Alex Cross is a series of books by James Patterson. The protagonist is a detective that lives in Washington, D.C..
The Books in the Series
- Along Came a Spider
- Kiss the Girls
- Jack & Jill
- Cat and Mouse
- Pop Goes the Weasel
- Roses Are Red
- Violets Are Blue
- Four Blind Mice
- The Big Bad Wolf
- London Bridges
- Mary, Mary
- Cross
- Double Cross
- Cross Country
- Alex Cross's Trial
- I, Alex Cross
- Cross Fire
- Kill Alex Cross
- Merry Christmas, Alex Cross
- Alex Cross, Run
- Cross My Heart
- Hope To Die
- Cross Justice
- Cross the Line
- The People vs. Alex Cross
- Target: Alex Cross
- Criss Cross
- Deadly Cross
- Fear No Evil
- Triple Cross
- Cross Down
- Cross Out
Three novels have been adapted for the big screen:
- Along Came a Spider (where the character was played by Morgan Freeman).
- Kiss the Girls (also starring Morgan Freeman).
- Alex Cross (based on Cross where he is played by Tyler Perry).
This series provides examples of:
- And Now for Someone Completely Different: In Cat and Mouse Alex Cross gets attacked and taken to the hospital in serious condition. The next chapter starts with Thomas Pierce, a brand new narrator who was introduced earlier, while we're still reeling from the removal of Cross. He turns out to be Mr. Smith, the second serial killer of the book, the same one he was investigating.
- Agony of the Feet: The Gentleman Caller’s M.O. is to cut off the feet of his victims.
- Anonymous Killer Narrator: Almost every book contains this, except for the ones where the killer's identity is known from the beginning.
- Artistic License – History: Alex Cross's Trial. This book, set when Teddy Roosevelt was president (i.e., between September 14, 1901 and March 4, 1909) and which claims to be historically accurate, makes the following mistakes:
- The book focuses on lynchings taking place in the South, stressing that this is unusual and is not happening anywhere else, even though lynchings have taken place everywhere in America—the South, the Midwest, the West and yes, in the North.
- Roosevelt sends the white hero, Ben Corbett to his hometown of Eudora, Mississippi and report on lynchings and Klan activities. The modern version of the Klan was not founded till 1915, in Georgia, and wasn't a major movement until after World War I. The Reconstruction Klan was dissolved after ca. 1877. (Patterson admits that it had been disbanded officially, but maintains that it existed at the time of the story (possible) and that its impact was so great as to merit Presidential investigation (not supported by historical record)).
- Three "White Raiders" (read: Klansmen) are arrested (by a sheriff who's a Klansman and who believes in what they're doing) and Roosevelt sends one Jonah Curtis to prosecute the case. Jonah is a black man. It's not that Jonah's black and practicing law; the first African-American to be admitted to a state bar was Macon Bolling Allen
in July 1844. The problem is that Jonah is a black man who, between 1901 and 1909, apparently works for the federal government and is recognized by the state of Mississippi as an attorney. To find a situation that's more or less analogous, the first black man to serve as an assistant U.S. Attorney in Mississippi since Reconstruction was Tyree Irving. He was hired by the Northern District of Mississippi in 1978. - Roosevelt claims that the above lawsuit will ensure him the black vote for all time, despite the common ways that white people of the period kept blacks and other minorities from voting like the poll tax and literacy tests.
- At the end of the book, Ben takes Moody Cross (Alex's ancestor) into Eudora, walking hand in hand with her and walking into restaurants and stores demanding that they be served and actually expecting the store owners to comply. This is despite that segregation and Jim Crow laws existed, something that an attorney would know about.
- Special mention must be made of the treatment of black civil rights leaders in this book. Leaders of the time, like W.E.B. Du Bois and Ida Wells-Barnett, are mentioned, but the book doesn't say who they are or what they did. Consequently, all we have are names and no context. And in the end, they're reduced to leading a group of blacks through town, chanting. Although it's never stated, it's implied that they're doing this because that's what civil rights leaders do. It's not like they found things like the NAACP (which Du Bois did in 1909) or work as journalists for Chicago papers and write books and give lectures throughout Europe about lynching (which Wells-Barnett did starting in 1893).
