A Runaway Success

“Munch Mancini is at a Venice bar. This is her day--the day she gives up dope and drinking and changes everything. A guy sits down next to her and starts to talk. She’s instinctively assessing him because she’s a hooker. But then she thinks: ‘Not today. Today I’m changing and I would not do it for any price.’ ”

The woman talking is auto mechanic-turned-author Barbara Seranella, who created the drug-hooked hooker and ace mechanic named Munch, and placed that inexplicably endearing waif between the covers of her first book, a new mystery called “No Human Involved” (St. Martin’s Press).

Seranella, a Los Angeles native, looks waif-like herself as she breakfasts at a local coffee shop with scrubbed face, tawny ponytail and slight figure obscured by an oversized dark green sweatsuit. She orders oatmeal--”something soft”--possibly because her own teeth and jaws were compromised some years back by a steel-toed biker’s boot.

Those who think that writing a successful first book is lucky happenstance need only meet a few authors like Seranella to see that either a lot of living or a lot of research goes into each “overnight” success. In Seranella’s case, it was both.

And after listening to her youthful exploits, it’s clear that she must have been every parent’s vision of a nightmare child. Which is why it’s so inspiring to see how she turned out.

Mystery aficionados are hailing her heroine--an abused kid who has had to kill, lie, kick all her bad habits and fix a lot of cars in order to build a law-abiding life and erase her scummy beginnings. In the process of growing up and becoming sober, Munch (short for Munchkin) helps solve a serial murder and saves a homicide detective’s life.

Sheldon McArthur, of the Mysterious Bookshop in Los Angeles, says the book is hot among buffs because “it’s a first of its kind, a hyper-modern mystery totally different than anything written before by a woman. In the ‘80s, we got the first wave of hard-boiled mystery heroines: Kay Scarpetta, (by Patricia Cornwell), V. I. Warshawski (by Sara Paretsky) and Kinsey Millhone (by Sue Grafton). All those crime-solvers are on the right side of the law. But Munch is an anti-heroine, on the law’s wrong side. She’s closer to a male villain than a good guy. Yet you wind up rooting for her, although you would not invite her home for dinner.”

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McArthur, Seranella and others associated with mystery books attended the recent Mystery Writers of America convention in Monterey, Calif., where copies of Seranella’s first edition were already selling for $75. While there, Seranella and her new literary agent, Sandy Dijkstra, sewed up a two-book deal with HarperCollins.

“That made me feel legitimate; like writing’s not just a hobby to cover my postage costs any more,” Seranella says.

This is all understandably overwhelming to the author, whose parents couldn’t even find her when she was 14 years old, let alone invite her home for dinner. The child had high-tailed it out of Pacific Palisades while in ninth grade at Paul Revere Junior High. Don’t ask her why.

“All I know is I got into liquor and drugs and underwent a complete personality change,” she says.

She left two older brothers and a pair of well-to-do parents behind to cope with police and private investigators hired to try to locate the errant kid. No such luck.

The cute teeny-bopper was living on the streets of San Francisco, bulking up on fast food, and doing things her parents couldn’t imagine.

By the time she was hauled in by police for more than a few infractions, she’d had her braces removed for $4 and was so chubby that when officers pulled her picture off the station-house wall and compared it close-up to the child in front of them, they decided it was not the same person.

What a shriek.

It was the early ‘70s, after all, and jillions of kids were heading for the Haight, where Seranella eventually joined the Good Earth commune and got more heavily into drugs. But people there were expected to work.

“The cutest guys in the commune, the ones who had all the money and all the fun, were into fixing cars,” Seranella says. So she started learning to fix them too.

Her parents found her when she was 16, but they couldn’t get her back. Undaunted, “they’d periodically come up to San Francisco, brush me off, dress me up, and take me to whatever function they were attending. They’d sit me down somewhere and I’d immediately go looking for the liquor, acting like a total jerk.”

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By 17 she was into cocaine. By 18 she had been “using the needle and doing heroin for a year.” By 21 she had been in jail 13 times.

“My folks went to a psychiatrist for advice. He said to stop giving me help and money; he told them I’d be dead within the year and they should totally disconnect from me.”

In retrospect, Seranella says it was only when she hit bottom, lying alone in a cell at Sybil Brand Institute for Women in Los Angeles, with a big jail sentence looming, that she decided to turn her life around.

Her father, a furniture company representative who put Seranella’s two brothers through Stanford and had hoped to do the same for her, hired a lawyer who was able to consolidate all charges against her and win her probation. But there was a catch: even one small probation violation and she would go to prison for years.

Seranella, like Munch, had a dream. She wanted nothing more in life than to “live in the country and fix cars.” In the book, Munch is known to Venice police as a drug-addicted teenage hooker. She has murdered her even scuzzier, drug-dealing father and is on the lam.

The title, “No Human Involved,” derives from a police radio code that was common in the 1970s, Seranella says. She found that when two transients are involved in a crime, the police used an informal code among themselves, part of which included: NHI--no human involved.

After the fictional murder, the book’s heroine cadges a car from a friend and drives the 405 from the Westside to the San Fernando Valley. Which is exactly what the author did at age 21, when she was on probation.

Unfortunately, neither the fictional nor the real miscreant had quite kicked the drug habit at that point. Even more unfortunate, the borrowed car conked out at the crest of a hill. Looking down at the Valley’s flickering lights, both the real and the fictional characters decided this was the rural haven of their dreams.

Munch coasts downhill, hides the car in a big clump of bushes, dries out there for a few days and then hikes to the intersection of Ventura and Sepulveda. In real life, that was the site of Ed’s Arco station, where Seranella got her first good job, and her first leg up to her new life.

She became sober, law-abiding, expert at her trade--and worked at Ed’s until the property was sold to build a high-rise. Then she transferred to Brent-Air Texaco at Sunset and Barrington, where she stayed 12 years, rising to become service manager until she resigned three years ago.

“I was a really good mechanic,” she says, “the person everyone came to when they had a problem that couldn’t be fixed.”

Ed Baizer, owner of A & B Chevy Service in West L.A., has known Seranella for 15 years, and even tried to hire her from time to time. “She’s a top-flight mechanic with fantastic capabilities,” he says. And she’s so knowledgeable about electronics, computers, fuel injections--all the newer refinements in cars.”

The author’s biggest break of all came three years ago, when Ron Seranella walked into the Brentwood station as a business consultant, and into her private life.

“We clicked on how the station should be run. We clicked working together. Then we started clicking on another level,” Seranella says.

Ron, an investor who used to own service stations himself, “said he didn’t want me hauling engines out of cars when I’m 50 years old. He asked what did I want to do with the rest of my life?” Barbara said she wanted to write.

The two married, retired to Ron’s condo overlooking the Pacific, and to another home they bought in La Quinta, near where Barbara Seranella’s parents now live. “I see my parents all the time now, and things are great between us,” she says.

How do her parents feel about their recovered author-daughter?

Her father, Nate Shore, says: “She did it all herself. She got scared straight, as the saying goes. Once she bottomed out, she put her life back together again. She’s extremely strong-willed and determined.”

Her mother, Marge, is cautiously proud: “Yes, it’s wonderful. But it’s heartbreaking to think we couldn’t save her from herself when she was just 13.”