By Victor Greto
PHILADELPHIA — Standing by a podium in the sinkhole of a vast lecture hall, novelist Lisa Scottoline looks small, even doll-like, her short frame capped by straw-gold hair, her face amiably squeezed by a thin-lipped smile.
From the distance of ascending rows of countertop-like desks where more than 70 Penn Law School students clack away on laptop computers, one can barely see Scottoline’s tiny form outlining the plot of a movie she’s examining by linking a series of bubbles on the white greaseboard behind her.
She has shown the class snippets of the 1979 Al Pacino movie, “And Justice For All…,” a film that characterizes the justice system as absurd and lawyers as amoral.
“Both sides want to win regardless of the truth,” Pacino’s character tells a numb jury, before he himself cracks up, a victim of his own integrity and passion.
“This movie is a reaction to Miranda,” Scottoline says, referring to the 1966 Supreme Court 5-4 Miranda v. Arizona decision, which overturned Ernesto Miranda’s conviction for robbery, kidnapping and rape, and required police to read suspects their rights and to provide free legal counsel if they couldn’t afford it.
The movie is a perfect reflection of the popular 1970s view of both the law and lawyers, she tells her students. “Miranda was the uber-technicality case. People are mad at the law.”
More importantly, asks Scottoline — whose class, “Justice and Fiction,” shows the evolution of how justice and lawyers have been perceived in movies and books — “Where is Atticus Finch?” referring to the noble lawyer in 1962’s “To Kill a Mockingbird.”
Tempi cambi. Times change, and Scottoline is no typical law professor.
For that matter, where is Natalie Greco, Mary DiNunzio, Cate Fante?
Those are three of a cast of characters Scottoline has created in 14 suspense novels in as many years beginning in 1993, page-turning works averaging 100,000 words each. The books showcase women lawyers as determined heroes, who not only survive but thrive despite the men in and out of their lives.
Scottoline is revving up for a book tour promoting her latest novel, “Daddy’s Girl” (HarperCollins, $25.95), a follow up to her most popular book so far, “Dirty Blond” ($7.99), published a year ago and now in paperback.
Throw in healthy dashes of family and food, mix in cliff-hanging chapter endings and information-laden dialog, and you’ve got the ingredients for a Scottoline perennial.
A sign of these times, perhaps, but also revealing of the author herself.
Scottoline, 51, is a paisan, whose Philadelphia-area, Italian-American, independent-woman roots show on every page.
“What I find meaningful in her books I find meaningful in her,” says her friend, Franca Palumbo, a special education attorney. “The connections with people that she makes in her life. That’s why her books are involving. We care about her characters.”
After two unsuccessful marriages, and with one grown child in college, Scottoline cares for her four dogs and four horses on her sprawling 43-acre Malvern, Pa., farm.
Her days are filled with writing next year’s book this year, and calmly working out the details of book tours, answering up to 75 fan e-mails each evening, and cooking herself elaborate meals.
She’s alone. Mostly.
And happy, it seems. Always.
****
Her mom told her she read so much she was going to ruin her eyes.
But as a young girl, Scottoline couldn’t help but read volume after volume of Nancy Drew. She read all those boy-centered Hardy Boys books, too, because, “Back then, there were not a lot of choices for young girls.”
Born in South Philadelphia to a small Italian family — she only had one sibling, a brother — Scottoline grew up in nearby Norwood, Pa. When she was about to enter fifth grade, her family moved to Bala Cynwd. She graduated from Lower Merion High School in 1971.
It was not an intellectual house, Scottoline says. “The only book in the house was the TV Guide.”
Still, despite its size, it was a typically Italian-American household, full of noise, relatives, smells of garlic and cheese, and raised voices. Her mother was one of 19 children.
Like every kid of her generation, she spent a lot of time in front of the TV. She liked “I Love Lucy.” But her favorite was “Perry Mason.”
Mason attracted her because he “was in control, and fought for the little guy, and did justice.”