- Attention Whore: Gary Soneji’s crimes are spurred due to his desire for fame.
- Bad Boss: Chief Of Detectives Pittman.
- Batter Up!: The Sojourner Truth School killer in Jack and Jill uses a cut off, tape reinforced bat to kill his victims.
- Blood Lust: Soneji in Cat and Mouse incorporates blood as a trademark.
- Broken Bird: Years of publishing the Gentleman Caller’s diary entries have clearly had an effect on Beth Lieberman.
- The Butcher: The hitman antagonist of Cross.
- Card-Carrying Villain: The Gentleman Caller from Kiss The Girls, unlike his partner Casanova, is well aware what he does is wrong and has no illusions he is anything but a violent Serial Killer.
- The Casanova: The villain of Kiss the Girls is actually named Casanova, a criminal who builds a modern day harem of kidnapped women.
- Clear Their Name: In Cross Justice Alex's cousin Stefan Tate is accused of murdering a young boy, and is facing the death penalty. Alex Cross helps defend him, but acknowledges that if he is guilty he will not have any problem watching him die. It turns out the real killer was the boy's grandfather, who hated him for being part black, and Tate was framed because he was looking into the drug business in the school he worked.
- Cold-Blooded Torture: In London Bridges The Wolf and his men kidnap Geoffrey Shafer and torture him by dangling him from the ceiling and shaking his head repeatedly to slam his brain against his skull. The Wolf did this because he wanted to establish his dominance before making Shafer work for him.
- Combat Pragmatist: Kiss the Girls has Kate McTiernan who takes self-defense classes, with the Groin Attack recommended. When Casanova abducts her, she kicks him in the nuts. Unfortunately, Casanova was wearing protection because he had been watching her go to her self-defense classes.
- Creepy Crossdresser:
- Kidnapper Kelli Adams in Cross My Heart turns out to be one of the split personalities of Kenneth Carney, and was based off his dead sister.
- Cross Justice has Coco who is introduced in woman's clothing before being revealed to be a man. He murders the women that he paints pictures of.
- Crusading Widow: Cross lost his wife Maria before the series began, a death that is finally solved in Cross. He gets married again to Bree Stone near the end of Cross Fire.
- Darker and Edgier: Although the series is already dark on its own, Cross Country is noticeably more emotionally charged and violent compared to earlier entries. Not to mention the antagonist using Child Soldiers and the third part of the book dealing with the War in Darfur.
- A Deadly Affair: In Cross the Line one of the plots involves the murder of police captain Tom McGrath and his girlfriend Edita. The culprit was Alexander Gordon, the lover of McGrath's estranged wife Vivian, who kept their relationship secret because he was her divorce attorney. Due to losing money to a bad investment, Gordon planned to set up a memorial charity with Tom McGrath's life insurance policy, and steal from it. When exposed Gordon kills Vivian, holds Detective Bree Stone hostage, and is shot by the her partner Mueller.
- Depraved Homosexual:
- The Big Bad Wolf Potter, aka Homer O'Taylor, is the only client of the sex ring that buys male slaves.
- Alex Cross, Run Joshua Bergman is a serial killer who targets male hustlers, and has forces his male accomplice to kiss him.
- Depraved Bisexual: Geoffrey Shafer aka "The Weasel" is stated to be one, when they note that his male victim was sodomized.
- Diplomatic Impunity: In Pop Goes the Weasel, Geoffrey Shafer is a British diplomat (and ex-Special Forces assassin) who abuses this to get away with murder. Although his government eventually waives the immunity and allows him to be put on trial, his assertion of the immunity during his arrest leads to the most damning evidence being suppressed, and he is acquitted.
- Dirty Cop:
- In Along Came A Spider Mike Devine and Charley Chakely, the Secret Service agents in charge of protecting Maggie Rose and Michael, and Jezzie Flannagan, the head of the children's Secret Service detail, actually arranged the kidnapping to take the ransom money for themselves.
