Edina, Minn. ? Judith Guest’s first book, “Ordinary People,” has brought her “one birthday present after the next,” including a film version that won wide acclaim and several Academy Awards.

But not all of her experiences with Hollywood have gone well, said the notoriously slow-writing Guest.

Her second novel, “Second Heaven,” has been sold five times to the movies, but nothing has been made, she said. A movie version of her third book, “Killing Time in St. Cloud,” a 1988 mystery co-written with Rebecca Hill, also stalled.

“I decided that business is too frenetic for me. I can’t deal with it,” Guest said.

Still, her agent is shopping Guest’s recently released fifth book, “The Tarnished Eye,” to the movies. Guest said she first thought of doing the suspense novel, based on real-life murders in her native Michigan, as a screenplay but ended up writing a book instead.

“The Tarnished Eye” (the title comes from a line in the novel “Diana of the Crossways” by Victorian writer George Meredith) follows a rural Michigan sheriff, Hugh DeWitt, as he unravels the murders of six members of an upper middle-class family at their summer home. A father, mother, their three sons and daughter are gunned down, their bodies left to rot.

Familiar conflicts

The fictional case parallels the unsolved 1968 murders of Richard Robison, his wife and their four children at their summer cottage in northwestern Michigan. Each had been shot, and the young daughter also hit with a hammer. Their bodies were discovered about a month after the murders occurred.

Guest, who was born in Detroit, was living in Michigan at the time and remembers reading of the murders.

“It seemed so amazing to me that this many people could disappear from the face of the earth, and they would have basically no idea of who did it,” she said. As in the Robison case, in which no one has ever been charged, a possible suspect in Guest’s book kills himself and leaves a note denying he committed the murders.

While the book follows police procedure as DeWitt tracks down suspects, it weaves in family conflicts and sorrows — the sheriff mourning the SIDS death of his infant son, the murdered mother trying to break off an affair, an artistic son clashing with his father.

Such conflicts are familiar territory for Guest, who wrote of a family coming apart in “Ordinary People.” It became a best seller, then a hit 1980 movie that won the Oscar for best picture and netted Robert Redford an Oscar in his directorial debut.

“It did make my career, and it’s still making my career, which is very nice, so for that reason I’m very fond of it,” Guest said of her 1976 book.

Gift that keeps giving

In “Ordinary People,” the teenage Conrad Jarrett slashes his wrists after surviving a boating accident that killed his older brother, Buck. Guest said she wanted to explore “the anatomy of depression,” and the mid-1970s were the right time for a book about teen suicide. She leans over and knocks wood when she says there has not been a suicide in her family.

Guest’s first book was discovered by a “slush-pile editor” at Viking who says the manuscript grabbed her with its powerful emotions.

“In that job I sort of ran my Geiger counter over every thing I looked at. It just crackled off the charts,” said Mimi Jones Hedwig, now a senior staff editor at Reader’s Digest. Since publication, “Ordinary People”‘ has sold close to 90,000 hardcover copies and more than half a million paperback copies.

Guest later got another surprise in the mail: a letter from “R. Redford.”

“I looked at the return address and I thought, ‘Aw, man, it’s some guy named Ronald Redford … trying to make you think that he’s Robert Redford, so he writes R. Redford.”‘

Guest opened it, “and it was this sweet note about ‘I read your book, I loved your book, I want to be one of the first people to tell you this is going to be a huge success.’ And I look down and I go, ‘Oh my God, this is from Robert Redford.’ And then of course I had to run next door and tell Linda.”

Redford was looking to make his directing debut and Guest — a fan since first seeing Redford in “Barefoot in the Park” in 1967 — chose him to direct the movie version.”

The movie featured strong performances from Mary Tyler Moore, Donald Sutherland and Judd Hirsch, and also won Oscars for Timothy Hutton for supporting actor as the despondent son and screenwriter Alvin Sargent (“Spider-Man 2”) for adapted screenplay.

“Everything that’s associated with ‘Ordinary People’ has always just been like one birthday present after the next. Sort of amazing,” Guest said.