Andrew Gross, a member of a prominent New York apparel family who abandoned a career in the so-called rag trade to write nearly 20 crime and political thrillers, including five with James Patterson that hit No. 1 on The New York Times best-sellers list, died April 9 at his home in Purchase, NY. He was 72.

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, until he announced to his wife and three children that he wanted to write a novel. Although the finished novel was never sold, the work came to the attention of Mr. Paterson.

In 2018, Mr. Gross published what he considered his most personal work, Button Man, loosely autobiographical, about a man from a poor Jewish family on the Lower East Side of Manhattan who fight his way up the corporate ladder and into conflict with mobsters. “It is a tribute to my grandfather,” Mr. Gross told Publishers Weekly, referring to Mr. Pomerantz. “He was as tough as any gangster, single-minded and driven. He set a high bar for himself, and he succeeded.”