Grisly Killing Spices New Tale of Bookmaker-Sleuth

The last time Los Angeles sports bookmaker Jimmy Lujack had seen his partner’s “gorgeous, precocious, outrageously self-possessed” niece was when he picked up the 17-year-old model at the Betty Ford Center, where she had spent 31 days trying to kick a drug habit.

The next time Lujack would see the sassy Chinese-American teen-ager, she would be the decapitated victim of a gruesome ritualistic killing.

The murder of Ginger Louis launches “The Book of Numbers” (Pocket Books), the second in a series of Los Angeles-based paperback mysteries written by Laguna Beach writer David Thoreau.

Jimmy Lujack is not your ordinary private eye.

In fact, he’s not really a private eye. He’s a former LAPD vice cop-turned bookie who, as Thoreau says, occasionally acts as an investigative “consultant” for friends and others who seek his help.

“The reason I did that is so he can work both sides of the street. He works closely with the cops and he’s also a bookie, so he’s got entree with the bad guys,” said Thoreau, 42, who spent “a lot of time with a couple of bookies in the Cerritos area” in creating his character.

“I’ve never heard of anybody making a bookie a hero,” said Thoreau, adding with a laugh: “Sports betting is kind of a sign of the times: Everybody does it.”

Lujack is the kind of guy who, in “The Book of Numbers,” says: “I believe in the truth. . . . That’s why I’m a bookie. The point spread never lies.”

“He sees the world in a way I think is unique,” Thoreau said, “and his morality is that he’s a crook, but he’s a good crook. He’s cynical, but he’s got heart. He’s honest, but his business is illegal. He has a lot of contradictions, which I think makes him more lifelike.”

Thoreau’s first Lujack mystery, “The Good Book,” in 1988, sets the stage for “The Book of Numbers.”

Thoreau summarizes: Lujack’s wife runs off with his LAPD partner and the pair become involved in a complicated sports betting scheme. The partner kills himself, and Lujack’s wife checks into a mental institution. Lujack, meanwhile, has gotten mixed up in a “horrible homicide” and after beating up one of the witnesses, he is thrown off the police force.

Thoreau’s first hard-boiled Lujack outing was described in Mystery News as “a page-turner all the way . . . extremely entertaining.” In describing his latest effort, a review in the New York Times said: “Mr. Thoreau writes so fast and furiously you’d think he had toothpicks underneath his fingernails . . . no one can accuse the author of lacking imagination in the action department.”

A 1970 graduate of UCLA, where he majored in English, Thoreau had been writing about five years when Arbor House published his first book, “The City at Bay,” a 1979 hardcover mystery thriller about a police strike in San Francisco.

At the time, Thoreau was living in San Francisco where he worked nights as a waiter and wrote during the day. When the American Booksellers Assn. held its annual convention there in 1978, Thoreau took his half-completed manuscript of “The City at Bay” to the convention and showed it to an editor of a paperback publishing house. The editor put him in touch with an agent, who then sold the book to Arbor House.

Thoreau said: “It’s a strange way of getting a book published, but I didn’t know anything about the business.”

Five years ago he started writing for television, selling the first of eight scripts to “Highway to Heaven.”

“I had a friend--this is the only way to get into television--who was the story editor,” explained Thoreau, who has since written for “Miami Vice,” “Quantum Leap” and other TV series. In April, a movie based on his first screenplay, “Side Out,” a story about beach volleyball, was released in theaters nationwide.

Thoreau said he already has a third Lujack mystery planned out and he’s currently in negotiations to sell the mystery series to Hollywood.

“He’d be great for movies or television. There’s a million stories you could tell about him,” said Thoreau, who, yes, is indeed a relative of that more famous Thoreau, Henry David.

“We’re distant cousins,” he said, chuckling, “but I don’t write anything like him. ‘The Book of Numbers’ is not ‘Walden’s Pond.’ ”

Author Honored: Orange County author Larry L. Meyer’s “My Summer with Molly: The Journal of a Second Generation Father” received the 1990 Benjamin Franklin Award for autobiography at a recent ceremony held by the Publishers Marketing Assn. in Las Vegas.

Meyer, a professor of journalism at Cal State Long Bech, lives in Huntington Beach. He will sign copies of his book from noon to 2 p.m. Sunday at Brentano’s in South Coast Plaza, Costa Mesa.

More Honors: “Sections of Orange,” the official Orange County centennial history written by Doris Walker of Dana Point, has been named “Best Historical Book of the Year” by the National Federation of Press Women.