Peter Brendt
New Member
But what case did James Patterson get his inspiration from?
Well, after having written some dozen books myself (even not in English but mostly in German), including some serial killers, terrorists, and a little "how to steal the Golden Gate Bridge", I could give you kind of a cooking recipe how to write an SK thriller without one concrete case as inspiration. See, as writer, many just have a character and build the case around the character, not vice versa. Sullivan once brough up a nice example. He had seen those pentecostal churches with their snake rituals, somewhere in Pennsylvania or so. Well, he watched them and the result was an SK killing with snakes in a way never a real case occurred. Personally, I think, he was a little scared by the snakes.
Often, we have long lists of possible details we mix to get our plots together. Thriller writers can be a devious bloodthirsty bunch and they have in average higher IQs and more imagination than SKs. Well, except for that guy in Mexico, I think. He wrote horror and ate five people in the course of his research for the next book, so ... well, I think, you get the point.