Lisa Lutz is an American author. She began her career writing screenplays for Hollywood. One of her rejected screenplays became the basis for a popular series of novels about a family of private investigators, the Spellmans.

Biography

Lutz was born in Southern California in 1970. She attended UC Santa Cruz, UC Irvine, University of Leeds in England and San Francisco State University, all without attaining a degree. During the 1990s she had many low-paying jobs, including work in a private investigation firm, and spent a lot of time writing and re-writing a Mob comedy called Plan B. Her screenplay was optioned in 1997, and was made into a movie in 2000 (released in 2001). Variety Magazine described the movie as "torturously unfunny." She subsequently produced several other tentative screenplays, but none was picked up. Her final effort, tentatively titled "The Spellman Files", was also rejected; at that point Lutz realized that "the story really needed more space to be told properly." She decided to write it as a novel. She began the novel while still living in California in 2004, then decided to move into a relative's unused New York apartment to work on it full-time. She returned to the west coast (Seattle) to write her second Spellman novel, then moved to San Francisco, where she lived until 2012. She presently lives in old farmhouse miles from civilization in upstate New York.