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…Not only has she lived to
tell the tales, she's used them as background material for three
best-selling legal thrillers, Mitigating Circumstances, Interest
of Justice and First Offense. Her own history--and this includes
the time she was thrown from a horse, which is also germane to
her writing career--is not, however, what she's drawn on for her
newest book from Dutton, California Angel (Forecasts, Nov. 28,
1994).
California Angel, which has a first printing
of 125,000 copies, is not a legal thriller. Its heroine is Toy
Johnson, a woman who falls into trances during which she
materializes miles away to perform good deeds. Her actions get
her in hot water with the law (yes, there's a courtroom scene)
before she's discovered to be an incipient angel about to embark
on an existence more rewarding than this one.
Ushering PW into her stately apartment on
Manhattan's Central Park South (there's also another home in
Laguna Niguel, Calif.), Rosenberg admits that she's a bit
apprehensive about her departure from the genre for which she is
best known. But she claims that this novel had its own
imperative. "I had to write this book from my heart,"
she says, perched on a regal sofa behind which are sumptuous
views of the New York skyline. She's wearing a long skirt with a
slit this high, and every so often square footage falls away,
revealing a slim leg. She has very long auburn hair, but she's
not a woman who's continually pushing it from her face. It's
just there, commanding attention-like her Italian greyhound,
Princess, who lolls nearby on tapestry cushions.
Rosenberg wrote California Angel
from the heart, she says, because of a young girl named Janelle.
Some time ago, Rosenberg, whose charitable work includes a
writing class she sponsors at an inner-city high school in Santa
Ana, Calif., also decided to "adopt" a family she
heard about through the class. (How do you adopt a family!
"You just do it" she says.) She discovered that the
daughter was "the oldest living survivor" of a disease
called methylmalonic aciduria. Known more commonly as MMA, its
primary manifestation is that protein introduced into the body
turns poisonous.
"I was going to see Janelle -- she'd
been in the hospital--and I think that I wanted an offering:'
Rosenberg reports in the rushed, soft-spoken, thoroughly
determined manner she has when she gets under way "I wanted
something to take to her. She was very ill, wasted away, a wisp
of a child. She needed something else. She needed something
magical. She needed something that would take away this horrible
fear of dying that she lives with."
Suddenly Rosenberg says, she knew what her
offering would be. "The book just came out. I never stopped
writing it. I think I slept a few hours a day. I wrote it in
around three weeks of nearly 24-hour days." She
pauses, muses. "Fifteen-hour days are a piece of cake for
me." She resumes the barrage. "It was a compulsion.
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I didn't think about what I
was writing. I hope that doesn't show. I really felt inspired.
It's like having a fever and you don't know why. And I never
feel that way with my thrillers."
It's not that she doesn't get excited about
her thrillers, she explains. "If I there are parts that are
very good, I even get chills when I read them:' she admits. But
with her suspense novels, Rosenberg feels that she is in
command. . California Angel was unique in inspiration and
execution. The books she is known for-- Mitigating Circumstances
(1993), Interest of Justice (1993) and First Offense (1994) are
an entirely different breed. The first two of those page-turners
sold 100,000 copies each; Dutton projects 150,000 for the third;
all were Literary Guild main selections. They made … Rosenberg
a household name, one of the few women writing in the
male-dominated world of courtroom thrillers. Appearing in quick
succession, they, too, seem to have spilled out of her nonstop,
evidence of her obsession to indict a legal system that she
finds hugely inadequate.
Thrillers With a Message
" like to
think I'm putting the justice system on trial," Rosenberg
says with a glint that suggests both mischievousness and
resolute anger. She happens to be in a unique position. Having
worked as a model in her native Dallas between the ages of 14
and 23, Rosenberg, looking for a more serious pursuit, studied
criminology at Southern Methodist University. In 1971 she joined
the Dallas police department--as one of two women in its
ranks--and soon found herself being sexually harassed in a
police car. "Who do you call upon when you're being raped
by a policeman and you're in uniform!" she asks
rhetorically. She was so persona non grata that even the
officers' wives were unfriendly.
"They didn't want a woman driving around
with their husbands at 3 a.m., she says ruefully. Rosenberg
moved from Texas to New Mexico and then to California before
deciding in 1980 to retrain as a Ventura probation officer.
That's where she became known as "The
Angel of Death" for her vociferous objections to the
legalities involving the inadmissibility of prior convictions in
courtroom proceedings. Rosenberg reasoned that if she could get
felons talking about prior illegal activities during
pre-sentencing interviews, she could relay the information to
judges. "I worked very closely with criminal offenders--the
multiple murderers, the multiple rapists:' she says. "I
wanted to nail those people. I dug and dug and dug. Yes, being a
woman helped. I dressed the part--the short skirt, the high
heels. Would you say I manipulated them? Finesse is what I call
it.'
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