Faye Kellerman not in love with ''Shakespeare''

Best-selling mystery writer Faye Kellerman (Serpent's Tooth) has decided there's something rotten in Hollywood: She has filed suit in U.S. district court in Los Angeles against the authors of Shakespeare in Love, Marc Norman and Tom Stoppard — who just nabbed the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay — claiming they stole the idea for their romantic comedy from her 1989 novel The Quality of Mercy. ''It's one of the accolades of success,'' Stoppard told New York's Daily News. Kellerman's lawyer, Barry Novack, thinks otherwise. ''Her book could have been subtitled Shakespeare in Love,'' he says. Nonsense, responds Miramax, which produced the film and is included in the complaint. ''Its timing suggests a publicity stunt,'' says Miramax spokesman Andrew Stengel. ''The idea that one was copied from the other is absurd.''

Absurd or not, the novel, like the movie, hinges on a beautiful woman's disguising herself as a man, encountering the Bard in a theater, and falling in love with him. On the other hand, Kellerman's historical thriller is no romantic comedy. The novel — in which Shakespeare turns gumshoe to solve a friend's murder — centers on the persecution of Catholics and Jews in Elizabethan England. The heroine is the daughter of the Queen's Jewish physician, Roderigo Lopez; his arrest for treason inspires the playwright to begin The Merchant of Venice. Unfortunately for Kellerman, not only are the similarities limited, but she has competition: No Bed for Bacon, a 1941 comic novel by Caryl Brahms and S.J. Simon, appears to have even more in common with the movie. Long out of print, the book has been getting so much press in England that publisher Transworld plans a new edition there. According to Curtis Brown London, the agency representing the authors' estate, negotiations are also in the works for a U.S. book-club sale.