Return to Her Creative Roots Is a Novel Success : Books: TV writer and producer April Smith took a gamble on fiction. Her ‘North of Montana’ is winning praise--even Hollywood is interested.

Here is Ana Grey, tough-girl FBI agent, her .357 Magnum cocked, in the midst of nailing a bank robber: “I’m really nervous right now,” confides the protagonist of “North of Montana,” “so don’t make me use this because I probably won’t kill you. I’ll just maim you for life.”

Here is April Smith, the book’s sweet-as-pie author, lamenting to a reporter how guilty she feels this morning because her husband had to take their 3-year-old daughter to the doctor.

“She just has a cold,” says Smith, whose gritty novel has won kudos from the likes of Scott Turow and James Ellroy, “but I felt bad I had to leave her and go to work.”

Smith is sitting in her cozy two-room office in a medical building in Santa Monica. It’s just down the street from the notably unglamorous Henley Hotel--a setting in her novel--around the corner from the trendy Third Street Promenade, and a few blocks from her home in an upscale Santa Monica residential neighborhood known as (what else?) north of Montana.

Dressed in a plaid flannel shirt, khaki shorts and fashionable hiking boots, with honey-blond hair and creamy skin, the mid-40s writer looks like a model for an Oil of Olay ad. Hardly someone who would turn out lines like her description of a perfect arrest: “It was pure sex.” Nonetheless, the soft-spoken Smith clearly has an instinct for snappy patter and the seamy side of big-city crime.

A successful TV writer and producer for nearly 20 years, she nabbed two Emmy nominations for her work on “Cagney and Lacey.” She’s also written several TV movies, including one about cops’ wives called “Best Kept Secrets.”

And now “North of Montana,” her first novel, about the adventures of a female FBI agent in Los Angeles, seems to be generating terrific heat.

The book, for which the unknown author received six figures, had an initial printing of 200,000 copies. There have been stories in Vanity Fair and People magazine. Great notices in Kirkus Reviews and Publishers Weekly. Ballantine paid $550,000 for paperback rights. And, naturally, there’s interest in Hollywood.

Still, no one seems more stunned by all the hoopla than Smith, who spent 3 1/2 years writing what she describes as a “gamble.” Asked her response to the novel’s success, it is the one time she sounds like her tough-talking heroine Ana. “Completely blown away,” she says with a laugh.

With a rat-a-tat style and a narrative akin to a high-speed freeway chase, “North of Montana” follows the ambitious Ana through one professional and personal crisis after the next. It careens through L.A.’s most famous and disparate neighborhoods, from the wealthy Westside to the gritty streets of Pico Rivera.

As issues and life in Los Angeles go, it’s got everything. There’s rich whites and poor Latinos. There’s a fading movie queen and Hollywood cynicism. There’s bad cops, drug addiction, sex discrimination and drive-by shootings. There’s family secrets, romance and, of course, murder. There’s even that staple of L.A. culture, Dodger dogs.

For Smith, who has logged a lot of hours cruising with New York City cops and the Santa Monica police, the decision to write about law enforcement was a natural.

But this time around, Smith wanted to tackle the particular world and politics of the FBI. “The FBI really attracted me because it’s not a blue-collar kind of job. Everyone has college degrees. I also think, kind of subconsciously, I’d read about the lawsuit that Hispanic agents brought against the FBI years ago, and that was percolating.”

Although Smith’s track record as a TV producer got her inside the bureau, she doesn’t want to say too much about that aspect of researching the novel. The agents she talked with were so loath to receive any publicity that they didn’t want mention in the book’s acknowledgments.

“They don’t want to blow their cover,” she says.

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Perhaps what is most remarkable about the novel’s success, however, is Smith’s tenacity. “I staked everything on this book,” she says.

After graduating from Stanford’s creative writing program in the early ‘70s, Smith published fiction in Ploughshares, Mademoiselle and the Atlantic Monthly. But then she moved to Los Angeles and got seduced by television. She didn’t write fiction for 20 years.

Then came the 1988 Writers Guild strike. “My husband, Doug Brayfield, and I were in business together,” she recalls. “We had a production deal at Republic Pictures. We had several scripts in development. When the strike happened, it basically wiped us out. It was devastating.”

