Pages From Recent History : Local Writers Tap Experience and Imagination to Fill Shelves With Words of Warmth, Wit and Wisdom

It’s been a year in which a San Juan Capistrano incest victim wrote about the dark family secret she had kept hidden for four decades, a Lake Forest woman chronicled the enduring popularity of “The Sound of Music,” and a retired Irvine history professor eloquently described regaining his sight after years of blindness.

It was also a year in which Orange County lost one of its brightest literary lights, the county’s best-known author had his fifth suspense thriller in a row reach the No. 1 spot on the New York Times bestseller list and a transplanted Australian author’s 11-year-old, fact-based novel about an unlikely hero of the Holocaust was finally translated to the big screen by Steven Spielberg.

Orange County has been a vital literary scene for more than a decade, and 1993 was no exception, with literally dozens of books pouring forth from local writers. Among the highlights:

* “Cry the Darkness: One Woman’s Triumph Over Tragedy” (Health Communications; $11.95) is Donna Friess’ account of two generations of female family members being molested by her father. The book’s publication resulted in Friess--a professor of communications at Cypress College--appearing on nearly 100 radio shows and receiving numerous letters and phone calls from readers who identified with her tale of incest.

“I’m getting a lot of ‘it changed my life’ stories,” says Friess, whose book is also being used by therapists and in college classes.

* Julia Antopol Hirsch’s “The Sound of Music: The Making of America’s Favorite Movie” (Contemporary Books; $19.95) told fans everything they ever wanted to know about the 1965 Julie Andrews musical based on the singing Von Trapp family.

Among Hirsch’s fan mail: a letter from George Von Trapp--grandson of Maria Von Trapp--who runs the family’s ski lodge in Stowe, Vt. He ordered 200 copies to sell during the Christmas season and invited Hirsch to do a book-signing at a “Sound of Music” festival at the lodge next year.

* Robert V. Hine’s “Second Sight” (University of California Press; $20) chronicled the retired UC Riverside professor’s 20 years of failing eyesight, his 15 years of total blindness and the near-miraculous restoration of his sight in one eye after a dangerous operation in 1986.

“Second Sight” not only generated glowing reviews--from Library Journal to the New York Times Book Review--but was selected by the Book of the Month Club and attracted the attention of the “Today” show, which filmed Hine at his Irvine home.

* “Summer of Fear” (St. Martin’s Press; $19.95) is T. Jefferson Parker’s fourth Orange County-set mystery since “Laguna Heat” in 1984. It’s also the Laguna Beach author’s most autobiographical novel: Like his protagonist--ex-cop-turned-crime writer Russ Monroe, whose wife is battling a malignant brain tumor--Parker’s wife, Catherine Anne (Cat) Parker, died in 1992 at age 34 after a two-year struggle with brain cancer.

Parker, who is working on his next Orange County mystery, says “Summer of Fear” has been optioned by a production company interested in turning it into a two-part mini-series.

* Jo-Ann Mapson’s debut novel, “Hank & Chloe” (HarperCollins; $20), a contemporary Western romance set in Orange County, was condensed in the March issue of Cosmopolitan magazine and attracted the attention of Annette Bening and Warren Beatty. The Hollywood couple didn’t bite, but an option on the book was snagged by a producer who is now looking for a screenwriter.

Now teaching creative writing and composition full time at Orange Coast College in Costa Mesa, Mapson says she “barely” has time to write. But she did manage to finish her second novel, “Blue Rodeo,” another contemporary Western set this time in the Four Corners area of New Mexico. It’s due out in May.

* “Schindler’s List,” Australian Thomas Keneally’s 1982 prize-winning novel about a German industrialist-Nazi Party member who secretly saved 1,300 Jews from dying in the death camps, is in the news again, thanks to director Steven Spielberg.

Keneally, who joined Bill and Hillary Rodham Clinton at an invitational screening of the film in Washington in late November, has been on a yearlong unpaid leave of absence from his teaching job in the graduate Program in Writing at UC Irvine in order to devote time to Australia’s political Republican Movement. But he has stepped down as the movement’s chairman and returns to UCI in January.

* Dean Koontz of Newport Beach, who normally has only one best-selling novel published a year, had two in 1993. “Dragon Tears,” which is about two Orange County detectives on the trail of a serial killer “with extraordinary powers,” swept to the No. 1 spot on the New York Times bestseller list early in the year; “Mr. Murder”--an October release about a Mission Viejo mystery writer stalked by a nameless psychotic--is moving up the New York Times’ Top 10 chart.

Although he typically sets his novels in Orange County, Koontz says he’s gone “far afield” for his as-yet-untitled next thriller--due out next fall. Set largely in Los Angeles, Malibu and Santa Monica, it has only one reference to Orange County. “That sort of surprised me,” he says, “but that’s the way it went.”

* Elizabeth George of Huntington Beach turned out another best-seller, “Missing Joseph,” her sixth British murder suspense novel featuring New Scotland Yard Detective Inspector Thomas Lynley and associates. George, who was featured in a People magazine article during the summer, has already completed her next book, “Playing for the Ashes,” which is due out in August.

The former El Toro High School English teacher, who leaves in January for her annual research trip to England, has no intention of abandoning Lynley and company for a novelistic change of pace.

“Since I have five main characters,” she says, “I can flip in and out of different characters’ lives in each book, so I can bring one character to the forefront and have another character take a vacation as well. It just depends on which characters seem to accommodate the needs of the plot.”

