Author Gambles, Hits the Jackpot : Books: A former poker-playing reporter cashes in with a quirky postmodern thriller.

Robert Ferrigno vividly recalls the late nights nearly four years ago when he would retreat to Alamitos Bay in Long Beach.

His wife, Jody, was bedridden, suffering complications during her pregnancy with their son, Jake. As a way of coping with his “incredible feeling of helplessness,” Ferrigno would slip out of their warm Belmont Shore apartment after she was asleep and swim in the cold, dark bay.

“Even though they both pulled out of it, and they’re both fine, it gave me a very powerful sense that life is fleeting,” said Ferrigno, 42. “It made me realize I had been talking and thinking about writing a book for a long time, but I should probably not count on having the rest of my life to finish it.”

Ferrigno used the late-night swims, “as a way to strengthen my resolve: I will not drown, not in this water and not in the events that were overtaking my life. If I can force myself to hit the water--I can do anything.”

So he began rising at 4 a.m. each day to work on “The Horse Latitudes”--a noir Southern California morality tale of sex, drugs and money--before going to work as a feature writer for the Orange County Register. Then he would return to his bedroom personal computer in the evening after his infant son was asleep.

After 18 months of existing on roughly four hours of sleep a night and with his marriage threatened by his compulsive overwork, Ferrigno--at his wife’s urging--quit his newspaper job to devote full time to finish his first novel.

The gamble--not out of character for a man who spent six years in the ‘70s playing poker for a living in Seattle--paid off. Handsomely.

Within four months of quitting his job in 1988, the hardcover and paperback rights to Ferrigno’s incomplete novel were sold to William Morrow & Co./Avon for an impressive $150,000 advance. Sales to eight foreign countries have earned him nearly $250,000 more and a movie deal is pending.

Early reviews of “The Horse Latitudes,” a Book-of-the-Month-Club featured alternate for March, praise the romantic thriller. Publishers Weekly labeled Ferrigno’s first novel “impressive,” noting that it is “a perfect escape into quirky, sunny, sexy postmodern suspense.”

Set on the coast between Long Beach and Newport Beach, “The Horse Latitudes” is about retired marijuana wholesaler Danny DiMedici, who is still carrying a torch for his beautiful ex-wife, Lauren Kiel, a wealthy corporate psychologist.

When Lauren turns up missing, after the mutilated body of a research scientist is found hanging in her blood-splattered Newport Beach living room, Danny sets out to find his ex-wife. In the process, he must re-enter the seamy underworld he thought he had left behind.

“The Horse Latitudes” refers to an area of the Atlantic Ocean where the trade winds die, causing the old sailing ships on their way to the New World to stand dead in the water. To get under way, sailors would lighten the ships by throwing part of their cargo overboard. During the most severe doldrums, they would abandon their most precious cargo--horses.

The novel’s title, Ferrigno explained, is a metaphor for Danny DiMedici.

“The way I see it, my guy is frozen in time and for him to get under way, he’s going to have to get rid of a lot of emotional baggage,” said Ferrigno, whose anti-hero, appropriately, is found taking a midnight swim in Alamitos Bay when the novel opens. As Ferrigno writes, “He was going to drown one of these nights, or he was going to get over her--it was too early to tell which.”

It’s the amoral, highly erotic Lauren who has intrigued many reviewers.

“Her very amorality is what gives her part of her erotic charge,” said Ferrigno, who says he once dated a woman like Lauren. “I mean she’s incendiary precisely because of that evil component to her. She is dangerous. You touch her at your own risk. I think that’s part of her appeal to Danny. He doesn’t like ‘safe and sane’ fireworks. He likes the stuff that will blow up in your hand if you don’t handle them carefully.”

For a coming issue of Mademoiselle magazine, three male novelists have been asked to write about their “dream girls.”

Ferrigno wrote about Lauren.

Single until he was 36, Ferrigno no longer leads the kind of exotic life he embraced in the ‘70s.

The Florida-born writer, who earned a bachelor’s degree in philosophy and a master’s in creative writing, moved to Seattle after graduate school in 1971. He landed a job teaching English and literature at community colleges but quit after two years.

“I didn’t really like it and I felt like I needed to get my hands dirty,” he said. “I had been in school my whole life and I wanted to experience a non-academic environment.”

He moved from his “nice little neighborhood” in the university district to a high-crime area in downtown Seattle where he lived in a two-room apartment, “with a bathroom down the hall,” and started playing “serious poker” for a living.

For Ferrigno, who paid for college and graduate school with his poker earnings, it was a natural career move.

“I liked the life,” he said. “It was very interesting, very intense--I used to get psyched up before the game--and I liked the hours. You didn’t get rich, but you always had cash.”

One of Ferrigno’s neighbors was a young Cuban refugee named Armando, an ex-convict who sold heroin out of his window to customers who lined up on the sidewalk. Armando served as the model for Cubanito, the drug dealer in “The Horse Latitudes.”

“In a lot of ways, the criminal environment I was in was very comfortable to me,” said Ferrigno. “Things were very direct, very up front. And I didn’t make moral judgments about a lot of the people I hung out with.”

He said he wrote his novel, in part, to help understand his own past.

“I used to try to imagine why do I still think of those people as my friends? And why do I have trouble connecting with the day-to-day regular world?”

He concedes he is no longer comfortable in the criminal world. “I went back to my old neighborhood in Seattle a couple of years ago and it scared the hell out of me. I don’t belong there any more. I’d get eaten there in an hour.”

Ferrigno said there is a lot of himself in Danny DiMedici.

“I think the brink is very seductive to Danny and very seductive to me,” he said. “There is an eroticism to being that close to the edge and knowing how easy it would be to let go of that little bit and to not do it. I derive something from not doing it.”

After six years of playing poker in pick-up games with everyone from lawyers to hustlers, Ferrigno wrote a free-lance review of a photographic exhibit for a Seattle alternative weekly newspaper. When he saw his first newspaper byline, he was hooked.

“There is an intensity in coming home at 4 in the morning and throwing a couple of thousand dollars on your bed and throwing it in the air (and saying), I won all of it! But that wasn’t even close to getting $10 for an article with your name on it,” he said.

Recalling those days when he was working on his novel in his free time while holding down a full-time newspaper job, Ferrigno said he would wake up “before 4 and my brain would be on fire. It wasn’t like I was even tired. My wife finally said, ‘If you don’t quit your job things aren’t going to work out’ because I was becoming a less than pleasant person.”

Jody Ferrigno, who had read every draft of each chapter, “had total belief” that his novel would sell. “She said, ‘It’s too good. Someone will buy this.’ ”

The Ferrignos’ lives haven’t changed dramatically since Ferrigno sold “The Horse Latitudes.” Their biggest concession to his literary windfall was buying a four-bedroom, lake-front house next to Seattle.

But they’re renting out their new house and continue to live in their ‘40s-vintage two-bedroom apartment in Belmont Shore where Ferrigno is working on his next novel.

And three mornings a week he teaches a basic reporting class at Cal State Fullerton.

Like writing a story for the newspaper, Ferrigno believes, a novelist should not waste any time in attracting the reader’s attention.

“I figure if I can catch you for the first page I’ve got good odds. And again, I’m a good poker player. All I need is good odds.”