Former US President Bill Clinton has teamed up with best-selling suspense writer James Patterson to pen a political thriller involving, predictably, a president.

The novel, The President is Missing, will be “a unique amalgam of intrigue, suspense and behind-the-scenes global drama from the highest corridors of power … informed by details that only a president can know,” publishers Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group and Hachette Book Group said in a statement.

President Clinton said he had been a fan of Patterson for many years and has enjoyed working with him.

“Working on a book about a sitting president – drawing on what I know about the job, life in the White House, and the way Washington works – has been a lot of fun,” President Clinton said in a statement.

Joe Klein, a political columnist and author of the novel Primary Colors and The Natural – an account of the Clinton presidency – told The New York Times that the former president has always been a “devoted mystery reader”.

While most presidents author a memoir after their presidency, few have chosen to do fiction.

Jimmy Carter is one exception. In 2003 he wrote The Hornet’s Nest, a novel set during the Revolutionary War.

President Clinton is already a best-selling author, with his autobiography, My Life, sold more than two million copies in the US.

The New York Times reported that the project was conceived by Robert B. Barnett, a lawyer at Williams & Connolly who represents both President Clinton and Patterson and who first approached president Clinton about the collaboration.

The cover as advertised by bookseller Barnes and Noble. Source: Twitter/Barnes and Noble

Mr Barnett, incidentally, also represents the Obamas, Hillary Clinton, George W. Bush, Laura Bush and other politicians.

President Clinton, a longtime reader of Patterson’s breathless thrillers, was game, so Mr Barnett took the idea to the author.

Patterson wrote an extensive outline, and so far, they’re a few chapters into the novel.

Patterson, known for his novels featuring the psychologist Alex Cross and for the Women’s Murder Club series, said working with the former president had been the highlight of his career.

He said the collaboration gave him the chance to work with a friend who knows better than anyone about life in the White House.

“I’m a story-teller, and president Clinton’s insight has allowed us to tell a really interesting one,” he said in a statement.

“It’s a rare combination.

“Readers will be drawn to the suspense, of course, but they’ll also be given an inside look into what it’s like to be president.”

A political release from the 1990s had a similar arrangement: Random House and Simon & Schuster jointly published the nonfiction All’s Fair by husband-and-wife campaign consultants James Carville and Mary Matalin.

The publishers declined to offer any more details about the book, including whether it refers to President Donald Trump, who defeated President Clinton’s wife, Hillary, in last year’s election.

Penguin Random House – which has published both President Clinton and Patterson – has UK, Commonwealth and European rights to the collaboration.

“This unprecedented collaboration with its compelling mix of insider knowledge and edge-of-the-seat suspense is utterly irresistible,” Susan Sandon, divisional managing director at Penguin Random House, said in a statement.

– With AAP/AP