‘Flame’ Author Hopes Story Catches Fire

Somebody’s playing with fire.

In the Soviet Union, the body of a man who had been expelled from the United Nations for espionage has been found burned beyond recognition.

In Lebanon, a terrorist begins to feel a tremendous heat on his upper back and the nape of his neck. As his body slumps to the sidewalk, he can “hear the rage of fire, sizzling his flesh like mutton fat.”

In the United States, an acquitted child-rapist and murderer is reaching for his car door when red and blue flames suddenly “lick away his hair and puffs of smoke circle his skull.”

So opens Kathleen Dougherty’s “Moth to the Flame,” a first novel whose heroine is a government computer expert enlisted to uncover the infiltrator who has accessed a top secret government project.

Or, as the former Lake Forest resident describes it, “It’s about an intelligent woman who not only fights to save a computer system from a madman, but also struggles to overcome her darkest past.”

“Moth to the Flame” has been given an impressive 200,000 first printing--about four times the usual number for a paperback original; it’s the first in a two-book deal that Dougherty has with the Berkley Publishing Group under its Diamond imprint.

“It’s psychological suspense with a good measure of techno thriller,” Dougherty explained by phone from her home in Sandy, Utah, where she and her husband moved when his company relocated in January.

“Moth to the Flame” is Dougherty’s kind of book.

“I read everything, but I do enjoy high stakes,” she said. “I like large risk, and in this case I’m risking not only the life of my character and the people she loves, but essentially the world.”

With a laugh, she added, “You can’t get any bigger than that.”

The idea for “Moth to the Flame” grew out of Dougherty’s experience working as a district manager for an artificial intelligence computer firm, which meant, she said, “I had an ‘in’ to a lot of ‘black’ work being done--very secret stuff.”

Intrigued by the company’s classified military work, the fledgling novelist wondered, “What would happen if the system got out of control?”

The stress of driving more than 30,000 miles a year on her job--and a brush with an 18-wheeler near the El Toro Y--provided the impetus for Dougherty to quit her job and begin writing five years ago.

Dougherty, who originally thought short stories would be easier to write, credits Orange Coast College writing instructor Raymond Obstfeld for “telling me to stop being such a ‘wuss’ and try a novel.”

Dougherty was one of eight writers in Obstfeld’s fiction workshop who were asked to join his elite Mentor Group. Members of the group not only met to read and critique each other’s work, but studied philosophy, literary criticism, psychology, contemporary fiction and other topics. They also went to movies and plays.

“It’s like an intensive one-year program for people who really want to be writers,” explained Obstfeld, adding that the multidisciplinary approach helped the writers understand the value of trying to get some depth into their work. “Most of the people (who were in the group) have published something, and the rest are sending their stuff around.”

As for Dougherty, Obstfeld said, “She really bloomed.

“She’s really a demonstration of what rewriting does. She didn’t just do it and say, ‘I’m a writer--here, world!’ You’ve got to polish, and she wasn’t afraid of it.”

Although her publisher is giving “Moth to the Flame” more publicity than most first-time paperback originals, Dougherty said it’s important for an author--especially a first-timer--to help promote her novel.

She paid to have “Moth to the Flame” promotional bookmarks and postcards printed; she has mailed them to bookstores, reviewers, libraries--”any potential purchaser.”

“It’s your best shot at punching up the sales,” she said. “You can do that by keeping a detailed mailing list, keeping contacts over the years.”

She also has arranged and paid for a mini book tour. She did a signing recently at the Mysterious Bookstore in Los Angeles, where she sold 150 copies of her book, and she’ll be in Washington, D.C.--the setting for the novel--later this month for signings and to speak on “methods of murder” at a writers conference called Malice Domestic III.

The self-promotion is paying off.

At one signing in a Utah bookstore last week, “Moth to the Flame” was the store’s second biggest seller of the week--behind only Kitty Kelley’s biography of Nancy Reagan.

“Actually,” Dougherty said with a laugh, “if I had personally bought three books myself, I would have topped sales (in that store) that week.”

UCI GRAD: John Keene, a Marine fighter pilot during the Vietnam War and a 1976 graduate of the UC Irvine Program in Writing, will read and sign copies of his first novel, “Pettibone’s Law,” in Orange County this weekend.

