A Political Wife Creates Second Life as Novelist : Books: When official duties didn’t call, Marilyn Quayle and her sister collaborated by modem on a thriller. Their hero is a Republican, of course.

This spring seems to be a season of new beginnings for the Quayles. After a widely discussed reassessment of the vice president and his wife in the press, it is rumored that in the corridors of power, Dan Quayle is being taken more seriously.

It is widely expected that the Quayles will seek to occupy the White House in 1996, and if Marilyn Quayle has had difficulty with the media, it stems from her being perceived as the more intelligent, heavyweight half of the partnership.

But the subject today is lightweight and probably without political pitfalls--Marilyn and sister Nancy Northcott’s thriller novel, “Embrace the Serpent,” just out from Crown. And Marilyn Quayle asserts in her way that brooks no nonsense that her presence here has nothing to do with politics.

“I represent myself--we’ve separated out from the ‘wife of’ business,” she says, even as she is surrounded by the trappings of a political wife.

Once Quayle, 42, and her sister, a 47-year-old former Tennessee English teacher, are installed in a hotel suite where they’re meeting the press, at least two Secret Service agents stand by, identifiable by the coiled transparent wires leading from their ears.

The Quayle entourage also includes a Crown representative and a woman described as a personal friend; she produces her own tape recorder lest there be any confusion about what is said.

Quayle says she derived no advantage in the book project from her proximity to power--even her staff didn’t know she was writing it until word appeared in the newspapers.

“We studiously kept away from any people I knew in government who could have access to documents,” she says. “We used no research facilities of the government, so nobody could accuse me of misusing my position,” news that may disappoint readers expecting the ultimate insider novel.

The night before this five-city publicity tour began, a group of friends and acquaintances gathered for a book party in Washington. Quayle and Northcott signed books, and among those attending the all-women event were Secretary of Labor Lynn Martin, former Secretary of the Interior Anne McLaughlin and former Nancy Reagan press secretary Sheila Tate. A larger party is planned tonight at the National Press Club, and the authors will be feted in Los Angeles on April 2 by their publisher and L.A. friends.

“So far the word of mouth has been incredible,” says Quayle. “There’s been a hiatus in the thriller business because of the fall of the Soviet Union. This is one of the first books to bridge that gap--which is attracting at least as much interest as who wrote it.”

An early review in the local newspaper was less enthusiastic. Citing a sample from the book, the critic for the Washington Post observed, “Prose like that is the making of cringes,” adding that, for the most part, the sisters write with “careful diligence.”

“Embrace the Serpent” covers the four days following Fidel Castro’s fictional demise. His brother, Raoul, thought to be Castro’s likely successor, is assassinated. A cabinet minister, Cesar Valles, who is believed to represent a democratizing tendency, gets set to take power, enlisting the support of the United States.

The book’s politics are not surprising. All is not as it seems with Valles--he is a puppet of bad-guy Russian Communists and financed by unidentified worse-guy Middle Eastern Arabs--and only a secret band of Cuban freedom fighters and a heroic black Republican junior senator from Georgia can save Cuba and the United States from the quagmire into which they are about to plunge.

Some of the impetus for the book comes from Quayle’s friendship with a former political prisoner in Cuba, Armando Valladare, who wrote a book about his ordeal. “It’s an absolutely amazing story and so tragic, and that made us feel that other people would find it very interesting,” Northcott says.

The book’s Democrats fare little better than the Communists and their Arab financiers. The portrait in the book of a Democratic U.S. President is that of a stupid, extremely image-conscious and impressionable man.

When asked about this, Marilyn Quayle comes alive, a rare moment of spontaneity during the press encounter. “You’ve got his personality exactly right,” she fairly shouts with genuine delight, a hint of how very rewarding it has been to pen such a portrait, even given that the characters are composites, the authors say.

Quayle allows that she and her sister intended a degree of verisimilitude in the novel’s central idea: “In life there are things that aren’t always as they appear, and one really needs to be very careful, especially if you’re in a position where you can change the world.”

Both sisters point out that the book is also intended to represent the many hard-working people in government who rarely get their due. Northcott asserts that most of the characters have their origins in people the women knew in Indiana, where they grew up.

Quayle and Northcott, who say they wrote the thriller “for fun,” worked together via computer modems. Quayle found that she had the most time to write while traveling, working aboard Air Force II, where interruptions were few.

Richard Marek, the authors’ editor at Crown, has nothing but praise for the professionalism of the pair, who quickly rewrote much of the novel after dramatic changes in the former Soviet Union. “I love the interaction between them,” Marek says, “it was absolutely genuine. We knew we were into something good with this book.” The sisters are working on another book, with the same Republican senator hero.

There was a first printing of 75,000 copies, a large number for a first novel in this genre. The sisters have declined to reveal the amount of any advance they may have received.

The Quayle name, which appears above Northcott on the book cover, may not have at first attracted attention. At one Washington bookstore where the book had been on display for a week before the publicity tour began, a clerk said no copies had been sold. Olsson’s, a venerable Georgetown bookstore, reported “above average” sales, boosted by one purchase of 15 copies.

When any probing question comes her way--one that might have political repercussions--Quayle passes it on: “I defer to my older sister,” she jokes.

On the point of how much their book is a reflection of themselves, the sisters mildly disagree.

“It’s obviously going to be our beliefs and our feelings--we’re not going to write a book that doesn’t reflect us,” says Northcott.

“ Somewhat ,” says Quayle, in the tone of the careful political wife.