With that, she says, they made a drastic life choice. “We decided to return to our creative roots. I decided I was going to write this novel come hell or high water. Doug decided he was going to get his degree in poetry.”

So while Smith worked on her novel, her husband was off attending a three-year program in North Carolina. Their life, she confides, was crazy. Their son, Ben, was only 4, they went through half their savings and, in the midst of all this, she got pregnant with their daughter and was forced to go back to writing for television.

“It was enormous stress being pregnant with him gone,” she sighs. “Oh, man. I did a lot of TV work during this time. I did a one-hour pilot, wrote a movie of the week, worked on staff of a half-hour comedy series. I also wrote two other TV movie scripts.”

Smith would focus on her novel for six months, then do TV for six months. “It was hard and humiliating,” she says. “I took assignments that were just awful.”

What’s more, she also ran into serious trouble with the book. Although Ana was always the narrator, originally the story centered on a troubled Westside woman named Claire and her relationship with her Latino housekeeper.

“I was going to do a story about greed in the ‘80s, about a modern Madame Bovary,” Smith says. “I knew what I had was a story of betrayal between an upper-middle-class white woman and a lower-class Hispanic woman. What interested me was the power equation in that relationship and how it’s abused.”

But when Smith showed an early draft to her friend, writer Dan Wakefield, he found the manuscript problematic. “Whose story is this?” he asked.

“It was one of those devastating moments when you have 200 pages,” Smith recalls. “That created the necessity for some very painful rewrites, in which I had to go back and tell everything from Ana’s point of view.”

Interestingly, Smith says she didn’t tell anyone in Hollywood about her novel. The reasons: “Paranoia, obsessional thinking, insecurity,” she says with a laugh. “But mainly the notion that Hollywood ideas are a dime a dozen and meaningless. I didn’t want this novel to become an anecdote.”

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The story of how “North of Montana” got published is almost ridiculously Hollywood-esque. Smith and her TV agent from Creative Artists Agency drew up a list of New York literary agents and narrowed it to two. Both agents wanted to represent the book. Now it was time for Smith to hit New York.

“This was probably the most nerve-racking time for me because even though two agents were interested, I didn’t know what that meant,” she says. “I expected the worst. In TV, it means ‘We like it, but you have to completely rewrite it.’ ”

So Smith did what any normal career woman would do under such stressful circumstances: She went to her favorite boutique and bought a fabulous suit.

She flew to New York on a Wednesday, met with the agents on Thursday, and by the following Monday literary agent Molly Friedrich was sending the novel to 15 publishers. The next morning, Smith got a call from Friedrich saying the book had gotten four offers--including a lucrative deal that gave Smith only 45 minutes to decide.

Describing that morning, Smith sounds like the typical harried working mother. “Here it is 8:30, my husband’s off riding his (expletive) bike in Venice, and I’ve got these kids running around. So I said, ‘Molly, I can’t make this decision.’ She said, ‘You have to.’ ”

Now Smith’s husband arrives home to total chaos. “He’s all sweaty in his bicycle togs, I’m walking around in my nightgown completely crazed, and I’m on the phone writing down these numbers, and he’s saying, ‘Oh God, oh God!’ ”

Smith won’t say who the publisher was, but she rejected the deal. The executive told her she could make the novel a bestseller, but only if Smith would make substantial editorial changes.

But Smith stuck to her guns, so to speak. She told her agent she felt it was a “deal with the devil. . . . I’d rather take less money and have it be mine.” At which point Friedrich said, good, because Sonny Mehta, editor in chief of Alfred Knopf, was interested. And that’s who Smith went with.

As for the future, Smith says she’s agreed to do a sequel to “North of Montana,” but maybe not for another 10 years. She’s not interested in making Ana a “franchise character.” Her next novel, which she’s reticent to discuss, will be about something else. And she’s probably through with television.

Reflecting on how she approached writing the novel, Smith says she thought, “I’d be lucky if it got published respectfully. There are a lot of screenwriters who’ve published novels. But I never thought it would be such an explosive change in identity.”