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There's a diva dead in a bathtub. She floats in the lukewarm water, a smile that's not actually a smile on her face. So begins The Wonder Singer, the new novel by local author George Rabasa. What's especially unfortunate is that the diva has died while in the middle of a series of interviews with Mark Lockwood, her would-be biographer. Now the writer is left with a silent client.

Armed with 500 hours' worth of cassettes, Lockwood must piece together the missing gaps in the singer's life. Out to thwart the his claim on the Señora's story, though, are her former agent and a best-selling sleazeball who's trying to steal the tapes. What unfolds is a tale of war, fame, scandal, seduction, and betrayal - none of which ceases simply because a diva dies of cardiac arrest in her bath.

Secrets of the City had a chance to talk a bit with Rabasa about his book. He'll be reading from it (and soprano Jennifer Baldwin will be singing) this Friday, December 5, at the Minneapolis Central Library. 3 p.m.

Secrets: How did the idea for The Wonder Singer germinate?

George Rabasa: My intention was to write a sort of picaresque novel about a ghostwriter. In my checkered professional life I've written in practically every medium, besides fiction, with varying degrees of success: commercials, direct mail, restaurant menus, reviews, speeches, obituaries, and jokes.  But I was never a ghostwriter. The idea of a journeyman writer serving as the voice for a famous personality has a kind of elegance to it. I needed a bigger-than-life foil for the humble scribbler. There are no bigger personalities than old-school opera divas. And the irony of serving as the conduit for a voice that cannot sing her own song captivated me.

S: How do you go about creating a diva? -- A character who's oversized and ridiculous, and yet somehow sympathetic and relatable.

GR: As I began to imagine Mercé Casals, I reached for the bigger-than-life women in my own family. I also read a particularly lurid biography of Maria Callas, as well as reams of lore on the bad old days of opera. They don't make divas like Mercé Casals anymore. The challenge was to endow her with the full grace and dignity of a real human being - not a caricature or comic character.  After a while, as I wrote, I took her eccentricities for granted, and concentrated on giving her a rich and deep inner life, touched by love, disappointment and the world's inevitable cruelties. As a result, I hope my Diva will engage the reader's heart and mind at a basic human level.

S: Casals turns away the first four prospective biographers she meets because, she says, they're even more egotistical than she is. Might it be every writer's secret dream to be a diva?

GR: Oh, there's an inner diva waiting to spring out like a jack-in-the-box at any moment. This is not limited to writers, of course. But our professional life is filled with much disappointment and uncertainty, and we need to compensate for our insecurity with some measure of self-aggrandizement. We do keep it under control, of course. Most of us would rather not offend the editors, critics, agents, booksellers and book-clubbers that hold our destiny. The rich and famous writers, of course, are free to offend with impunity. Some do.

S: Are you an opera fan? Did this endeavor make you either more or less of one?

GR: When I started The Wonder Singer some ten years ago, I did not particularly like what little opera I had listened to. Rock and roll, roots, symphonic, choral, chamber - all of these I loved. Then, when I decided to write about an opera diva, I though I'd better figure out what these people did. So thanks to the Minneapolis Public Library, I checked out Tosca. I played it over and over one weekend, and by Monday morning, I was hooked. Once opera's sublime melodies get a hook into your brain, there's not much musically that can match the experience. Add to that the great emotional and intellectual challenge of almost mythical theater and you've got the stuff of ecstasy and catharsis.  No small achievement for people in big wigs and fancy dress singing really loud.

S: Did you approach it any differently from your previous novels?

GR: Oh God, yes! I will never write a novel this way again. I had the basic structure - Lockwood's attempts to write his big book, the story of La Señora in her own words, the relationship between the writer and the diva. So for about two years I just wrote random scenes, fragments, snatches of dialogue as the mood hit me, with the idea of putting it all together eventually. After about 130,000 words I had a mess to cut and paste into some coherent arc. A wonderful mess to be sure. But it took years of grief, and thousands of words cut, to come up with the novel that is the object of our attention today.

S: Along with being a novelist, you're a heavy-hitting short story writer, which is kind of like being a marathon runner as well as a sprinter. How do you view these disciplines differently?

GR: A short story is born of some shard of a thought, a focused image of a character or a mood or a moment that elicits a sense of urgency for the telling. Sometimes the image will sit in my hard drive for years before I understand what the urgency was all about and can finish the telling.

The idea of a novel germinates over time before I start writing, less a clear plot than a problem of narrative to be solved. Unlike a short story, the idea can remain diffuse and amorphous for the two years it may take me to complete a draft. In that time, the original impulse grows and expands so that every writing day is one of discovery for me. I am both writer and audience. I don't often know the ending until I get there. It's a wonderful process, like driving to the seashore -- as I travel, the scent of the ocean grows and pulls me to its destination.

S: Do you like one form better than the other?

GR: Yes.