But it was undeniable that doing justice primarily involved men — Della Street was merely an assistant.
Even Scottoline’s real-life heroes — which included her best friend’s father, who was a lawyer — seemed inevitably male, even father figures.
That didn’t stop her from applying to her friend’s father’s alma mater, the University of Pennsylvania, where she got in and majored in English literature. She took a class from Philip Roth, and read contemporary literature — again, mostly by men.
Enthralled by literature both high and low, her goal remained the law. She had no desire to become a writer.
****
As if she consciously decided to live in a house the opposite of her youth’s, there are stacks of books everywhere in Scottoline’s Malvern home.
Copies of her own books comprise many of the stacks, including editions from different countries, and slip-cased leather-bound editions. More than 15 million copies of her books have been sold, and her work has been translated into 25 languages.
The farm house is filled with light from huge windows. Her upstairs office also is cluttered with books, ads and magazine and newspaper articles featuring her, and framed family pictures — in one, her mother sits on the stool of aunt Rachel’s luncheonette in South Philadelphia in the 1940s.
A large poster of Elvis reading a book, his lip in sensual mid-quiver, hangs over her work area and high-powered computer. A boxful of her new books sits nearby. She buys them to give to her friends.
According to Scottoline’s agent, Molly Friedrich, sales of “Dirty Blond” were up 43 percent from her previous books.
“This book seems to be bursting out of itself,” Friedrich says. “This in a business where if you maintain your sales, you’re considered way ahead of the game. It’s her turn.”
It’s hard to tell. It’s business as usual here.
“I finished the next book two days ago,” Scottoline says during an early March afternoon.
That book, which may be called “Old Flame,” will come out next year, after “Daddy’s Girl,” the one just published. She also has begun writing a weekly column called “Chick Wit” for the Philadelphia Inquirer.
It’s only because she finished next year’s book that she has time to talk.
“If you’re in the middle of a book, you’re not great company,” she says. She works all the time, but refuses to call it discipline.
“I was a professional lawyer,” Scottoline says. “I was a waitress. It’s a work ethic. I can’t have lunch or dinner when I’m in the middle of writing a book. People don’t understand that.”
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Scottoline graduated magna cum laude with a degree in English from Penn in 1976 after only three years, and then worked as a paralegal for two years, earning $8,600 a year.
“I liked it,” Scottoline says. “I could see that litigation was dramatic, and if you make the right argument you can win.”
She was “deliriously happy” to get into Penn Law School in 1978.
Palumbo and Scottoline sat near each other during classes, and Scottoline helped her get into a study group.
Palumbo also was there to help Scottoline through a breakup.
“When I met her in law school, she was in a relationship, and it broke up, and it was painful for her,” Palumbo says. “I remember they were fighting over custody of the dog, and her father stepped in and mediated. She ended up with the dog.”
Scottoline says she doesn’t remember much about her relationships. They seem beside the point.
At 26, Scottoline clerked for Judge Edmund B. Spaeth, Jr. of the Pennsylvania Superior Court after graduating law school in 1981. She soon got a job as a litigator with the Philadelphia firm Dechert, Price & Rhoads. Palumbo also got a job there.
Scottoline loved it. “I was a happy lawyer,” she says.
She also dated and then married a lawyer from another firm.
By 1986, Scottoline was pregnant, and breaking up with her husband. “I can’t even remember when it was good,” she says.
It wasn’t a good time, Palumbo says. “But she doesn’t fall apart. In terms of moving on, she has a lot of positive energy.”
There was at least one moment that seemed almost too elementary to Palumbo, but stuck out for Scottoline.
“She was pregnant with her daughter and she had pneumonia and I washed her hair in the hospital,” Palumbo says. “It seemed such a small thing to me, but in one of the books there is a scene where a friend washed her hair. That meant so much to her.”
After she had her child, Scottoline decided working 80 hours a week was not the right thing for a single mother to do.
“I stayed home for a couple of months and loved it,” she says. “I wasn’t going to turn my back on this kid.”
