Banking on One From the Heart : Novel: When former O.C. writer Robert Ferrigno switched to a plot that excited him, words flowed. Now so are film offers and rave reviews.

Three years ago, Robert Ferrigno was hunkered down in his Belmont Shore apartment in Long Beach writing what he thought would be the follow-up to “The Horse Latitudes,” his critically acclaimed Southern California-set noir first novel.

But after struggling for nearly a year on a new novel with a “radical environmental theme,” the former Orange County journalist realized he was working on a book he didn’t really want to write.

“I was just totally bored with it,” he said. “I really tried to think out a book: a ‘what if?’ kind of thing. I can’t write like that. I actually sat down and thought what would it take to write a bestseller like ‘The Firm’: What happens if a lawyer goes to work for a law firm that is secretly run by the Mafia? That is an idea for a book that, to me, is purely intellectual. I can’t sustain that sort of fascination with an intellectual idea, but I can with an emotional idea or sensation.”

Of course, Ferrigno, 46, didn’t know that at the time.

It didn’t occur to him until after he received a phone call from a friend from “the bad old days” in Seattle in the ‘70s, when the former philosophy major and graduate writing student from Florida was playing poker for a living and “traveling in rough circles.” It seems an old gambling acquaintance in Seattle had been murdered and Ferrigno became convinced he and his family might be in jeopardy.

Thus inspired by his own fear, Ferrigno scuttled his environmental novel and began writing a new book.

The result is “The Cheshire Moon” (William Morrow & Company; $20), which, like his first novel, is fast-paced, stylishly written and populated with more colorful Southern California characters than Hollywood Boulevard at high noon.

Ferrigno’s protagonist is Quinn (just one name), a former investigative newspaper reporter with a reputation for “trolling biker bars and the city morgue for information” and generally keeping bad company.

But after one of his stories helps acquit a serial murderer who went on to kill a mini-mart clerk--in front of Quinn--the divorced father of a young daughter is playing it safe by writing features for SLAP, “a snide, trendy monthly,” where his most recent assignment was to “interview haberdashers who outfit Madonna impersonators.”

As the novel opens, Quinn and hotshot photojournalist Jen Takamura are on their way to cover a “Musclemen for Jesus” rally in Huntington Beach. At the same time, Quinn’s hustler pal Andy is frantically trying to reach him: Andy has stumbled upon the murder of a television producer for a TV talk show host (“the white Oprah”) and fears the killer, “a total monstro,” is after him.

Andy soon turns up dead in a van at the edge of the Long Beach airport, part of his head blown away and a .357 magnum in his hand. The police are calling it a suicide. But Quinn knows better, and he fears his own life may be in jeopardy.

Foreign rights to the novel have already been sold to six countries, and the book is garnering rave early reviews.

Entertainment Weekly, which included a full-page color photo of Ferrigno, called it “a propulsive and endlessly surprising novel of suspense.” Indeed, within hours after the magazine hit newsstands last week, Ferrigno’s agent was fielding phone calls from Hollywood producers interested in optioning the film rights.

But during a phone interview from his new home in Kirkland, Wash.--a lakefront bedroom community 10 minutes from downtown Seattle--Ferrigno was more interested in talking about the phone call that gave him the “emotional hook” that sustained him through months of writing “The Cheshire Moon.”

The Seattle acquaintance who was murdered had been a law school student in the ‘70s when he and Ferrigno were part of a group--”basically drug dealers and little criminal types”--that used to meet Sundays to gamble on pro football games on TV.

Ferrigno was told that his old buddy had been murdered in his home and that the police were saying he had been killed after surprising a burglar.

“I laughed because I knew this guy,” said Ferrigno. “I basically said, ‘No way. Here’s what happened: This was the kind of guy who’s got his law degree now; he’s set up. He probably got busted for coke and to get out of being tried he ratted out his dealer and his dealer sent somebody to kill him.’ ”

End of phone conversation.

Then two weeks later, Ferrigno’s phone rang again. This time it was a private investigator hired by the dead man’s family: “He said, ‘I hear you know who killed my client’s son?’ I said, ‘What? ‘ . . . “

Ferrigno assured the investigator that he had only been speculating, but after Ferrigno hung up the phone, it struck him: “If this guy thinks I know who did it, what happens if the bad guys think I know who did it?

“I actually had some real serious concerns that I had put myself and my family in jeopardy,” said Ferrigno, who sent his wife and 3-year-old son to his wife’s family’s home and spent “close to a week of very tense nights where I was real conscious of my security. It’s the idea that if I was right (about the murder), I have a right to be scared.”

As it turned out, the murder of his old gambling buddy happened exactly the way he had speculated.

When Ferrigno told his editor at William Morrow about the incident and how furious he was at himself for inadvertently putting his family in possible jeopardy, “my editor said, ‘God, you’re so much more animated when talking about what happened to you than the book you’ve been working on for a year. Why don’t you write that story?’ ”

Ferrigno said the incident gave him “the germ” of an idea for his novel and taught him a valuable lesson.

Writing “The Cheshire Moon,” he said, “was just like the feeling I had when I wrote the first book: I was writing from the heart.” The scuttled novel with the environmental theme “was very much a labor: I really had to pump myself up to work, and that’s not the way I want to work.”

“I think I learned my lesson: If it’s not from the heart, I don’t want to write it.”

Although Ferrigno moved from Long Beach to Kirkland two years ago, he returns here several times a year “to keep in tune.”

“It was really a hard decision because I love Southern California, but we ultimately felt it was a better place to raise a family.”

However, he has no intention of giving up his Southern California literary milieu and says his next novel will be set primarily in Seal Beach.

“I think the coastal area of Orange County in particular is so ripe with promise,” he said. “I love the idea of the hustler mentality, and I see that in a good way. I see people in that part of the country as people who are very hard-working and very eager to make it.

“I think great good or great evil can come from that desire to exceed one’s expectations.”

In fact, he said, all the “bad guys” in his novels are either taking courses or they have aspirations. Cubanito, the drug dealer in “The Horse Latitudes,” was trying to improve his grammar. Liston, the ruthless killer in “The Cheshire Moon,” is an ex-football player who takes adult-education classes--world literature, world history, world religion: “Anything with ‘World’ in the title,” he says, “I haven’t got time for the small stuff.”

As Ferrigno says, “the bad guys are constantly trying to improve themselves, and yet there’s that boundary.”

“I guess that’s why Orange County and Southern California in general appeal to me. Everybody works more than one job: ‘I’m a waiter, but . . .’ ‘I’m a schoolteacher, but . . . ‘ It’s the ‘buts’--what they aspire to--that intrigue me. No one is satisfied with who or what they are. That’s fertile soil, and that’s why I’m fascinated with it.”

Ferrigno will embark on a 10-city publicity tour later this month that brings him to Orange County, where he’ll do a signing at Book Carnival in Orange from 2 to 4 p.m. Feb. 27.