Maxine Paetro

My life has been a jumbled succession of accidents and incidents, tough luck, dumb luck, good breaks, and damned good breaks fueled by curiosity, fear, naivete, determination, and optimism.

In the late ‘60s, after two years of college – I dropped out — and after a year living and working as a shop-girl in London, I moved to New York and got a good dog, a walk-up apartment in the Village and like my father, I went into sales. From carrying 25 lb. electronic calculators through the meat market on Gansevoort Street in all kinds of weather, I realized that I would like sales better if I worked at a desk indoors.

I became a headhunter and recruiter and was assigned to a territory. My new specialty was finding jobs for “advertising agency creative people.” That job was one of those dumb luck things because I knew very little about advertising. But I took to it, made placements and new friends in advertising, and became an expert.

This was a turning point in my career. I was hired by a large advertising agency to recruit creative people. Some people brought their books to me in New York and I also recruited at schools nationwide. While at Foote Cone and Belding, I wrote “How To Put Your Book Together and Get a Job in Advertising,“ a primer for would-be beginners hoping to get their first jobs.

This book turned out to be an entirely good thing for several reasons. It was a rainy day when the first copy of the published book arrived. I was leaving the agency for the day during a downpour, and the Pan Am building had a taxi turn-around under an overhang. I got into a cab with a woman I didn’t know. Her name was Karen Anderegg, and she was the managing editor of Mademoiselle Magazine. I showed her my book and told her I was a bit disappointed in how small it looked. Karen gave me the name and number of her friend, Val Weaver, the editor of Self Magazine, who published my first magazine story.

I began writing first-person adventure stories for many magazines, including Self, Mademoiselle, Cosmopolitan, Men’s Health and New Woman. And I wrote a novel called Manshare, which was my first. Two novels followed, Babydreams and Windfall, and I continued to write magazine adventure stories. I flew through hurricanes, swam with sharks, and knocked on doors with Jehovah’s Witnesses. I catcalled men in New York and returned to my high school to see how the cheerleaders had fared now that we were all about fifty years old.  For that same reason, I pitched a story to my editor at New Woman. It was about a nude cruise on a sailing ship, a week in the Caribbean.

She said, “That’s disgusting.” When I said, “It’s a Halloween cruise. What do nudists wear on Halloween?” She gave me the assignment, and I had my first sailing journey — in the nude.

At about that time, in the mid-1990s, I was co-authoring a biography about the son of singer and actor Bobby Darin and his wife, movie star Sandra Dee, with their son, Dodd Darin and I was writing full-time. One day, cold and lonely in my apartment with my cat, I called an old acquaintance from my days as a recruiter who was then the Executive Creative Director of J. Walter Thompson, USA. I  asked if he had an office I could use to finish “The Magnificent Shattered Lives of Bobby Darin and Sandra Dee.”

“Come on up,” James Patterson said. “Bring your cat.”

I left Pumpkin at home and went to work at J. Walter Thompson, helped recruit creative talent, finished the Darin book, and had a magazine assignment to cross the Atlantic in a four-masted sailing ship – but before I left for this journey, James asked me if I’d like to write with him. But first, he wanted me to write a sample chapter. I said, “Yes!” But I had planned the transatlantic crossing and asked Jim if the chapter could wait until my return.  He said, “Okay, but in that case, I’ll have to raise the bar.”

Taking no chances, I wrote the chapter and boarded that sailing ship traveling from Barbados to Spain for three weeks at sea. While aboard the Star Clipper, halfway across the Atlantic, I received a cable from Jim. The job was mine. The trip was fabulous, and the story was wonderfully published. Thirty years later, I’m still writing with Jim Patterson, primarily The Women’s Murder Club series, other James Patterson thrillers and some standalone novels, including Woman of God.

In 2001, I married John Duffy, a versatile, resolute New Yorker. We live part-time in NYC and part-time at our house in a farm town in upstate New York. We’re taking a holiday break right now, and I’m writing this from a small cabin on the Star Clipper, a sailing trip traveling from Malaga to Malta. I call it a good and lucky thing.