Thriller Writer Has Had This Dream Before

“I’ve always had this dream,” Newport Beach writer John J. Gobbell says, “of a fellow escaping from a waterfront warehouse in San Diego in a mini-submarine. I’ve had the dream for about 15 years. I don’t know why.”

Gobbell is proof that dreams sometimes do come true.

His first novel, “The Brutus Lie,” features a top-secret, fuel-cell-powered mini-submarine (the Brutus) that is commandeered by its designer, a former U.S. Navy SEAL, after he witnesses a murder and discovers a plot to blow up a Japanese fishing trawler and a U.S. submarine off the Soviet coast.

And, yes, Gobbell’s hero, Brad Lofton, escapes out of San Diego Harbor.

With his life in jeopardy, Lofton must race to the Russian port of Petropavlosk to uncover the double agent “whose plot against a shipload of American sailors is poised to unsettle the precarious peace fostered by perestroika. “ And it’s in Russia that Lofton discovers the truth about his own long-buried past when confronted by his identical twin brother.

Gobbell, 53, is the owner of an executive recruitment firm. But as a former U.S. Navy line officer who headed the anti-submarine/air/surface fire control systems aboard a destroyer, he was able to tap his own experience in writing his lively techno-thriller, which is partially set in Newport Beach.

The familiarity with his subject, combined with extensive research, paid off.

John Lehman, former secretary of the Navy, has praised Gobbell for bringing “the certainty of experience to a fine storyteller’s art. He is the John Le Carre of naval thrillers.”

Says Publishers Weekly: “Readers will be rewarded by a knowledgeable presentation of modern mini-sub technology, an effective depiction of Russia’s naval Spetsnaz (Special Forces) , and the extended escape-and-evasion narrative as Lofton . . . flees Russia in Brutus, pursued by everything the Soviet navy can muster.”

Gobbell will sign copies of “The Brutus Lie” (Scribner’s; $22.95) from 10 a.m. to noon Saturday at the Book Tree, 474 E. 17th St., Costa Mesa.

A fan of Tom Clancy, Craig Thomas and other techno-thriller authors, Gobbell says he has always enjoyed the genre.

“I love this type of fiction, but I haven’t been satisfied with the recent fiction relative to individual experiences aboard (naval) vessels at sea,” he says. “I find them somewhat bookish and researchy and not written in the satisfying tradition of Alistair MacLean’s ‘H.M.S. Ulysses’ and Herman Wouk’s ‘The Caine Mutiny.’ They just don’t measure up to what it’s really like.”

As Gobbell sees it, “You have to feel strongly about your subject. You’ve got to have passion, a dedication to it. I think if that’s absent, then it’s going to be 125,000 contrived, mechanical words.”

Gobbell, who interviewed a nuclear submarine officer and other naval officers as part of his research, says his own experience in the Navy in the early ‘60s was invaluable “because I knew some of the questions to ask.”

Gobbell, who wrote a previous unpublished novel, began writing “The Brutus Lie” in 1989. Six months later he had completed a first draft, which his literary agent promptly sold to Charles Scribner’s Sons for a $20,000 advance.

But by the time he had completed a rewrite in February, 1990, he says, “the Berlin Wall came down and the whole political situation in Eastern Europe and Russia had changed.” So another rewrite was in order. “We had to change the tone to adapt to glasnost and perestroika ,” he says.

Gobbell is already more than 100 manuscript pages into a sequel to “The Brutus Lie.” But then he’s had plenty of time to devote to writing lately.

“The reality is business has been so terrible in executive recruiting that I went ahead and did this instead,” he says. “If not for a terrible economy, I’d be doing less writing and more executive recruiting.”

Miriam Marx Allen of San Clemente, daughter of Groucho Marx, has sold her manuscript containing letters written to her by her father between 1938 and 1967.

Faber & Faber, a Massachusetts-based publishing house, will publish the book, titled “Love Groucho: Letters from a Father to his Daughter,” next spring.

“The interesting thing is they are the ones who published T.S. Eliot,” says Allen. “My father would be very impressed. He had a correspondence with Eliot and had his autographed picture on the wall and even went to meet him in London.”

Allen, 64, has been trying to sell her book for two years. The original manuscript not only chronicled her early life with Groucho but her battle with alcoholism--a 30-year struggle that landed her in a series of hospitals and psychiatric clinics and ruined her marriage. She says she took her last drink in 1977, the year her father died at age 86.

Allen says little of her own story will be used in the upcoming book, but she is currently working on a new manuscript which, she says, “is going to be about my alcoholism and my recovery from it.”