She decided to work on a long shot. Although she never seriously considered writing as a profession, after reading and enjoying the works of John Grisham and Scott Turow. Scottoline thought, “These men were doing it, and I’m an actual lawyer. We’re more than Della Street. I can do this, too.”
It took her five years of rejection and five maxed-out credit cards. She began by trying to write screenplays. “I sent off 100 of them, and got no replies,” she says.
She wrote a novel. Nothing.
She tried another in 1993, and one week after getting a part-time job as a law clerk — her daughter was old enough to go to first grade and she needed the money — “Everywhere That Mary Went,” dedicated to Palumbo and her daughter, was accepted for paperback publication by HarperCollins.
She held on to the law clerk job, because money from the first book wasn’t enough to cover her debts. But after her second book, 1994’s “Final Appeal,” also issued in paperback, won an award, “the publisher was convinced I would make it and I began to be published in hardcover.”
She’d made it.
Almost. There was another relationship with a man she met on a blind date. An eight-year marriage followed, which brought her to the home in Malvern.
That broke up, too.
“I’m a big fidelity woman,” Scottoline says, again pleading memory loss. “I lost a lot, but I’m back.”
****
Scottoline has four dogs: three golden retrievers, and one Welsh Corgi. A photo of her and Ruby, the Corgi, graced the back cover of one of her recent books.
“Some people wrote and told me she was ugly,” she says.
Dumpy, maybe, but not ugly. She even brought Ruby with her to one of her Penn classes because she was leaving right after to visit her daughter, now 21 and attending college in Massachusetts.
In many ways, Scottoline’s daughter, untouchable to the media, centers her life.
It may not be a coincidence that her desire to teach a college class coincided with her daughter’s college career.
It is definitely not a coincidence that her latest hero, Natalie Greco, is a teacher at Penn Law School, before she gets carried away in a plot that involves murder, a dying man’s last words, and a would-be prison escape.
“I have no ideas,” Scottoline insists. But for the past decade and a half, she’s had at least one good idea each year.
She doesn’t plot out her novels, which may help explain the time she spends crafting her books. It also makes for exciting alone-time, as she watches her creations wreak havoc, talk with their hands, eat Italian food, and do justice.
She’s getting faster at what she does, she says. “Daddy’s Girl” took five months to write, just like “Dirty Blond.”
For the last three books, she and her assistant, Laura Leonard, took several days to research locations.
“We went to the National Archives for ‘Killer Smile,’” says Leonard, whom Scottoline hired away from HarperCollins in 2000. Leonard also created and updates Scottoline’s intricate web site.
Published in 2004, “Killer Smile” centers on World War II Italian-American internment camps, something Scottoline knew nothing about until she discovered that her paternal grandparents, Giuseppe and Maria Scottoline, had registered as “enemy aliens” in 1942. Scottoline’s father had given her their alien registration cards shortly before his death in 2002.
For “Dirty Blond,” Leonard and Scottoline traveled to the old mining town of Centralia, Pa., where the main character grew up.
For “Daddy’s Girl,” they spent a couple of days at the Chester County prison, where some of the action in that novel takes place.
“I’m a second set of eyes,” Leonard says. “When she’s there, she stays focused, and I take notes and we compare them to make sure we get it right.”
Especially with the last two novels, Scottoline resists calling them “legal thrillers.”
So does her agent, Molly Friedrich. The marketing of the books has changed.
“We’re trying to go after more of an audience,” Friedrich says. “She’s now known for having created a family of warm and funny characters. They may be lawyers, but you know all about their lives, love affairs, missed meals, families, and become involved in who they are as people.”
Scottoline repeatedly infuses her main characters with a resilient independence, acuity of thought and the ability to rebound from adversity, whether it has to do with men, betrayed friendships or crime.
“These are gutsy women that happen to be in these situations,” Scottoline says of her heroes. “My women are women first, then lawyers. They’re fun and sexy, fully-realized women.” She smiles, almost shyly. “Men love it.”
Yes, they do.