It Was a Dark and Stormy Week . . .

Name your news-of-the-week. Is it the county surgeon who let a scrub tech operate on a patient? Or the sight of sheriff’s deputies taking whacks at a couple of people after a nervy 80-mile chase?

I’ll take two bits of literary news.

The first, almost casually imparted during a “60 Minutes” story about possible O.J. Simpson jury tampering, is the news that the publisher of books by O.J. jurors and O.J. acquaintances has fielded an astounding 300-plus different O.J.-related book proposals.

Who are these people? Marcia Clark’s auto mechanic? (“Ms. Clark rides the brakes something awful, but she always empties her ashtray before she brings the car in.”) Are the drive-up clerk who handed O.J. his burgers and the Ben & Jerry’s clerk who dished Nicole Brown’s last scoop of Rainforest Crunch collaborating on a fast-food crime cookbook?

The second piece of news is also about a tragedy, and a personal story, but of a vastly different order.

It is about the hero of this and many other hours, Alfredo Perez, the schoolteacher shot in the head when a gang bullet came through a window at Figueroa Street Elementary School.

The city, and the world beyond, wept and worried over Alfredo Perez. When he lived, against all the odds, we rejoiced. The president phoned. Donations poured in with the cards and notes. The mayor and Edward James Olmos bought bulletproof glass for the school’s windows. When Alfredo Perez fought back, so did all of L.A.

Last week, a Times reporter checking on Perez’s progress at a Long Beach hospital talked to his wife, Virginia, about his condition. She and her family, she said, are working on a volume about their ordeal. “You can read all about it in the book,” she said, “in about two months.”

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L.A.’s latitude lies at six degrees of separation: your carpool partner’s nephew mows Richard Gere’s lawn, or better, the same hands that cut Loni Anderson’s hair cut your own. Hollywood has persuaded us that the degree to which we are real is only the degree to which we are touched by fame.

Leo Braudy is a USC professor whose book, “The Frenzy of Renown,” is a study of fame not just in this century but across a dozen centuries. When fame and fate intersect, he says, “all of a sudden the hand of God or fate has come down and connected you to something everybody’s interested in, and you want to exploit it in some way, and the most obvious way is to do a book on it.”

If there is no public memorial of the event, it as good as didn’t happen. The craving is for recognition, for a lasting affirmation of a fleeting moment. And a book, says Braudy, is “like the living version of a tombstone.”

The Warholian 15 minutes never requires fame to be praiseworthy, or even significant. If the tree falls in the forest and no one turns it into a paperback, then it hasn’t made a sound.

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Long before it was a dateline on news stories, Brentwood was a village, and the shelves of Dutton’s Brentwood--bearing volumes of literary criticism, elegant mysteries, poets obscure and renowned, almost everything but O.J. Simpsoniana--are a testament to that.

Now, for the first time in owner Doug Dutton’s memory, “I’ve had customers and people in the neighborhood coming up to me and saying, ‘Please don’t stock this book.’ I find that astonishing.” The few Simpson books he has carried as a concession to local events haven’t sold.

Instant books are no novelty. Dutton recalls the Pentagon Papers compilation, the book on the Gulf War. My home library has an “instant” book on the 1889 Johnstown Flood, the assassination of President McKinley in 1901 and the 1906 San Francisco earthquake.

But those offer a panoramic and comprehensive view of events.

These “my story” books, usually one-note literature that isn’t so much written as transcribed, are a little piece of a big story. The truth and the public would be better served, suggests Dutton, if all the jurors, or all the witnesses, or all the attorneys, collaborated on one book with their multiple truths, like the classic Japanese movie “Rashomon.”

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In the 1950s, the publisher and humorist Bennett Cerf remarked that the most popular book topics of the time were Abraham Lincoln, pets and medicine. Therefore, the runaway bestseller of the decade would be “Lincoln’s Doctor’s Dogs.”

He meant it as a joke. Nowadays, he’d have six book proposals.

Perhaps Gresham’s Law is at work, and bad books could end up driving out good. But professional pique is not driving this, truly. If anything, this trend is a full employment act for ghostwriters. Still, for the record: Judge Ito’s parents go to my dentist. His dogs go to my vet. I was at a party across the street from O.J.’s estate the early evening of the murders. I’d broken my foot, and I was getting around with the help of a sword cane, which I subsequently got rid of.

Do I hear the words “book contract”? Operators are standing by.