The undercover life of Barry Broad

One afternoon two summers ago, labor union lobbyist Barry Broad sat through a dull legislative hearing at California’s ornate Capitol building.

As lawmakers droned, he fell into a daydream. Broad, an avid news consumer and armchair geopoliticist, began pondering the Middle East, terrorism and weapons of mass destruction.

“What if CIA secret agents could engineer a Chernobyl-like nuclear meltdown that would stymie Iran’s ambitions to build a nuclear bomb?” Broad mused. “What if Iran’s mullahs could smuggle a radioactive ‘dirty bomb’ into the Port of Los Angeles and set it off at Griffith Observatory?” And “what if both events were to occur simultaneously?”

Suddenly, the bearded, balding, 50-year-old family man thought: “What a good idea for a book!”

Broad’s daydreaming and his wisp of a plot morphed into hundreds of hours of researching and writing that produced an international thriller, “Eve of Destruction.”

The book, Broad’s first, was published by Seven Locks Press in Santa Ana and is scheduled to be in bookstores next month.

Turning the concept into a 496-page novel (list price $24.95) with dozens of characters was the challenge of a lifetime for the neophyte author. He recalled that it took him two months to get the courage up to write the first word.

“One Friday night, my wife and kids were gone and I was hanging out,” he said. “I sat down at the computer and wrote a chapter that was a critical moment for one of the characters.” That was Hannah, a clandestine operative for Israel’s Mossad intelligence service.

“I enjoyed myself and wrote for two hours,” he said. “So I told myself, let’s see if I can write 150 pages” more.

With the prose finally flowing, Broad started researching. He visited California ports and questioned his union members to learn about the movement of cargo and security weaknesses.

To his delight, the Internet yielded a treasure trove of information about everything from “Iranian cigarette brands to how to make a bomb, nuclear or conventional.” The Iranian military export company’s website gave him access to an extensive catalog of weapons.

Broad’s wife and two teenage children were shocked at the sensitive data he downloaded. “They believed that any day the FBI was going to come knocking on our door, asking what the heck I was doing,” he said.

In six months, Broad finished a draft and began polishing it after getting comments from the members of his longtime book club and people he knew around the Capitol.

He sent out more than 100 query letters before Eddie Kritzer, a veteran Hollywood film, television and book agent, took him on.

“I thought he told an excellent story. What’s going on in Iran, Israel and the United States makes it very topical,” Kritzer said. “I think there’s a screenplay there.”

With Kritzer’s help, Broad signed a bare-bones contract with Seven Locks to print 5,000 copies of “Eve of Destruction.”

Just getting the book into print “is all I hoped for,” Broad said. But now, with his book published, he admits to growing ambition.

“The chance of becoming a bestselling author is about 1 in 800,000 or greater, but you never know,” he said.

Pre-publication reviews, however, are heartening. “ ‘Eve of Destruction’ is a well-researched, authentic and timely thriller that grips the reader from the first page,” wrote David Corbett, a Bay Area author whose 2007 “Blood of Paradise” was nominated for an Edgar mystery writing award.

Though facing long odds, Broad doesn’t have to look far to find inspiration. At least two people who once worked in the Capitol and state government have become bestselling writers after banging away nights and weekends on novels.

Steve Martini, a Capitol correspondent for legal newspaper the Los Angeles Daily Journal in the 1970s and a former state government attorney, made it big with a series of courtroom dramas that have been a staple of popular fiction since 1987. He gave up his civil service job in 1991.

Success as an author “is like lightning striking,” but it does happen with luck and talent, said Martini, whose 12th book, “Shadow of Power,” was released in May by HarperCollins Publishers.Another Sacramento author, Allison Brennan, worked for the Assembly Republican Caucus until she quit in 2005. A year later, her first three romantic thrillers were published by Random House Inc. Two more novels, “Killing Fear” and “Tempting Evil,” were released this year and another, “Playing Dead,” is scheduled to be in bookstores this fall.

Brennan, who met Broad at an FBI “Citizens Academy” in Sacramento, said the Capitol was full of quirky characters whom a budding writer can mine for colorful prose. “If you have a natural inclination to be a writer, it’s a good place to absorb,” she said.

Broad insists that he likes his lobbying job but would give it up without a thought if writing success should come his way. But for now, he says he’s committed to arguing to pass or defeat bills on behalf of union bus drivers, makers of metallic birthday party balloons, Hollywood production workers and other clients who might need his services.

Many of Broad’s regular adversaries acknowledge that he’s a tough, persuasive advocate for his clients. “I’m not surprised he can write fiction. I’ve been listening to him testify for years,” said Bill Dombrowski, president of the California Retailers Assn.

“It would probably be in my interest to talk to the larger retailers and get them to pre-order a million books, so I can get rid of Barry forever.”

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marc.lifsher@latimes.com

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The back story

Who: Barry Broad

Age: 50

Job: Lobbyist for various labor unions in California; novelist

Title: Partner in law firm Broad & Gusman

Residence: Sacramento

Education: Bachelor’s in history from UC Davis, law degree from UC Davis

Family: Married to Joan Markoff; daughter, Hannah, and son, Matty

Hobby: Raising orchids and exotic plants

Literary character he’d most like to be: Sam Spade in Dashiell Hammett’s “The Maltese Falcon”