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Among other Orange County books of note over the past year:

* “Knight’s Cross” (Birch Lane Press; $19.95), a World War II novel about a secret mission to kidnap Adolf Hitler--written by 90-year-old retired Army Col. Aaron Bank of San Clemente (known as the founding father of the Green Berets) and E.M. Nathanson, the Laguna Niguel author of “The Dirty Dozen.”

* “Timothy of the Cay,” the long-awaited sequel to Theodore Taylor’s award-winning 1969 young adult novel, “The Cay,” which has sold more than 500,000 copies in hardback and more than 2 million in paperback worldwide.

* “Five Orange County Poets” (Lightning Publications; $15), featuring the work of Mary Andrews, Rita McMahon Mitzner, Francisco Ortega, Catherine Spear and Gary Lee Tomlinson and billed as the first published anthology of Orange County poets.

* “Chiller” (Bantam Books; $21.95), Sterling Blake’s Orange County-set thriller about cryonically freezing people for possible revival. (Blake is a pseudonym for well-known Laguna Beach science fiction author Gregory Benford.)

* “Interest of Justice” (Dutton; $21), the second legal thriller by Nancy Taylor Rosenberg (“Mitigating Circumstances”) of Laguna Niguel. This time her setting was Orange County. Her protagonist? A brilliant young judge whose younger sister and brother-in-law are savagely murdered.

The county continued to be fertile soil for mysteries with local settings in 1993. Besides “Summer of Fear,” there was Robert Ferrigno’s “The Cheshire Moon,” Jan Burke’s “Goodnight Irene” and A.E. Maxwell’s eighth Fiddler mystery, “Murder Hurts.”

Maxwell (the husband and wife writing team of Ann and Evan Maxwell), alas, pulled up stakes in July and moved from their longtime home in Laguna Niguel to Anacortes, Wash.

Huntington Beach author Kem Nunn (“Tapping the Source,” “Pomona Queen”) also moved north in September--to Tomalas, Calif., a tiny farm town in the northwest corner of Marin County where, Nunn says, “even on a nice day on the weekends you can go out and do things and you don’t fight traffic.”

As with the Maxwells, Orange County had simply become too congested for Nunn’s liking.

“It wouldn’t surprise me if I returned there in terms of setting. It would surprise me if I returned there to live,” says Nunn, who recently completed a screen adaptation of a Robert Stone novel, “Children of Light,” and is now working on a new novel--set in Northern California.

The year also marked the death of Donald Heiney of Newport Beach, one of the founders of UC Irvine’s nationally acclaimed graduate Program in Writing. Heiney, who died of a heart attack in July at 71, was remembered by friends and colleagues as a dedicated teacher and mentor.

But the veteran English professor, who retired in 1991 after 26 years at UCI, is also remembered as the gifted author of 16 novels written under the pen name MacDonald Harris. His literary legacy includes “Glad Rags,” “Hemingway’s Suitcase” and “The Balloonist,” which was nominated for the National Book Award in 1976. His most recent novel, the finely crafted “A Portrait of My Desire,” was published in the spring and is considered one of his best.

Michael Chabon--a Heiney protege who wrote his acclaimed 1988 debut novel, “The Mysteries of Pittsburgh,” while at UCI--returned to Laguna Beach in October. Chabon, who regularly contributes short stories to the New Yorker, had spent the past four years living in Seattle, New York, Key West, Fla., and San Francisco.

Newly married for the second time, Chabon says his return to Orange County was prompted by his wife, Ayelet Waldman, who landed a job as a federal public defender in Santa Ana.

“It looks like I’m here to stay--at least for the time being,” says Chabon, who is completing a new Pittsburgh-set novel, “Wonder Boys,” which is due out in about a year.

Other Orange County literary highlights in 1993:

Responding to residents of Laguna Beach who lost homes in the October wildfire, Lorraine Zimmerman--former owner of Laguna’s landmark Fahrenheit 451 Books and now operating an out-of-print book search service--volunteered to defer her usual finder’s fee to help fire victim’s replace treasured volumes. Among the requests she has so far received: to replace a complete set of Zane Grey novels and out-of-print books about John Wayne.

Also in the fall: A group of Orange County women mystery writers published a 1994 “Men of Mystery” calendar to raise funds to buy books for the nation’s financially beleaguered libraries.

About half of the 3,000 calendars featuring black and white photographs of Earl Emerson, Jerome Doolittle and other nationally known mystery authors have so far sold--enough to pay the printing tab and pay back their lenders, says Garden Grove mystery writer Patricia McFall, the calendar’s editor.

Now that they’re in the black, McFall says, they recently were able to purchase their first book--a how-to-write-a-mystery book--for the Orange County Public Library, which has been hit with a 75% reduction in its materials budget. (As of July 1, all 27 branches also began closing on Fridays and reduced operating hours on the other days.)

A 1995 calendar is tentatively planned--this time the Women of Mystery--but don’t expect McFall to spearhead it.

“It’s not that I didn’t enjoy it,” she says, “but my own book writing was delayed by about nine months.”

The idea for the calendar, appropriately enough, was hatched at the Left Coast Crime mystery conference in Anaheim earlier in the year.

The annual conference--to be held in the Hyatt Recency Alicante in Anaheim on Feb. 11, 12 and 13--will include panel discussions with more than 70 mystery authors and promises to be one of the county’s biggest literary events of the new year.