An Unlikely Team--Law Clerk and Novelist--Write ‘Pretty Boy Floyd’ : Books: Diana Ossana was an unknown, a woman who had done a lot of writing but never had anything published. Larry McMurtry is one of America’s most successful writers.

Just who does Diana Ossana think she is, anyway? The 45-year-old former law clerk gets second billing on the most recent novel by Larry McMurtry, one of America’s most popular and prolific authors.

Ossana had never been published before she sat down with the Pulitzer Prize-winner to write “Pretty Boy Floyd,” McMurtry’s 17th novel.

While the book was released in September to mostly positive reviews, critics are wondering why the man who wrote “Lonesome Dove” and “Terms of Endearment” worked with a collaborator for the first time in his 33-year career.

But to McMurtry, the decision to write with Ossana was no act of charity--it was she who pulled him out of a slump.

“I knew that I couldn’t write it without her,” he says.

Ossana might not have taken on the project had she known that some critics would accuse her of daring to write with “the icon,” she says.

They filled in the details during a stop in Seattle on a national book tour, a first for both Ossana and McMurtry. He decided to do one this time because the collaboration has finally given him something to talk about, he says.

The tale of their alliance reads like McMurtry’s fiction--rich in folksy detail and melodrama.

The two, both divorced, met through mutual friends almost 10 years ago in a catfish restaurant in Tucson, Ariz., where Ossana lives.

Ossana was star-struck.

“I had just finished (reading) ‘Lonesome Dove,’ ” she said. “It was intimidating; I couldn’t imagine what I would have to say that would be interesting to this man.”

“Meanwhile, I was in awe of this silent, beautiful woman sitting at the end of the table,” McMurtry says.

Gradually the two became friends.

McMurtry described his lifestyle in the 1980s as peripatetic. He would flit around the country almost weekly to oversee his rare-book stores in Tucson, Texas and Washington, D.C., and he also had a home in Los Angeles. He wrote seven novels during the decade, as well as screenplays, essays and book reviews.

Then, in the fall of 1991, the now-58-year-old Texas native had quadruple bypass heart surgery and was forced to stop moving.

“It just so happened that I stopped at Diana’s kitchen table,” he said.

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A side-effect of the surgery was a debilitating fear of going outside, a reaction McMurtry says doctors call common.

He spent his time sleeping in Ossana’s guest room, writing “Streets of Laredo,” the sequel to “Lonesome Dove,” on a manual typewriter in her kitchen, or just staring out the window from a couch.

Ossana, who lived with her teen-age daughter, called his behavior “disconcerting.”

“I let him stay at my house because he seemed to be comfortable there, and waited, hoping that this would subside,” she said.

The collaboration began when McMurtry asked Ossana, who had written for pleasure since childhood, to help edit “Streets of Laredo.” He had been so out of it that the story seemed “faxed from a former self,” he recalls, but Ossana improved it.

Meanwhile, he was rejecting screenplay offers, insisting that he couldn’t focus on a job that was structured.

When Warner Bros. wanted a script for “Pretty Boy Floyd,” Ossana put her foot down. She researched the story and persuaded McMurtry to tackle it.

Charles Arthur Floyd was a small-time, Depression-era bank robber from Oklahoma who found himself on J. Edgar Hoover’s most wanted list as Public Enemy No. 1.

“I had a lot of trouble persuading Diana to actually put her name on it, although it was her research, and it was a full collaboration,” McMurtry said.

Ossana says she would have been content to just be paid for her time without taking credit. “I didn’t want to deal with Hollywood, I didn’t want to deal with the press, I didn’t want to deal with all the things that go along with it. I just wanted to write, that’s all.”

After finishing the script, the two were so fascinated by the story they immediately began the novel. They wrote 10 pages a day, with McMurtry punching out a five-page framework in the morning and Ossana filling in color and details on her computer.

“I was very worried about our styles merging at first,” McMurtry said, “but (it) just happened without anyone noticing . . . and sort of got lost in the daily activity.”

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One day during the project, he sneaked a glance at Ossana’s work.

“I read two pages of her novel, and I was very, very moved,” he said. “I realized then that my instinctive choice to try to persuade her to be my partner was correct, because there was something in that prose that I don’t have in my prose.”

While “Pretty Boy Floyd” features McMurtry-esque down-home slang and humor, the two authors say the female characters have a sensibility that comes from Ossana.

She is now working on a novel of her own about Italian immigrants. When that is published, readers will see clearly how Ossana contributed to “Pretty Boy,” McMurtry says.

The collaboration helped pull McMurtry out of his daze. The pair wrote three more screenplays together.

McMurtry and Ossana plan to begin another joint novel in 1996, this time about two real-life Cherokee outlaws in the late 19th Century. Right now, Warner Bros. has asked them to alter the “Pretty Boy Floyd” screenplay a bit, based on new details in the novel. The film is not yet in production.

Ossana is still trying to deal with the media scrutiny “Pretty Boy Floyd” has drawn. She likens her experience to the story of Charley Floyd, whose impulsive decision to pull a minor heist changed his life forever.