Andrew Gross, a member of a prominent New York apparel family who abandoned a career in the rag trade to write nearly 20 crime and political thrillers, including five with the fiction juggernaut James Patterson that hit No. 1 on the New York Times best-seller list, died on April 9 at his home in Purchase, N.Y. He was 72.
The cause was a rare form of bladder cancer, his wife, Lynn Gross, said.
In his solo career, Mr. Gross was known for works such as “Eyes Wide Open” (2011), “15 Seconds” (2012), “No Way Back” (2013) and “Everything to Lose” (2014), as well as his popular series featuring the character Ty Hauck, a detective who probes the dark doings behind the mansion gates of Greenwich, Conn.
He later turned his sights from high-adrenaline contemporary potboilers, often involving ordinary people sucked into a whirlwind of criminal intrigue, to historical thrillers.
His 2016 effort, “The One Man,” centers on a young Jewish man who escapes the Krakow ghetto early in World War II and later joins an American intelligence effort to rescue a renowned physicist from the Auschwitz concentration camp. Booklist called it “as moving as it is gripping” in a starred review.
Ultimately a prolific writer, Mr. Gross started late: He was in his 40s when he decided to trade the spreadsheets and quarterly reports of the business world for the long, lonely hours of a literary career.
Mr. Gross was a grandson of Fred P. Pomerantz, the founder of Leslie Fay Inc., whose dresses and sportswear were being sold in more than 13,000 stores around the country when Mr. Pomerantz died in 1986.
For a time, Mr. Gross served as senior corporate vice president of the company, running its sportswear division, as well as president of its Head Sports Wear subsidiary, known for its ski, golf and tennis apparel. He later became a top executive at Le Coq Sportif and Sun Ice, a Canadian sportswear company.
Wearying of the corporate world, Mr. Gross decided to perform a career about-face. “Basically,” he said in a 2015 interview published on the website LinkedIn, “I came home without a job one night and announced to my wife and three kids that I wanted to write a novel.”
Easier said than done. It took three years to write, edit and attempt to sell his first novel, “Hydra,” a political thriller that was never published. Late in the process, after double-digit rejections, he recalled in a 2017 interview, he was sitting in his den and wondering “what cliff to drive our S.U.V. off” when he received a call from Mr. Patterson’s publisher asking if he would be willing to talk to Mr. Patterson.
An editor at the publishing house, he learned, had sent Mr. Gross’s manuscript to Mr. Patterson, a veritable fiction factory in human form. (As of this year, he has churned out more than 200 books in various genres, including thrillers and children’s books, and sold more than 400 million copies.)
Mr. Gross, who spent part of the year in Palm Beach, Fla., recalled in a 2016 interview with The Palm Beach Post that the editor had written on the manuscript, “This guy does women well!”
Mr. Patterson soon invited Mr. Gross to breakfast, telling him that “he had several projects he wanted to write and not enough time to do them,” Mr. Gross recalled on his professional website. “I had the incredible foresight to say yes.”
Their first book together, “2nd Chance” (2002), was the second installment of Mr. Patterson’s highly regarded Women’s Murder Club series, about a group of women in San Francisco, including a police detective and a newspaper reporter, who band together to crack murder cases. (In 2007, the series was spun off into a short-lived ABC drama starring Angie Harmon.)
To a literary neophyte, Mr. Patterson’s tutelage was invaluable, Mr. Gross wrote on his website: “It was like a combination MFA and MBA rolled into one.”
As for the writing itself, “we always began with a concept and an outline that came from him, which we fleshed out into a detailed chapter-by-chapter outline,” Mr. Gross recalled. “No writer’s block here, the road map was always there.”
Thanks to Mr. Patterson’s clout, he added, “my first book was a No. 1 best seller” on the Times list.
Howard Andrew Gross was born on May 18, 1952, in Manhattan to Aaron Gross, who ran an active-wear company, and Leslie Fay Pomerantz, whom the family apparel company was named after.
After graduating from the Barnard School for Boys, in the Riverdale section of the Bronx, Mr. Gross enrolled at Middlebury College in Vermont, where he received a bachelor’s degree in English literature in 1974. In 1982, he earned a master’s degree in business administration from Columbia Business School.
His fruitful partnership with Mr. Patterson included “Lifeguard” (2005), about a Florida lifeguard lured by love into a multimillion-dollar robbery, and “Judge & Jury” (2006), about an aspiring actress whose life spins out of control after she lands on the jury in the trial of a brutal Mafia don. (The story was inspired by Mr. Gross’s own experience as a juror in a mob trial).
Mr. Gross struck out on his own in 2007 with “The Blue Zone,” a novel about a woman whose seemingly perfect life unravels after her father is arrested and charged with laundering money for a drug ring.
In addition to his wife of 42 years, Mr. Gross is survived by their daughter, Kristen Gross Magyar; their sons, Matthew and Nicholas; a half sister, Liz Scopinich; and five grandchildren.
In 2018, Mr. Gross published what he considered his most personal work, “Button Man,” about someone from a poor Jewish family on the Lower East Side of Manhattan who fights his way up the ladder in the garment trade only to find himself in a Depression-era standoff with vicious Jewish mobsters. (“Button man” is not an apparel term, he explained in a 2020 video interview, but mob slang for a hit man.)
“It’s a tribute to my grandfather,” Mr. Gross told Publishers Weekly, referring to Mr. Pomerantz. “He was as tough as any gangster you’ll read about in the novel. He was single-minded and driven and set a high bar for himself, and he succeeded.”