Pinstripes And Pearls

• Share

Perhaps it's because success was once so elusive that Lisa Scottoline wears it so conspicuously. There are the leopard-print Manolo Blahnik mules, the Blue Cult jeans and Ralph Lauren sweater, the gold Cartier bracelet and the white S500 Mercedes. Her home--a stylishly refurbished Pennsylvania farmhouse on 43 acres--is a grand monument to a blockbuster career that the author has painstakingly built from the ground up. Sometimes called the female John Grisham, Scottoline (pronounced Scot-oh-lee-nee) is a star among the burgeoning ranks of lawyers turned best-selling novelists. Devil's Corner (HarperCollins; 393 pages), her 12th book, will arrive in bookstores on May 31, and in light of the advance orders at Amazon.com it is well on its way to becoming her seventh best seller.

Scottoline, 49, turned to writing in 1986 after four years as a successful litigator at a big-name Philadelphia firm. That was the year she gave birth to her only child, Francesca, and, just a few months later, her teetering marriage fell apart. Although Scottoline loved practicing law, she discovered that she loved being home with her daughter more. "I realized that as a litigator, I just wouldn't see her," says Scottoline, "and she had no other parent on the scene."

Casting around for work that she could do at home, Scottoline decided to try her hand at writing--not such a leap, perhaps, for a University of Pennsylvania English major who had concentrated her studies on the American novel. She had even taken a course from Philip Roth. ("He was cold and distant," she recalls.)

For five years, Scottoline was a bicoastal failure. First she bombed at writing screenplays, although she peppered Los Angeles agents with 100 submissions. "Not one person wrote me back," she remembers with a wince. "I could not even get rejected." She ran into another wall of refusal when she sent her first novel to Manhattan book agents. By 1991, Scottoline was broke: receiving no alimony, she had maxed out her credit cards and was $38,500 in debt.

Grisham and Scott Turow were exploding on the scene at the time, and Scottoline was a fan. But she had a gripe with the popular new genre. "I don't think women characters were well realized," she says. "They were the subordinate characters. They were the wife, the spouse, the girlfriend. I thought, I'm a woman trial lawyer. I'm not that rare a bird." She also found the characters too white bread. "I'm an Italian American," she says. "I grew up in a Jewish neighborhood. I saw no Italians and Jews. I want people whom I recognize."

As soon as Scottoline tried her hand at legal thrillers, she sold her first book, Everywhere That Mary Went,and her career took off. By 1995, she had won the Edgar Award, the top prize for mystery writers, for Final Appeal. As of this year, her books have been translated into 23 languages and more than 7 million copies have been sold in the U.S.