Novelist Turow Credits ‘Good Luck’ : Literature: At a Costa Mesa luncheon that also featured two other writers, the best-selling author made light of his success.

A week after appearing on the cover of Time magazine, best-selling author Scott Turow still can’t believe the good fortune that has befallen him since the publication three years ago of his first blockbuster novel, “Presumed Innocent.”

Speaking at a book and author luncheon in Costa Mesa Thursday, the Chicago attorney-novelist, whose new novel, “The Burden of Proof,” will be No. 1 on the New York Times best-seller list on Sunday, said he mentioned his “good luck” to a friend in Beverly Hills the other night.

“He looked at me and was sort of dismayed by this: ‘Did you really think it was all good luck?’ And I began to think that perhaps Beverly Hills is the site of the new American Calvinism, where everybody believes that they deserve what they’ve got,” said Turow.

The man Time dubbed the Bard of the Litigious Age paused as his audience roared with laughter, then added: “I don’t. I really do credit good luck, good fortune and pure serendipity with the various factors that have brought me here.”

Turow, in Southern California to promote his new novel, was one of three authors on the bill at The Times Orange County’s third annual Book & Author luncheon.

Speaking before a sold-out crowd of 750 in the ballroom of the Red Lion Hotel, Turow was joined by Bette Bao Lord, author of “Legacies: A Chinese Mosaic,” and Times staff writer Itabari Njeri, author of “Every Good-bye Ain’t Gone: Family Portraits and Personal Escapades.”

Lord, the wife of the recent American ambassador to China, described walking through “the sea of citizens” in and around Tian An Men Square in the days before the massacre of Chinese civilians demonstrating for democracy in Beijing last June--and how, in writing her collection of first-person accounts of life in China over the past 40 years, she “heard the voices echo from the empty square. So many stories begged to be told.”

Rather than talk about “Every Good-bye Ain’t Gone,” a bittersweet personal history of growing up as a black woman, Njeri chose to read a segment of the book about her eccentric family.

With theatrical flair, despite a case of laryngitis, Njeri told of her Jamaica-born grandmother, Ruby, who baked fruitcakes so saturated with alcohol that “when you bit into it, the raisins spat back rum,” and who would bellow out her kitchen window at her young granddaughter coming home from school singing tunes from the Hit Parade: “You’re too forward!”

In talking about the serendipitous nature of his writing career, Turow said that when he was writing “Presumed Innocent” in the early ‘80s while he was an assistant U.S. attorney, he reached a point in the plot where “I knew I was writing a murder mystery, but I had no idea who done it, or why. So I stopped to figure that out.”

It was while he was in that “cognitive phase” of writing, Turow said, that he received a call from his agent, whom he had not heard from in several years.

“When she asked what I was doing,” Turow recalled, “I began to tell her about this novel I was working on: ‘Oh, it’s terrific. This assistant district attorney is investigating the murder of his former lover, who is also an assistant district attorney. . . .’ She interrupted me. She knew what I was doing for a living. She said, ‘Well, there’s a trial in there, isn’t there?’

“I was always somewhat daunted by my agent. I had never given any thought to this, but I was much too abashed to say no. So I said yes. And that’s where the 190-page trial in ‘Presumed Innocent’ ” comes from.