Pinstripes And Pearls

By Andrea Sachs/Philadelphia

Perhaps it's because success was once so elusive that Lisa Scottoline wears it so conspicuously. There are the leopard-print Manolo Blahnik mules, the Blue Cult jeans and Ralph Lauren sweater, the gold Cartier bracelet and the white S500 Mercedes. Her home--a stylishly refurbished Pennsylvania farmhouse on 43 acres--is a grand monument to a blockbuster career that the author has painstakingly built from the ground up. Sometimes called the female John Grisham, Scottoline (pronounced Scot-oh-lee-nee) is a star among the burgeoning ranks of lawyers turned best-selling novelists. Devil's Corner (HarperCollins; 393 pages), her 12th book, will arrive in bookstores on May 31, and in light of the advance orders at Amazon.com it is well on its way to becoming her seventh best seller.

Scottoline, 49, turned to writing in 1986 after four years as a successful litigator at a big-name Philadelphia firm. That was the year she gave birth to her only child, Francesca, and, just a few months later, her teetering marriage fell apart. Although Scottoline loved practicing law, she discovered that she loved being home with her daughter more. "I realized that as a litigator, I just wouldn't see her," says Scottoline, "and she had no other parent on the scene."

Casting around for work that she could do at home, Scottoline decided to try her hand at writing--not such a leap, perhaps, for a University of Pennsylvania English major who had concentrated her studies on the American novel. She had even taken a course from Philip Roth. ("He was cold and distant," she recalls.)

For five years, Scottoline was a bicoastal failure. First she bombed at writing screenplays, although she peppered Los Angeles agents with 100 submissions. "Not one person wrote me back," she remembers with a wince. "I could not even get rejected." She ran into another wall of refusal when she sent her first novel to Manhattan book agents. By 1991, Scottoline was broke: receiving no alimony, she had maxed out her credit cards and was $38,500 in debt.

Grisham and Scott Turow were exploding on the scene at the time, and Scottoline was a fan. But she had a gripe with the popular new genre. "I don't think women characters were well realized," she says. "They were the subordinate characters. They were the wife, the spouse, the girlfriend. I thought, I'm a woman trial lawyer. I'm not that rare a bird." She also found the characters too white bread. "I'm an Italian American," she says. "I grew up in a Jewish neighborhood. I saw no Italians and Jews. I want people whom I recognize."

As soon as Scottoline tried her hand at legal thrillers, she sold her first book, Everywhere That Mary Went,and her career took off. By 1995, she had won the Edgar Award, the top prize for mystery writers, for Final Appeal. As of this year, her books have been translated into 23 languages and more than 7 million copies have been sold in the U.S.

Scottoline begins her day shoveling manure in a stable for her four horses. She likes to ride Buddy, which she describes lovingly as "a low-down, dirty, Pocono Mountain 4-H pony." She turns 50 in July. "It's a big deal, although 50 is the new 40," she says. Her second marriage over, she shares her home with four dogs, which pad along after her like an obedient pack. Many authors write for a few hours in the morning, but Scottoline works throughout the day and into the night, with breaks for daytime television ("Oprah is my girl crush," she gushes). She is a peripatetic writer, moving among four home computers.

Like her other novels, Devil's Corner is a fast-paced thriller featuring a female lawyer with an ample supply of attitude. Vicki Allegretti, a U.S. Attorney, teams up with Reheema Bristow, a glamorous African-American woman who has been wrongly accused of a crime, to expose an ever widening conspiracy of cocaine dealing and violence. Added to the mix is some hanky-panky between Vicki and a senior attorney in her office.

As in Scottoline's other books, the writing is brisk and sassy, right at the intersection of the law genre and women's fiction. Vicki and Reheema make a sharp, urban Thelma and Louise. The story swings from the gritty to the grand, always with lawyerly attention to detail. "It's Philadelphia," Scottoline explains. "It's not a fake place. There's real police procedure. There's real law. I have to follow it."

Scottoline has earned the respect of the authors who dominate legal lit. "If I could be a partner in one of the fictional law firms that she has created, I'd sign up in a heartbeat," says star crime writer Linda Fairstein admiringly. Scottoline quibbles with the popular name for her craft. "I don't think I'm writing legal thrillers at all, and honestly, I hate the term," she says. "I'm writing stories about strong, funny, resourceful women who get themselves in and out of trouble by sheer dint of will and excessive amounts of heart, and these women just happen to be lawyers. I write about murder and law because they encompass the great themes of fiction--love and hate, justice and injustice, good and evil. If you can write about such dramatic stuff, why would you write about anything else?"

Whatever you call it, she tips her hat to the creator of the genre. John Grisham, she says, "made room for people like me. He showed the interior life of a lawyer. And lawyers aren't always heroes." Or heroines--in the case of Scottoline's protagonists, although, like their creator, they do their job with style, preferably in heels.