A Briton’s American Independence : Fulbright Chandler award gives Denise Danks, here soaking up U.S. culture, something most mothers don’t have--free time.

For an author, it’s a dream come true.

Imagine you’re a British crime writer who has been awarded round-trip air fare plus $20,000 to spend up to nine months in the United States soaking up Yankee culture for the purpose of “enriching” your writing.

“I was absolutely thrilled,” says Denise Danks, the 1994 British winner of the Fulbright Raymond Chandler Award, an annual scholarship given to up-and-coming British and American authors who are demonstrating outstanding talent in detective and crime fiction writing.

Danks, author of a series of high-tech crime novels featuring a London-based female journalist who covers the computer industry, arrived in the United States in July and has been living in Orange County since August.

Her elation over learning she had won the award, however, quickly took a nose-dive.

“I got cold feet,” admits Danks, the mother of two daughters, ages 4 and 8.

The prospect of leaving her husband and children behind is the reason she never even entertained the thought of applying for the scholarship. But Ian Rankin, the previous British winner, recommended her to the Fulbright Commission and she was invited to apply.

“I wasn’t thinking about it because of my family situation, which is probably what a lot of women would consider,” says Danks, 41. “A lot of the winners are younger men without families. Ian has a family, but it seems to be easier for men to organize their lives. It’s not the same when a man leaves home.

“There were some very strange remarks about my going off on my own, but any women I’ve told know exactly how good an opportunity it is,” she says.

Although she is entitled to spend nine months in America, Danks chose to stay only six. Her two daughters accompanied her during her first month in the United States, which included visits to Massachusetts and Maine.

Her family is still in good hands.

“I have wonderful parents who actually moved 300 miles from their home to look after my husband and my two children,” she says. “I was very concerned that my children’s routine would not be changed because I felt bringing them out here would uproot them. They’ve only just started school, and, besides, it would be pointless for me: I’d be in the same situation I was at home.”

Indeed, it’s not easy for Danks to carve out time to write back home in London. “I go to the supermarket, go to the laundry--I do all those mum things,” says Danks, who gets her writing done Monday through Wednesday, “from about quarter past 9 to quarter to 3.”

That’s the beauty of winning the award.

“You’re just here to write,” she says. “That’s their gift to you. This is the first time in my life I’ve just had myself to worry about.”

Danks, who is staying in the Laguna Hills home of friends, Leslie Baer-Brown and Alfred Brown, is the first woman to win the Fulbright Raymond Chandler Award, which alternates each year between British and American writers.

The award, which is funded by the Raymond Chandler estate, also provides winners with access to the Raymond Chandler papers, which are housed at UCLA and at Oxford University in England.

Danks, who has been asked to create a crime television series in England, wanted to take advantage of UCLA’s film and television department while she is here and has been auditing screenwriting classes.

“I thought, where better to learn than Hollywood?” she says. “I’m halfway through a screenplay at the moment. I decided I could write the (next) book when I got home.”

Despite her forays to UCLA, Danks hasn’t taken advantage of the opportunity to examine the Chandler papers.

“I’m very, very naughty,” she says with a laugh. “I just haven’t been to see them. I thought to myself, ‘I suppose I could browse over them and what? It’s not going to give you any ideas.’ I’ve been so busy, to tell you the truth, just absorbing the American lifestyle and writing and being busy just getting about.”

Danks, whose narrator-heroine Georgina Powers is based in London’s scruffy East End, has a lot in common with the author of the quintessential hard-boiled American private eye.

“If I was to say which was the lineage (for her novels), I’d have to say Raymond Chandler as opposed to Agatha Christie,” says Danks. “I favor the American tradition of crime writing more. It seems to have a better grip on real life, on urban life. Although I do enjoy a classic mystery, I prefer those mean streets.”

Danks adds that “I’ve found myself defending Raymond Chandler to women who object to his work, for instance, because of his depictions of women. I do hate the way writers are taken out of their time. I found these women (characters) could take care of themselves.”

Georgina Powers can take care of herself as well.

For those who haven’t been properly introduced to Georgina in “User Deadly,” “Better Off Dead,” “Frame Grabber” and the new one, “Wink a Hopeful Eye” (St. Martin’s Press), here’s Danks’ thumbnail sketch of her character.

She’s in her late 20s and “rather androgynous: She’s sort of skinny, but sexy. She’s got blue eyes, and her hair color varies with a bottle: She does change her hair color.”

