Comic Novelist Lisa Lutz, Creator of the Spellman Files

Lisa Lutz was born "in Southern California" in 1970. She enrolled in the University of California, Santa Cruz; the University of California, Irvine; the University of Leeds; and San Francisco State University, dropping out the last without completing degree requirements to work on multiple drafts of a screenplay of a gangster comedy called "Plan B." Changed much more by other scriptwriters, it was filmed and released in 2000, starring Dianne Keaton. Lutz agrees with the reviewer for Variety that the movie was "torturously unfunny."

The series of novels about the Spellmans, a family of professional snoops that includes licensed private investigators and an underage sugar-junkie one (Rae) whose hobby is tailing people, is, in contrast, hilarious. In an appearance that included acting out a scene from the novel with two of her friends playing the parts of her brother and the man he protagonist, Isabel "Izzy" Spellman, is dating, Lutz recalled the frustrations of "Plan B" and her two years working for a PI firm.

She said that the paranoia that inflicts the Spellmans was derived from her observations of the PIs, one of them a retired FBI agent, not from her own family. When setting out to write a novel, she wanted to mix the comedy of a meddlesome, affectionate family with the PI business eccentricities and pathological suspiciousness. She recalled that, on the job at the PI firm, she mostly shredded files in a tiny shredder, but eventually did some stakeouts, so long as they did not involve driving.

Aside from having lived in San Francisco, where she again lives, one reason for setting the Spellman shenanigans in San Francisco is its compactness: surrounded on three sides by water and at the end of a peninsula, San Francisco is 7 miles by 7 miles, something of a walking city that also has quite a bit of public transportation, and (like Manhattan, unlike LA) where Izzy can hop cabs.

So far, four volume in the Spellman series have been published. She stressed that, contrary to reports, a fifth one is contracted, though the next book out (spring 2011) is a novel coauthored with David Hayward (who took the part of the Latino dentist/boyfriend in the performance). Among other reasons, she wants to see if male authors have greater input to cover design. (Based on my own frustrating experiences, I'm pretty sure the answer is no!) She has come to like the HB cover of the first novel-in contrast to later ones-though at the time it was "the lesser of two evils."

Believing (with good reason IMO!) that she is good at writing comic dialogue, The Spellman Files contains lengthy transcripts of conversations Izzy recorded, usually surreptitiously. Lutz thinks that it is easier to read dialogue in transcript style with the speaker's name first than a series of "she said" and "he said," or with no markings of speaker.

The book also includes memoranda to herself and some very funny lists. And chapters are numbered by the subplot rather than continuously.

She acknowledged that the footnotes delight some readers and annoy others. Why should David Foster Wallace be the only novelist allowed to use footnotes, she wondered early on, while wondering if her editor at Simon & Schuster, Marysuee Rucci, would object. With each draft she added more, without any murmur of dismay from her editor, but she says she gets strong negative reactions from some readers. (I guess they are unable to skip them... but I'm on the side that finds them amusing.)

The Spellman Files (first published in 2007) was optioned by Paramount. Lutz was not involved in writing a screenplay and since the option has expired is more interested in a more expansive media: television for it. While reading The Spellman Files (and knowing there were three sequels), I thought that it should be a miniseries, or a series under the title "Spellman Files," that resonates with "The Rockford Files" (alas, James Garner is now too old to play either of the elder males).

Lutz tries to downplay expectations of mystery novels. Though there are no corpses, there is a mystery of a long-ago disappearance in The Spellman Files, and Izzy does solve it. Still, I would agree that the novel is more a family comedy than a mystery story.

The family devoted to revealing secrets, especially those of the two daughters (the 28-year-old Izzy who wants to get out of the family business and her 14-year-old sister Rae), is not easy to relax within. Izzy's mother, Olivia, wants to marry Izzy off to attorney, and inveigles her corporate attorney son, David, to fix her up with a succession of them. Olivia was traumatized by a dentist, so who better than a dentist (Latino dreamboat Daniel) for Izzy to fall in love with?

Attempts to keep Daniel and her parents apart provide much of the humor-or should I say "comedy"? Lutz resents that "comedy" seems to be reserved for work by male writers and if applied at all to the work of female ones is chained to "light." She is also far from happy with being marketed as a stopgap for fans waiting for Janet Evanovich to produce the next Stephanie Plum novel. She decorously did not comment on the sponsor of her appearance, San Francisco Reads, labeling Izzy "a cross between Bridget Jones and Sam Spade." I think that Izzy is funnier than either.

Inevitably asked how like Izzy she is, Lutz opined "not very much." When I said that if Izzy had written the book, she would have claimed it was all fiction, Lutz laughed. Izzy definitely shares Lutz's self-deprecating sardonicness. I hope their love lives differ, and Lutz said that the model for the Spellman paranoia was coworkers in her PI employment years, not her family.

To the other inevitable question at author appearances: "Which writers have influenced you?" she answered "None," that she had no models when she started out with no idea how to write a novel.

The saga so far:

* The Spellman Files (2007)

* Curse of the Spellmans (2008)

* Revenge of the Spellmans (2009)

* The Spellmans Strike Again (2010)