.

He proudly points out photographs of former President Bill Clinton.

"You see what Clinton's got under his arm? A James Patterson book," the author says, a half-cocked smile creeping across his jowly face.

In the writing room, about a dozen neatly stacked piles of works-in-progress line a desktop.

"We just sold a couple of things to Hollywood — a Cross book, and a horror book for next year," Patterson says. "That's one that I wrote that I haven't gone further with. . . . That's the horror, that's next February. That's an outline for another one.

"I'm very lucky in that I have kind of the triple-header," Patterson adds, shaking his head in disbelief. "I love my little boy, I love my wife and I love what I do."