Why did 19 publishers put Richard North Patterson’s book on 'Trial'?

If bestselling author Richard North Patterson can’t get his fast-paced legal thriller focusing on American racism published in New York, then who can?

Patterson, who has written 22 novels, been on the NYT bestseller list 16 times and sold more than 25 million books, should have his pick among publishers. Instead, he couldn’t find anyone in Manhattan to handle his gripping new suspense novel "Trial." Just about everyone agreed it’s a very good novel, but they fear the "American Dirt" syndrome, and he says they quietly told him white authors can’t write about the Black experience of racism in America.

At a time when writers are being threatened by calls for book banning all across America based on race and sex, 19 New York publishers did just that, Patterson says.

“My agents warned me that I was asking for trouble with major publishers, and I was acutely aware of the risk — most famously exemplified in 2020, when Jeanine Cummins, the white author of 'American Dirt,' was widely castigated for the way she depicted a Mexican mother and son struggling to cross the U.S. border. As the British novelist Zadie Smith observed in 2019, ‘The old — and never especially helpful — adage ‘write what you know’ has morphed into something more like a threat: ‘Stay in your lane,’” he wrote in a column in The Wall Street Journal, which has received much attention.

“To license the imagination across racial lines,” he says, “is not the enemy of diversity of authorship. Rather, we should directly confront the woeful lack of diversity in publishing houses and, even today, among authors.”

That said, Patterson’s account of racism, Black voter suppression, and an inter-racial love affair in America set in 2022 is showing up on bookshelves — but from an unexpected source. Ironically, a small...