On Saturday between 3 and 5 p.m. he’ll be at Martha’s Bookstore, 308 Marine Ave., Balboa Island; and on Sunday, from 4 to 6 p.m., he’ll be at Upchurch-Brown Booksellers, 384 Forest Ave., Laguna Beach.

Written in the irreverent tradition of “Catch-22” and “MASH,” “Pettibone’s Law” is about the air war in Vietnam and its aftermath.

Keene, a longtime Laguna Beach resident who now lives in Ojai, where he is technical director of a company that develops agricultural machinery, said the novel is written on several levels.

“On the surface it’s about the pomposity and irresponsibility and depraved motivation of our military establishment in the conduct of the Vietnam War,” he said. On another level, “it’s really maybe more about the fatuousness of mankind as a civilization and the bleak failures at all attempts at social engineering in this century.”

The book spans the ‘60s to the ‘80s. Chapters alternate between the war in Vietnam, the anti-war movement in California and the frustrations the novel’s F-4 pilot protagonist, Smilin’ Jack Rawlins, has dealing with the bureaucracy of the defense industry after the war.

It is, Keene said, “a satire, a very black, black comedy.”

Keene said he was inspired by “MASH” and Joseph Heller’s “Catch-22.”

“I wrote Heller that I owe him a debt of gratitude, and he wrote back and gave me a fine blurb for the cover (“ . . . an absorbing novel. It is a spirited, perceptive work of surprising comic ingenuity. . . “).

Keene also received a promotional blurb from Col. David Hackworth, America’s most decorated living soldier and a critic of the military establishment. A press release for “Pettibone’s Law” quotes Hackworth as saying, “It’s not ‘Catch-22.’ It’s better.”

“They didn’t put that on the cover,” said Keene, adding with a laugh, “I think they didn’t want to offend Heller.”

“Pettibone’s Law” is Keene’s first novel. He wrote a couple of other unpublished novels and spent more than 10 years working on “Pettibone’s Law.”

In 1986, a friend offered him the use of a cabin in Colorado so he could complete the book. He quit his job as a proposal engineer at Northrop Aircraft Corp. in Hawthorn and moved into the cabin. “I thought it would take six months; it took two years,” he said.

Keene said the novel’s title, “Pettibone’s Law,” comes from the name of a monthly column in Aviation News (“Grandpa Pettibone”), which describes various aviation accidents and the “stupidities” that led up to them.

“Nobody knew what we were getting into (in Vietnam) and if he had a law, Rawlins, the protagonist, says his law would be roughly this: ‘You had better watch your step very carefully out there or else something will bite you, because the world is rife with, abounds in, folly, perversity and misadventure.’ ”

Book Sale: The Friends of the Huntington Beach Library will hold a book sale Friday, Saturday and Monday in the Central Library, 7111 Talbert Ave. For more information, call the library at (714) 842-4481.

National Writers: Shirl Thomas will discuss “Writing for the Greeting Card Market” during the meeting of the Southern California chapter of the National Writers Club at 10 a.m. Saturday at the Irvine Marriott, 18000 Von Karman. Tickets: $15.

War Poetry: A special reading by the authors of works contained in “Journal of the Gulf War: Poetry From Home” will be held at 8 p.m. Saturday in the Fullerton Museum Center, 301 N. Pomona Ave.

Book Talk: David Hess, co-owner of the Bookman Bookstore in Orange, will discuss what he calls “the Incredible Adventures of the Bookman,” at the Let’s Talk Books discussion group meeting at 7 p.m. Tuesday in the Orange Main Library, 101 N. Center St.

Round Table West: Mariette Hartley (“Breaking the Silence”), Michael John Sullivan (“Presidential Passions: the Love Affairs of America’s Presidents”), Ellen Jones (“The Fatal Crown”) and William Bakewell (“Hollywood Be Thy Name”) will discuss their books at the Round Table West author luncheon at noon on April 25. Price: $30. Advance reservations can be made by calling (213) 256-7977.

Writers Workshop: Author and communications consultant Joan Talmage Weiss will conduct a six-week writers workshop from 6:30 to 9:30 p.m. at Upchurch-Brown Booksellers in Laguna Beach beginning April 25. Fee: $125. For reservations, call (714) 499-0011.

Send information about book-related events to: Books & Authors, View, The Times, 1375 Sunflower Ave., Costa Mesa, Calif. 92626. Deadline is two weeks before publication.