Frontier Justice : THE MAKING OF A COUNTRY LAWYER.<i> By Gerry Spence (St. Martin’s Press: $26.95, 437 pp.)</i>

Gerry Spence is one of the most celebrated lawyers in America. He claims that he has not lost a jury trial since 1969 and has never lost a criminal case. Always clad in a buckskin jacket, he has become a familiar television commentator.

In “The Making of a Country Lawyer,” Spence retraces his Wyoming childhood and early career as a backwoods barrister. If there is a theme, it’s the deep schism between Spence’s personal and professional life: Like so many lawyers and other professionals, his private life turned into a shambles as he became more publicly successful.

The author has spent many hours in encounter groups and developed considerable insight into the reasons for his internal struggles. “The Making of a Country Lawyer” shares what Spence learned and tells of his ultimate redemption. His book will interest readers curious about the nature of fame and its darker side.

Spence’s autobiography is quite different from those of other famous lawyers, such as Clarence Darrow, Louis Nizer, Thurman Arnold, F. Lee Bailey or Melvin Belli. These works typically center on the authors’ prominent cases and give short shrift to anything else. Most of them pause for a few childhood or college anecdotes in chapter one, then rush on to the years of success and celebrity. They describe little of the authors’ lives away from the office and the courtroom, and there is nothing of the self-revelation contained in Spence’s book.

Readers eager to learn about Spence’s high-profile cases will be disappointed. Indeed, the book’s chronology stops about 25 years ago, omitting his celebrated representation of Imelda Marcos, Randy Weaver and Karen Silkwood. What we do get are glimpses of a life and, although experience has served Spence well, success gave him no instant happiness. His book is a chronicle of self-discovery, as well as the account of how a superstar learned his trade.

Spence spins wonderful yarns about his boyhood and early career as a floundering country lawyer. Born in Laramie in 1929, his family was poor and lived mostly off the land. His mother was puritanical and deeply religious; his father was a chemist, an anti-authoritarian man who identified strongly with working people.

Rebelling, the boy left home after finishing high school and became a merchant seaman. He started smoking, drinking, gambling and whoring. All this horrified his mother, who committed suicide a few years later. Many people close to the family blamed Spence for this, including Spence himself, and the struggle to overcome such guilt became the central issue of his life.

“Your mother did not do this to you, I heard a voice say,” writes Spence, recalling his mother’s death. “It was you who did this to your mother. . . . It was you who demanded your mother’s love and gave nothing in return. It was you, Gerry Spence, who killed her.”

He eventually went to law school because, as he put it, practicing law beat the hell out of manual labor. Spence finished at the top of his class and, after passing the bar with the highest marks in the state, the aspiring attorney--by now married with children--landed an unremarkable job examining title abstracts.

Early in his career, however, Spence was elected county attorney and he learned how to try cases. It soon dawned on him that he had a vocation for such work because he had a knack for storytelling and speaking to working folks on juries. Although often reversed on appeal, he won case after case for injured clients and his professional reputation began to soar.

Meanwhile, his personal life scraped bottom. Tormented by his mother’s ghost, he and his first wife fought incessantly and Spence hit the bottle. He ran for Congress as a right-wing Republican and was drubbed by a descendant of William Henry Harrison. His law school refused to give him a teaching job, and he got nowhere trying to become a judge. Hungry for money, Spence started taking cases for insurance companies but despised himself for it.

Spence was ultimately rescued the old-fashioned way--by true love. While skiing, he met and became enamored of a beautiful woman who was also married. Eventually, by sheer chutzpah, he propelled himself into her life and married his second wife, Imaging, after prying himself loose from Anna and his four kids. This part of the book reads more like a romance novel than the memoir of a hard-bitten mountain man, and the stylistic transition is abrupt.

At 39, Spence’s midlife crisis ended. Today, he takes the cases of a few carefully chosen personal injury plaintiffs and criminal defendants--especially those despised by society.

What, then, accounts for his remarkable success? First, Spence overcame an austere childhood and only a modest education. His parents imbued him with a powerful sense of justice and sympathy for the downtrodden. He won the genetic lottery, inheriting brilliant analytical skills and a strong constitution. His childhood and young adulthood taught him self-reliance, risk-taking and the value of hard work.

Spence and his father were hunters, and he often uses hunting metaphors to describe his work. The courtroom, he writes, is “a place of death” where “the king has a champion as does the poor man. . . . When I walk into a courtroom I am the hunter.” And he kills well.