- In Kiss The Girls Alex suspects Detective Davey Sikes to be Casanova, but it turns out to be his partner Nick Ruskin.
- Roses Are Red:
- The third robbery crew the Mastermind hires are detectives.
- The Mastermind himself turns out to be FBI Agent Kyle Craig.
- In Cross Justice the police are paid to ignore the hand signals between the members of the drug ring known as "the company". One of them has a sick daughter who's medical bills are being paid with the dirty money.
- In Cross the Line DEA Agent Jed Potter who leaks information to the vigilante Regulators, tells them the name of a witness, and lets himself be shot and injured in the raid as cover.
- Disability Alibi: In Cross the Line.
- One subplot involves motorcycle drive-by shootings, targeting unsafe drivers. Cross and Sampson question former Navy SEAL Nick Condon who tells them that a quick look at his medical history will prove he cannot shoot a pistol from a motorcycle, and shows them his wrist braces and the scars beneath them. His chaplain clarifies that Condon injured his wrists, resulting in his discharge. He is an excellent rifle shot but couldn't hold a pistol.
- Another subplot involves the deaths of Police Captain Tommy McGrath and his girlfriend Edita. The main suspect is disgraced cop Terry Howard, but Cross notes that Howard was never a particularly good shot, and the shoots were done with near perfect precision. Indeed the real perpetrator was a competitive shooter with perfect scores.
- The Dog Was the Mastermind: In Cross the Line, Jeb Whittaker, the Naval Academy Instructor Cross and Samson meet while visiting the academy, turns out to be both motorcycle vigilante Mercury and Regulators leader John Brown.
- Doting Parent: In Cross Justice "the grandfather", despite being vaguely creepy, is shown to be loving and caring to his granddaughter. Which makes it more disturbing when we find out he brutally killed his grandson for being part black.
- Embarrassing Nickname: Although the embarrassing part is debatable, Sampson calls Cross "sugar".
- Evil Cripple: "John Brown" the Regulator's leader has an artificial leg.
- Facial Horror: The female victims from Mary, Mary had their faces skinned off.
- Flayed Alive: In the end of Cat And Mouse Thomas Pierce aka Mr. Smith does this to himself.
- Foreshadowing: In Cross the Line both Mercury and John Brown are both introduced noting that they take up an identity to go to war, because they are the same person.
- Freudian Excuse: Some of his villains have very painful reasons for what they do. Examples include:
- Gary Murphy/Soneji: he was abused by his father and stepmother when he was young.
- The Butcher from Cross: his father molested him.
- The killer in Cross My Heart Kenneth Carney's younger siblings were killed by his mom who was killed by his dad. This caused him to snap, form split personalities, and force prostitutes to drown children the way his mother killed his siblings.
- Friend on the Force:
- FBI Agent Kyle Craig acts as Cross's connection to the Bureau. Subverted in Roses Are Red, where he turns out to be the criminal known as the Mastermind.
- In Cross, when Cross leaves the FBI, he helps the investigation as a civilian consultant, with his former partner Sampson acting as this.
- After rejoining the Metro PD, Cross's former FBI partner Ned Mahoney acts as his federal connection.
- Gory Discretion Shot: It's not uncommon for a chapter to end vaguely hinting at what has taken place. A particularly disturbing example from I, Alex Cross when the Big Bad, Zeus, visits the sex club that he frequents and takes two girls to his private room. After binding and gagging the two girls, he pulls out a taser gun and a pair of pliers before the chapter ends.
- Happy-Ending Massage: Kevin Olmstead in Cross My Heart targets parlors that offers these.
- Hate Sink: Chief of Detectives George Pittman is a closet racist, bullies his fellow officers, particularly cops, and seems to take pride in stopping Cross from solving crimes that happened to minorities and the poor.
- Heterosexual Life-Partners: Cross and Sampson.
