James Patterson’s “The Thomas Berryman Number”: Does the bestselling author’s Edgar Award winning first novel reveal anything about his writing process?

This 1976 novel won an Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of America, but the plot is not a mystery. I was expecting there to be some twist at the end as to who killed the mayor. But there was none. The title character is a professional assassin, and it turns out that he, as the reader has been led to expect, did, in fact, do it.

Although the murder is not a mystery to the reader, it was, in the story, to the public, who thought that someone else had done it. The truth is uncovered when a psychiatrist contacts a newspaper reporter (the narrator) to say that a hospitalized mental patient had told a story about who was going to kill the mayor before the murder took place. The mental patient turns out to have been a partner of Thomas Berryman, the killer.

The peculiar thing about this story set-up is that the psychiatrist calls a reporter, not the police. To state this another way: two kinds of storyteller personalities (a violent, psychotic killer and a psychiatrist) communicate with a writer personality to produce the book.

James Patterson. The Thomas Berryman Number. New York, Warner Books, 1976.