By Jim Klobuchar; Staff Writer

Lovers of manageable lust will be thrilled to learn that Susan Johnson, the novelist laureate of North Branch, Minn., is planning a scorching story of sex and power set in Minnesota.

This certainly will be a literary watershed, comparable to picking the Sahara desert as the locale for a flood epic.

"I don't necessarily agree," she said. "Don't underestimate Minnesota as a place for some credible eroticism."

She said Minnesota has vitality. It has money. It has smart lawyers. It has independent-minded women. It puts a relatively high level of chivalry and courtesy in its sex. She said you could make the Iron Range a locale for some really warm-blooded stuff, ethnic rivalries and forbidden matchups, cutthroat politics, feuding mining and union barons . . .
I told her it's been done. It happens every two years. On the Range it's called an election.

"No, this is a romantic novel. As a matter of fact, I did a scene on Ely Lake near Eveleth in a recent book. But I haven't decided that it should be set on the Iron Range. You also have some great possibilities for a book on sex and power in Wayzata, Edina and Brooklyn Center-Fridley."

She may be right. I said I would have to be convinced you could write 400 pages of an erotic novel in which the critical coupling takes place in the early morning hours just off the produce department in the Crystal Super Valu.

Yet you have to be impressed by the pure megatonnage of Susan Johnson's sales. Of all the authors who have made it mixing history with hormones, few of them have equaled Susan's numbers or her lack of notoriety. She is a onetime library researcher and child of the Iron Range who has sold at least 3 million copies, most of them literary and almost all of them glandular. She is under contract today with Doubleday, Bantam and big-league publishers of that stripe. Not many people married to a ceiling contractor and living on a farm near North Branch can make this claim.

Her latest book, not amazingly, is called "Sinful," set partly in England and partly in Tunisia. Most of the amorous exertions she describes in smoking detail in her books take place in the time of the Russian czars, or 18th-century England or on the 19th-century American frontier, and one way or another draw lovers from opposite cultures - headstrong English girl with Arab chieftain, rich white girl and Indian warrior, nobleman and scullery maid. She says she wouldn't have to change the formula much on the Range.

"You had the struggles years ago between the mining companies and the unions. You have this tremendous reservoir of attractive people. Blond and restrained Scandinavians. Finns. I'm one."

Restrained?

"A Finn. But you also have tremendously handsome Slovenes and Croatians and Italians. You're one."

Tremendously handsome?

"A Slovene. Anyhow, I like the idea of a weekend of lovemaking in a sequestered cabin up on the northern lakes, especially in winter," she said. "Who would want to follow you there? Who could?"

I told her that sooner or later the eelpout fishermen would find you. They are relentless. Another thing: If you're going to have a tryst in a place like that, you'll need a rotary snowplow to get in there and probably an ice auger. Those are lousy omens over uninhibited lovemaking.

Susan Johnson sounded annoyed.

"Look. Those woods along a place like the Gunflint Trail are marvelous in winter. There's a winterized cabin. You heat up the sauna."

I intruded with the obvious. It is well known in northwoods lore that saunas, fully stoked, act as a suppressant for most males.

"All right. After the sauna they dive into the snow, romp around in the pure joy of it and return to the cabin balcony to enjoy each other."

Only, however, after filling out HMO forms for treatment of frostbite at St. Mary's Hospital in Duluth. This is provided the DOT sanders get through north of Illgen City on the North Shore. Nothing comes easy in northern Minnesota, including love.

I asked Susan Johnson whether she could do a persuasive erotic novel set in Stearns County.

"Is that around St. Cloud?"

"Among several places, yes."

"I know more about northern Minnesota and the Twin Cities. I think there's a tremendous story of how the wealthy network on Lake Minnetonka. I like the idea of a love scene on a yacht on its way to the Lafayette Club."

You could call it something between the buoys.

"Edina is a different kind of Lake Minnetonka, where you have more established wealth. In Edina, you have people who had to claw their way to success. I don't mean that in a derogatory way. The reason I'd like writing a turbulent love story set in Minnesota is that, from a woman's viewpoint, most of the guys are civil and most of the society has strong values, so that you'd have your passion and/or weakness set against a background of pretty good and carrying life."

My guess is that Susan Johnson is going to put the book on the Range.
There is no precedent in literature for a torrid love scene in an abandoned open pit.
Bring lots of shampoo.