- Hollywood Law: Alex Cross's Trial. The book is about a white attorney, Ben Corbett, coming to his hometown of Eudora, Mississippi and investigating lynchings and Klan activity at the command of President Teddy Roosevelt, putting the book's date range between September 14, 1901 and March 4, 1909. The book fairly drips with examples of this trope. Here are a few:
- In a town dominated by the Klan (which had been officially disbanded since around 1877 and which didn't exist in its modern form until 1915, but that's another issue) and in which the sheriff is a sincere member of the Klan, two "White Raiders" who have come to lynch an old black man and his granddaughter die—one by falling off a roof and the other by being stabbed in the back by the granddaughter. The granddaughter is not only not convicted of murder or manslaughter, she never even gets arrested. The three surviving Raiders were arrested by the sheriff, despite that fact that he is a Klansman who believes in what they're doing. It seems that Patterson forgot that self-defense is a plea the defendant makes in court, not an excuse for the cops not to arrest someone, and racist, Klan-loving cops would be especially unlikely not to.
- Ben Corbett's father is appointed judge, despite the fact that he handles traffic cases and small claims cases between neighbors. This means he is a judge of a small-town civil court, not the judge of a county or state criminal court, and his court doesn't have jurisdiction.
- The sheriff tells another cop to read the surviving Raiders their rights. The concept of the Miranda rights didn't come into existence until the Supreme Court decision in the case of Miranda v. Arizona in 1966. This novel is set somewhere between 1901 and 1909. Miranda rights don't exist yet; Ernesto Miranda himself wouldn't even be born until the '40s.
- Ben, mid-trial, gets an idea: he and one of his friends will break into the photography offices of Scooter Williams, who takes pictures of every single lynching, and steal the photos and the negatives. Then he will bring the stolen pictures into court as evidence. This ignores several facts:
- Stolen pictures may be inadmissible. This may or may not be a handicap: most states didn't have a rule against this before Mapp v. Ohio, and even now it only applies to police or people acting as their agents. So they would be liable for burglary and theft, but the pictures could still be admitted.
- Even if they weren't stolen, the grisly pictures are horrible, yes, and they are certainly proof that lynching exists, which is what Roosevelt wanted Ben to find, but they aren't evidence of anything in this case. They do prove that the men who went to the Crosses' house had attended lynchings. But they don't prove that these men went to the Crosses' to commit a lynching or that they attacked the Crosses with intent to commit murder, and any first-year law student would argue as much.
- If the pictures weren't considered prejudicial to the jury and thrown out of the evidence list during preparations for the trial.
- Since the evidence lists are prepared before trial and are seen by attorneys for both sides, it's unlikely that the judge would accept new evidence mid-trial that the other side hadn't seen—even if the evidence was obtained legally and proved that the defendants were guilty.note
- The Raiders claimed they had a search warrant, and that Cross's let them in. Moody Cross (the aforementioned granddaughter and Alex Cross's ancestor) instead of contesting that claim, perjures herself by saying that they did have a warrant and she agreed to let them and then they attacked them after that. Ben thinks that this changes everything because now the official story isn't that the Crosses fought men who were performing their legal duty, but that the Crosses acted like good citizens and admitted the representatives of the law, who then attacked them. He seems unaware that:
- The accounts of both the Crosses and the Raiders would have been recorded in the briefs both sides filed with the court, so changing the story now would raise all kinds of questions about, "Why are you changing your story? Were you lying then or are you lying now?"; and
- There is still no physical evidence that proves that the Raiders attacked the Crosses and not the other way around.
- When it's time for closing arguments, Jonah Curtis (the prosecutor) tells Ben to make the closing speech. Never mind that Ben isn't listed as an attorney for the prosecution, but as a prosecution witness, and therefore has no right to make the speech.
- Hope Spot: In the beginning London Bridges Geoffrey Shafer picks up a young streetwalker named Marie, and the audience can already guess what he will do based off his track record. He is then ambushed by The Wolf and his men who thank Marie for drawing Geoffrey out and then promptly kill her.
- Idiosyncratic Episode Naming: At first children's rhymes, now with "cross" in the title. Still, if you can have a murder mystery titled Double Cross, you should.
- In Name Only: Alex Cross's Trial is completely disconnected from the rest of the series, being a historical drama about racial segregation that happens to involve Alex Cross's ancestors. The justification is that it is a book written by Alex Cross. It should be noted that despite James Patterson being known for using co-authors, Alex Cross's Trial is the only one that wasn't written only by Patterson himself.