She is divorced--unhappily--and she can sometimes be bitter and self-destructive. “She’s a very poor judge of men. She likes to chase a story--that’s her main motivation--and she likes revenge. She has a lot of heart, but she’s a rather amoral character in that she wouldn’t be averse to taking the money and running.

“Somebody once said to me, ‘When I read Sarah Paretsky’s V.I. Warshawski I really want to be V.I. Warshawski, but when I read your books I don’t really want to be Georgina Powers.”

But the novels have humor, says Danks, “which gets her through all the gruesome nature of her life.”

So, are there any autobiographical elements in Georgina Powers?

“You mean, ‘Am I an alcoholic tart?’ ” Danks says with a big, throaty laugh. “Yeah, yeah. I didn’t make any of this up.”

Danks does have something in common with her character: Her resume includes being managing director of a London-based technology news agency and European editor of a U.S. computer magazine. But after having her first child, she quit in 1987 to free-lance and begin writing her first Georgina Powers novel.

Danks is no stranger to Orange County, having last visited here seven years ago. “There have,” she says, “been quite a lot of changes since I’ve been away.”

She’s “quite appalled” by the destruction of the hills for the San Joaquin Transportation Corridor (“It’s like scarring a beautiful painting”). She’s amazed by the “great influence of Latin America now in Southern California, which seven years ago was barely there, really.” And she’s dismayed by the gang culture, in which “every little pipsqueak can have a gun and arm themselves.”

She’s suffered no culture shock traversing Southern California’s freeways, however.

“I live in London,” she says. “You haven’t seen traffic because your traffic just goes in straight lines; ours goes at every possible angle that can be exploited. And London rush hour is just appalling.”

Besides, she says, “it’s really easy to drive around here because your gas prices are a fraction of ours. Ours are about $4 a gallon.”

Although she has made side trips to Seattle and San Francisco, Danks has spent most of her time in Orange and Los Angeles counties. She’s even been up to the O.J. Simpson trial, taking pictures, talking to people outside the courthouse and generally just soaking up the carnival-like atmosphere.

It’s all research for her next Georgina Powers novel, which, she says, “is going to start outside the O.J. Simpson trial.”

Unlike some writers who have no trouble coming up with ideas for novels, Danks says she needs a springboard: “Something has to hit me.”

In this case it was a story she read in USA Today shortly after arriving in the United States about how TV news cameras had been stolen outside the courthouse. “They now have them chained down,” she says.

Danks says the Simpson trial has received a lot of publicity in England, but nothing like the media saturation here.

“The rest of the world does not consider O.J. a proper footballer. Pele is a proper footballer,” she says. “The rest of the world does not have an emotional investment in O.J.”

She says the British tabloids “love the scandal involved,” but what most intrigues her countrymen is the media coverage (“for the ratings, presumably”) and how our legal system differs with theirs.

“That you should have two teams of attorneys picking jurors is beyond me,” she says. “I was very amused by the picking of the jurors. In the UK, you get people off the electoral roles. It’s supposed to be random, but inevitably it’s in alphabetical order. The lawyers get three goes in questioning--they can only get rid of three (potential jurors)--and the requirement tends to be, ‘Can you speak English?’ You don’t get teams who specialize in choosing jurors.”

She also finds the concern over courtroom attire quite amusing.

“Everybody’s conscious of how they look,” she says. “Of course, we have wigs and gowns, which is supposed to make our law more serious, (give it) an air of authority. Can you imagine Judge (Lance) Ito in a long white wig and (Robert) Shapiro and (Marcia) Clark in black gowns? There wouldn’t be any arguments about who looks the chicest and the sharpest.”

Danks, who says she appreciates the “kindness and the openness” of American society and the fact that “you can really be yourself and get on,” says Judge Ito is indicative of one of the things she enjoys most about America:

“The opportunities are here. One of the things I noticed on the (recent televised) Judge Ito interview is he said he grew up knowing that he could become a judge. I can’t imagine someone in the UK who wasn’t of a certain class and of a certain gender and race being able to say that with the confidence that Judge Ito did, and that is a difference, and a very positive one, here.”

Danks, who returned home for a couple of weeks early in the fall to enroll her children in school “and make sure everybody knew the routine,” will be doing a number of book signings for “Wink a Hopeful Eye” before returning to England in the middle of December.

Meantime, she and her family have been communicating regularly via telephone, fax and e-mail. As Danks says, “We’re cruising the Internet, so we have a lot of contact.”

But, she says, “to be perfectly honest, I’m just having a blast. I do what I like, which for a mother is a miracle of opportunity. It’s wonderful. “