Valley Commentary : Truth Far Stranger Than Fiction in the O.J. Saga : This L.A. mystery writer thought he had ‘seen it all’ as a crime reporter and case-hardened novelist. Then the Simpson story broke with a plot too far-fetched to match.

As a crime reporter for six years in Los Angeles, I never went wanting.

During my years with The Times I covered mass murders and serial murders (there is a technical difference), the heat-of-passion slayings, the crazy killings and the carefully planned murders. And this was only in the Valley.

Admittedly, it’s a cynical view of society and life, but I made my living on murder and mayhem, and I came to believe that there was no better place than Los Angeles to be a police reporter. Miami, maybe. New York, never. It’s all right here.

I was drawn all the way from Florida to write about crime here because I knew this was the place to be. And I wasn’t disappointed. From cases that drew only a few paragraphs of attention to those put out on the front page, I covered more murders than I can remember.

One of my favorite memories was being on the phone with an LAPD detective, asking him the details--mostly unpublishable--about a particularly heinous sex slaying in North Hollywood, when I had to put him on hold as another call came in. It was the accused murderer, calling to tell me his side of the story. It is a creepy keepsake in my memory. The guy was later convicted, and I eventually stopped taking his collect calls from jail. I was tired of his protests of innocence and was on to other things, like the man who had his son help him bury his wife in concrete in the back yard in Reseda. After he was arrested, he used to call me too. A lot of them call. Los Angeles is that kind of place.

Last year I gave up true crime so I could make the stuff up. I left the crime beat so I could write mystery novels. These days I stay at home and write about a fictional Los Angeles and a fictional LAPD. I can plot my own murders, make them as complicated as I want and still have them solved by my own detectives by the last page. It’s a nicely ordered world and it’s fun and not as wearing on the feet, eyes and head.

You see, I thought I had seen it all and done it all as a police reporter in L.A. What else could this city show me about murder that I didn’t already know? I wasn’t surprised at anything anymore, and I had enough war stories to stick into 20 mystery novels. I thought I was home free.

Then the O.J. Simpson murder case came along.

As depressing and surprising as it is to see someone I admire fall from grace under the accusation of a brutally horrible set of murders, I have to admit the whole affair is also depressing because I can’t do better. What I mean is, as a fiction writer I am constrained by the bounds of believability. True life is not constrained by anything. It’s an irony I’ve been thinking about a lot these days. The Simpson case, from the shock of the murders to O.J.’s last run and arrest, is the golden example of the cliche that the truth is stranger than fiction.

No one could have scripted the events of two weeks ago. They would have seemed laughably outrageous. If I had submitted a book proposal in May for a mystery novel about a sports hero and cultural icon who leads police on a nationally televised chase when accused of hacking his former wife to death, the pile of rejects would have been enough to cover the wall behind my computer. Now, maybe not. Now, when a book editor reads my stuff and suggests that some plot machination seems far-fetched, I’ll say, “Yeah? And what about O.J.?”

Still, the whole episode remains depressing. I lost a day of making it up on my computer while I watched the real thing unfold on TV. I guess it’s the biggest murder case in L.A. since Robert Kennedy was gunned down. Maybe it’s bigger, made so by the evolution of the media and the immediacy it now has, and the heightened fascination with celebrity in our culture.

But I didn’t miss being part of it. It’s true that competition on a big story makes a police reporter’s blood race. It’s the best high I knew from the job. But even still, there’s not a lot of joy in reporting on such things, about the low points of people’s lives and deaths.

Like some cops, crime reporters burn out. I hit the wall and quit, and not even the crime of the decade, or maybe event of the century, made me want to go back to it. I’ll be content to watch the Simpson case on Court TV. Now all I need to do is figure out a way to make fiction stranger than the truth.