Although President Bill Clinton’s healthcare plans were blocked and his Middle East peace initiative failed, his eight years in the White House had an enduring influence on mystery fiction.
His habit of carrying a thriller in photo-range when boarding Air Force One or Marine One raised the sales of authors including Walter Mosley, PD James and Richard North Patterson. And the scandals that shadowed the Clinton presidency – both financial (Whitewater) and sexual (Gennifer Flowers, Monica Lewinsky) – also liberated political novelists to darken their tone, starting with David Baldacci’s Absolute Power in 1996, in which the president is a rapist-murderer.
This brings a literary as well as a marketing logic to Clinton’s co-written fictional debut. James Patterson is an advertising executive turned author who has achieved an industrial rate of production (300m-plus copies sold), often by using co-writers, but getting a former president on the ticket is his greatest publicity coup yet.
Clinton and Patterson have created President Duncan, whose party affiliation is carefully unspecified, presumably to avoid alienating either Democrat or Republican readers in the current viciously divided America that is also reflected in the book’s fictional political world. Across five days in May, Duncan has to prevent a terrorist cyber attack that, if it infects the internet, will inflict on the United States “massive loss of life … an economic crash greater than the Depression … and violent anarchy”.
The role of the protagonist inevitably prompts the reader to engage in a game of ticks and crosses, noting overlaps between Duncan and Clinton. The fictional president is a former governor of a southern state (tick), shares a middle name with a great US leader (Lincoln rather than Jefferson: tick), has an intelligent and impressive daughter (tick), and faces impeachment proceedings that he insists are a conspiracy by opponents (tick).
However, Duncan is also a former war hero (cross) and a widower (possibly making Hillary cross), two attributes that would have spared Clinton from being attacked as a draft-dodging adulterer.
The report of special prosecutor Kenneth Starr into the Lewinsky business revealed that Clinton once gave his Secret Service detail the slip by removing a shoe that contained a GPS tracker; that moment of security truancy may have informed the titular premise of The President Is Missing, which is unusual among US political thrillers in including few scenes at the White House and none at Camp David. Unable to trust even his closest aides, Duncan, like Henry V before Agincourt, first secretes himself among his people, and then, like King Lear, sets up a hidden power base in the wilds.
While the precise division of labour between co-writers is always blurred, there is an obvious temptation to attribute to Patterson the whizzy, twisty techno-thriller bits (“It’s possible this is a distributive system, meaning the viruses are communicating from device to device”), and to Clinton the intermittent state-of-the-nation editorials: “In America, racism is our oldest curse. But there are other divides – over religion, immigration, sexual identity.” A nine-page speech given by President Duncan to both houses of Congress at a point of crisis reads explicitly as what Clinton would say if he were permitted to give a State of the Union address at this moment in American history: “Our democracy cannot survive its current downward drift into tribalism, extremism, and seething resentment.”
Those with knowledge of Clinton’s geopolitical opinions may also have an advantage in guessing their way through the labyrinthine spaghetti of Patterson’s plot. The locations most pivotal to the action are Israel, Germany, Bosnia, Saudi Arabia and Russia. And it is not plot-spoiling to say that reasonable bets can be made on which nations will prove to be goodies or baddies from awareness of Clinton’s administrations, his 2004 memoir My Life, or one of the alleged causes of his wife failing to become president. If the novel were a pantomime, readers would feel encouraged to hiss when representatives of Russia appear and to applaud Israel and Germany, although Patterson is an accomplished enough writer to sometimes disrupt our assumptions.
The book’s biggest selling point, though, is the guarantee of political authenticity. Duncan’s observation that a “president never has to repeat himself”, as the entourage is always listening so intently, has the feel of experience. Many novelists have imagined what it might be like to telephone the mother of a dead soldier, or to decide what level of foreign civilian casualties might be acceptable: such scenes in this book fly the kite-mark of unmatchable psychological veracity.
The joshing jockeying between world leaders when they meet – including an Israeli prime minister who is reminiscent of Clinton’s assassinated friend Yitzhak Rabin – is surely taken from life. And passages dealing with the curious history of the wallpaper in the White House dining room, showing “scenes from the revolutionary war”, or the exact circumstances in which a president can refuse Secret Service protection, also feel lived rather than Googled.
Most striking is the frequent emphasis on the absolute loneliness of high political power. By giving Duncan a dead wife and a largely untrusted staff, the writers leave him isolated amid crisis, so that he often tells himself – and the reader – that it all comes down to him. While this follows the alone-against-the-world trope that is standard to thrillers, it can also be read as the closest the book comes to a critique of the Trump presidency, perhaps warning against the consoling view that even the most unsuitable of presidents can’t do much on their own. In this depiction, an American leader has terrifying power and responsibility.
It would be a heroically forbearing reader who did not look between the lines for Hillary or Monica. Sex is so pointedly absent from the book – Duncan is the sort of widower who remains celibate out of respect to his late wife – that in one scene the president agrees to meet a young female stranger alone in the Oval Office without anyone questioning the wisdom of this.
With regard to the possibility that, in other circumstances, the book might have been published during a second Clinton presidency, the narrative is less diplomatic. Although President Duncan expresses the hope that America will soon have a woman as leader, two major female characters – Vice-President Katherine Brandt and chief of staff Carolyn Brock – do not serve as great advertisements for this prospect, often seeming conniving and resentful, their ambition presented as more questionable than a man’s. Although Hillary Clinton is one of the book’s dedicatees, she might question why it is a female politician who is indicted for “envy, resentment, bitterness” in the book’s conclusion.
If Clinton clearly brings new details and insights to the presidential thriller, his co-writer stays closer to convention. Some elements – a Bach-loving assassin, assorted boat and car chases – could have come from almost any Patterson book. The greatest justification of the project is that the eventual revelation of the villain, which is satisfying and surprising, really does feel like the outcome of a conversation between one writer with an unusual skill at thriller plotting and another with an exceptional grasp of global politics. The literary running mates have earned a second term.
Mark Lawson’s latest book is The Allegations (Picador).
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