SPOTLIGHT / PATRICIA WARD BIEDERMAN : Her Characters Live in the Fast Lane, but Writer Prefers Encino

Right there, on the jacket of her new book, “Ultimate Justice,” Mimi Latt reveals to all the world that she lives in Encino.

Often, Valley-based writers instruct their publishers to say only that they live in Los Angeles. But Latt and her husband, Arron, are happy to occupy a gorgeous home up near the Skirball Cultural Center--this despite the fact that they are former residents of Beverly Hills.

After we shake our heads over the peculiar geographical snobbism that afflicts Los Angeles, she tells the following joke:

“What do women in Beverly Hills call Encino?”

Answer: “The Old Country.”

The house high above the Valley floor is a visible manifestation of the journey Latt has made. Today she is the author of three well-received legal thrillers, the latest of which recently made the Los Angeles Times’ bestseller list.

But a dozen years ago, Latt was a Westside attorney uncertain she could succeed as a writer, yet she knew practicing law was killing her.

She made her leap into the unknown for the most compelling of reasons--the one summed up by the phrase “Life is too short.”

“You reach a point where you realize material things are not giving you the happiness you want out of life,” Latt says.

As an attorney, she found little satisfaction in contract work (“business litigation is all about money,” she explains). And the area of her practice that was most gratifying--working with abused women--was also the most draining.

“That takes it out of you faster than anything I know.”

Latt had not written fiction since she was 20 and started a novel about three friends who were newly divorced and trying to raise children, just as she was. (Married at 17, she had daughter Carrie at 18 and was divorced at 19.) But the grown-up, discontented Latt found her way to a gifted writing teacher--the late Marjorie Miller--who nurtured Latt’s talent and helped her keep her lawyer side from dominating her fiction.

After some false starts, Latt found her voice, and five years later, she published her first book. Originally titled “A Question of Power,” that first novel was bought by Simon & Schuster and edited by the legendary Michael Korda and his less well-known but equally gifted partner, Chuck Adams.

“Michael was so cute,” Latt recalls of Korda, who praised her as a natural storyteller. He and Adams continue to edit her work. While editing her first book, Korda called and asked, “How do you like the name ‘Powers of Attorney’?”

“I don’t know,” she said.

“Well, try to get used to it,” he counseled.

One of the joys of working with Simon & Schuster, she says, is its well-oiled distribution system, a rarity in a world in which readers often read a glowing review and rush off to their local bookstore, only to find the shelves untouched by the desired book.

“I haven’t been to a store yet that doesn’t have the book--not all authors can say that,” she says of “Ultimate Justice.”

Dissatisfaction with the legal profession was only part of what drove Latt to write. Her mother had died of breast cancer at the age of 63, during Latt’s final year in law school. Earlier than most, she learned that the future is a gift, not a given.

“I knew that I had to do it,” she says of writing, “and I had to do it young because I might not be here.”

Latt has drawn on her legal experience in all three of her novels. In the latest, protagonist Alexandra Locke leaves New York and returns to her native Los Angeles to be near her dying mother. She gets a job in the office of her father, the Los Angeles County district attorney.

“A writer always plays ‘what if . . . ?’ ” says Latt. She got the idea for Alexandra and the turmoil her presence causes in her father’s office from former L.A. Dist. Atty. Gil Garcetti’s hiring of his daughter as an assistant D.A. and the controversy that ensued.

Unlike most mystery writers, Latt has created a new protagonist each time out (hers have all been women attorneys). Asked if she has been under pressure to create a series with a recurring character, she says pressure isn’t the right word, but her advisors have suggested it.

She is also asked if it nettles her that middle age is an unacceptable condition for characters in mystery novels. Alexandra Locke may reflect much of what her creator has learned about life in the course of time, but Locke is a mere 33. In mystery land, virtually every heroine is a lithe thirtysomething, such as Kinsey Millhone, who looks fabulous in a rumpled little black dress, or an eccentric old lady like Miss Marple. There is little in between.

Latt is resigned to the realities of contemporary publishing.

“I know that you have to keep them a certain age to interest the reading public and your publisher,” Latt says of her heroines, wondering aloud if she will ever have the guts to buck the status quo.

Latt seems to be at a good time in her life. She courageously left a profession that didn’t satisfy her and built a new career that does. She is happily married--for 36 years now--to a man who also reinvented himself as a wood sculptor after a successful career as head of an architecture and interior design firm.

They have two much-loved daughters and a 3-year-old grandson, Spencer Price, who has been known to ask for a drink of water in the middle of one of Latt’s book signings. Need I say that Latt finds this utterly adorable?

And she likes life in the Valley--except for the heat. It’s less pretentious here, where she doesn’t have to make a daily fashion statement and can run errands in her sweats.

Of life on the Westside, she recalls, “I never felt right going into Saks Fifth Avenue or Nieman-Marcus without putting my makeup on.”