As a lawyer Steve Lehto is used to strange stories, but none is stranger than the one he will tell at the Kerrytown BookFest where he is appearing September 12. Some of the story is about luck and some of it is about pluck (Lehto’s).

A few years ago Lehto wrote a book on the 1913 Calumet tragedy where 73 people died on Christmas Eve when someone yelled “fire”. His book “Death’s Door” won a Michigan Notable Book Award and rewrote history books.

But that’s not the story. Three years ago Jay Leno on the Tonight Show used the book’s grim title to poke a little fun. A Finnish American newspaper had run an ad for the book declaring it would make a great Christmas gift. That headline became a natural for Leno’s friendly jabs at comic headlines.

Taking it all in stride, Lehto mailed off a copy of the book to Leno in what he describes in a Neal Ruben column in the Detroit News as “the gaudiest Christmas paper he could find”. Knowing that Leno was a car buff he included his unpublished manuscript for a book on the Chrysler ’63 Turbine automobile. Sly fox that Lehto. Leno who is a car collector would buy one of the rare automobiles six weeks later while in Detroit.

A few days after Lehto sent the gift package a call comes into Lehto’s office with a guy on the phone saying he’s Jay Leno. It was. No joke.

The two car buffs hit it off and later Leno would ask Lehto to stop by for a ride if he was ever in California. Lehto of course found himself in California soon after the invitation and he got his ride, but he also got a promise of a foreword if the book was optioned. A few rewrites and a foreword later and a book was born.

Lehto will have his new book, “Chrysler’s Turbine Car: The Rise and Fall of Detroit’s Coolest Creation” at the Kerrytown BookFest so be sure you catch up with him so he can tell the story first hand.