One of Fiction's Most Popular Detectives Finally Has His Own TV ...

The most frustrating thing about James Patterson’s 2022 memoir, James Patterson by James Patterson, is that there’s not really enough in it about James Patterson. Seriously. The book barely touches on the invention of Alex Cross, the one distinctive and lasting creation of a novelist not renowned for his originality. Cross is also the hero, played by Aldis Hodge, of a new series from Amazon Prime Video, the third shot at bringing the Washington psychologist and detective to the screen, after he was played by Morgan Freeman in 1997’s Kiss the Girls and 2001’s Along Came a Spider and by Tyler Perry in 2012’s Alex Cross.

Patterson is known for cranking out formulaic thrillers—brisk airport time killers with short sentences and chapters—at a truly impressive rate, including books for which Patterson provides an outline and a co-author supplies the actual text. One thing Patterson does get into in his autobiography is the importance of outlining, a practice he recommends even to grade-school children. His first Alex Cross novel, 1993’s Along Came a Spider, began as an outline. “When I went back to start the novel itself,” Patterson wrote in his memoir, “I realized that I had already written it.”

But while Patterson’s novels are short on atmosphere and nuance, Along Came a Spider showed an awareness of and sensitivity to the role of race in its main character’s life that you just didn’t see in thrillers in the early ’90s, especially thrillers written by white men. Cross is always conscious of how his race affects his work and life, from his commitment to remaining in the neighborhood where he grew up to his acute awareness of the fact that he and his partner are the only Black faces in the lobby of a posh private school when they arrive to investigate the disappearance of two white children. Above all, Cross complains that investigations of crimes committed against Black Washingtonians get short shrift compared to crimes with white victims. At one point in Along Came a Spider, Cross’ grandmother—a highly sympathetic character—tells him, “I do not trust most white people. I would like to, but I can’t. Most of them have no respect for us.” That may sound unremarkable today, but in a work of mainstream commercial fiction in 1993, it was extraordinary. (Sadly, James Patterson by James Patterson relates nothing of how or why he did any of this, besides noting that he’d initially conceived of Cross as female.)

The best parts of Prime’s Cross series are the ones that pick up this thread in Patterson’s novel and run with it. Apart from a few higher-ups in the police brass, all the significant characters in Cross’ life are Black, and their social world—from family karaoke nights to house parties—feels warm, rich, and authentic.

To this end, showrunner Ben Watkins expertly deploys little details and interactions. In one scene, Cross meets with the family of a police-violence activist. They insist their relative has been murdered, possibly by the police themselves, while Cross’ bosses want him—one of the force’s most prominent Black detectives—to declare the crime either an accidental overdose or a suicide. Cross believes that the activist was murdered, but by a person unknown. When he asks the dead man’s mother if the victim had been using a dating app, she says yes, then specifies that he would have used an app to meet men. The victim’s sister gasps. She had no idea her mother knew that her brother was gay, and how could their mom have let him sneak around to hide it from her? “I figured he’d tell me when he was ready,” the older woman replies. It’s a whole family drama in a few lines, and these characters aren’t even central to the series’ plot.

Unfortunately, the series’ beautifully rendered setting must play host to a serial-killer yarn that’s as hokey as anything you’d find in a James Patterson novel, even though it was invented for the show. Patterson’s villains tend to be cackling grotesques whose behavior is so freakish you’d think they wouldn’t be able to order a cup of coffee without the white coats being called in to cart them off. The series’ bad guy—a smooth-talking, fabulously wealthy bottle blond played by Ryan Eggold—is identified in the first episode, fondling his scrapbook of famous serial killers and lovingly pasting in photos of his own victims, people chosen for their resemblance to his idols. As motives go, this one is so preposterous it’s almost campy, as Eggold seems well aware.

We all know how this goes, and Cross does not hesitate to follow the well-worn paths of past serial-killer thrillers. Cross has the obligatory murdered wife, whose loss haunts him and stokes his quest for justice. He is the first to recognize that a serial killer is at work, and as he intensely contemplates the whiteboard plastered with victims’ photos, his partner (a delightful Isaiah Mustafa, also known as the Old Spice guy) shushes their colleagues, announcing, “He’s doing his thing!” That thing involves producing such insights as “He thinks he’s an artist. He wants to leave behind a masterwork.” Crime fiction has always loved the idea of profiling—even though in real life it has now been largely discredited—because it involves constructing an entire character out of a handful of gestures and traits, much as novelists and actors do.

Meanwhile, someone shadowy and ingenious has been messing with Cross, invading his home, hacking into his home security system to talk to his kids, leaving a dress once worn by a defendant he helped convict hanging from a tree over his wife’s grave. Maybe it’s connected to the serial killer now dubbed the Fanboy by the cops, even as they complain about the “media having a field day” with the nickname? These were shopworn devices when Patterson started using them decades ago, and they feel immensely tired next to the vibrant scenes from Cross’ own life.

The really interesting mysteries in Cross have nothing to do with the Fanboy or the creep who slipped a recording of a 911 call into the Cross family’s karaoke machine. Hodge’s soulful performance breathes life into even the tired trope of the grieving cop who refuses therapy, but the series could have done a lot more with this paradox, given that Cross is himself a psychologist. An especially intriguing moment comes at a dinner party thrown by Cross’ new love interest (Samantha Walkes), where Cross mutters, “No one wants to defund the police” and gets challenged by a stockbroker who’s just been expounding on investment strategies. “I don’t understand how a Black man could be a cop,” the man says. “I’d feel like I was selling out my own people.” Cross responds with a grilling about the affluent, crime-free, and mostly white neighborhood where the broker lives, a bit of class friction that generates a pleasing amount of dramatic heat.

These are problems less easily solved than catching a billionaire maniac with a serial-killer fetish, and furthermore, unlike the maniac, they are also problems that exist in real life. If Cross continues, it ought to locate the crimes that Cross solves more firmly in the world it has taken so much care to create for him.