- The Last Dance: In Cat and Mouse, Gary Soneji, now dying of AIDS, goes on one last frenzied rampage, killing everyone he feels the need to and dead set on murdering Cross.
- Love Makes You Evil: Casanova invokes this as a justification for his rapes and musters.
- Madness Mantra:
- The Sojourner Truth School killer in Jack and Jill inwardly does "Happy Happy Joy Joy" during his crimes.
- In Cat and Mouse, when Thomas Pierce is exposed as serial killer Mr. Smith, he starts shouting: I MURDERED ISABELLA CALAIS. AND I CAN'T STOP THE KILLING. The first sentence had been spelled out in his victims' initials. The second would have been. He even asks if Cross understands.
- The Mole:
- In Roses Are Red the Mastermind turns out to be FBI Agent Kyle Craig. He also helped out Casanova and the Gentleman Caller during Kiss The Girls.
- In Cross the Line a woman is able to survive an attack from the vigilante Regulators, and agrees to act as a witness. Before she can, the Regulators receive a phone call telling them where she is, and they raid the safe house killing her. Agent Mahoney determines their is a traitor in the taskforce, and it is DEA Agent Jed Potter who was shot and injured in the raid as cover.
- murder.com: The DC Audience Killer from Double Cross.
- Names to Run Away from Really Fast: The Butcher, The Tiger and the Wolf. Cross himself also goes by the nickname of The Dragon Slayer.
- Obfuscating Disability: In London Bridges, Geoffrey Shafer uses a wheelchair he does not need as part of his disguise.
- Our Vampires Are Different: The vampire cult in Violets Are Blue is more like the Manson Family than a group of vampires. Then again it's not exactly common for real vampires to appear in police fiction.
- The Plan: Four Blind Mice is so strange that neither Alex nor the contract killers figure out what the guy hiring them is doing.
- Pun: In Cat and Mouse Mr. Smith "pierced" Isabella's heart.
- Racist Grandma: Nana Mama does not trust white people.
- Really Gets Around: Cross has quite a few Love Interests throughout the series.
- Scary Black Man:
- Alex Cross and John Sampson when on the job, subverted when they aren't.
- The Tiger, a warlord using child soldiers, plays this very straight.
- Secret Squatter: In Kiss The Girls, "Casanova" broke into the house belonging to his first victim, lived there for three weeks, and then murdered the entire family.
- Serial Killings, Specific Target: In Mary, Mary the killer Micheal Bell was really trying to kill his wife, and killed other people to frame it on a woman named Mary Wagner.
- Sickbed Slaying In Cross the Line DEA Agent Jed Potter is killed by Jeb Whittaker by getting air pumped in his veins, after Potter tries to take control of the regulators.
- Split Personality:
- Gary Soneji in Along Came The Spider claims he was two personalities, Gary Murphy the family man and Gary Soneji the killer. He turns out to be faking this.
- The killer in Cross My Heart Kenneth Carney has four of these. The heroic police officer, the killer, and two personalities based off his deceased siblings Kelli and Kevin.
- There Is No Kill Like Overkill: In the end of Big Bad Wolf Pasha Sorokin is shot with a rocket launcher.
- Vigilante Man In Cross the Line:
- The Regulators are a military trained group that targets drug and human trafficking, but later goes after the government. They are lead by a man known as "John Brown" who turns out to be Naval Academy Instructor Jeb Whittaker.
- Mercury is a motorcycle rider who targets reckless drivers, because he lost his wife to a crash. He is also the aforementioned John Brown.
- You Have Failed Me: Happens twice in Big Bad Wolf:
- "The Wolf" does this to the kidnapper duo, after they left too many witnesses.
- In the end The Wolf AKA Pasha Sorokin is killed by another criminal going by the alias The Wolf.
- You Have Outlived Your Usefulness
- The Mastermind does this to his first two robbery crews in Roses Are Red.
- In the beginning London Bridges, The Wolf and his men do this to young streetwalker named Marie after she helps them draw out Geoffrey Shafer.
