CHICAGO -- It is one of the great love stories in the rich literary history of Chicago.

It concerns a writer named Judith Michael, who wrote nearly a dozen bestselling novels, beginning in 1982 with “Deceptions” and ending more than 20 years later with “The Real Mother.”

Perhaps you read one. Millions of people did. Many others saw a film or television version of some of these books. What makes this story so compelling is that Judith Michael was not a real person. Judith Michael was the creation of a married couple named Judith Barnard and Michael Fain, who started their marriage and bestseller careers typing in a small apartment on the city’s North Side.

Barnard died here on May 6 from heart failure. She was 94 years old.

“The word I would use to describe my mother best would be ‘formidable,’” said her daughter Cynthia Barnard, a faculty member at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine. “Whatever she did, she jumped in with both feet. I would also use the words intelligent, sharp, insightful and incisive. She was unafraid to share an opinion or challenge another.”

Judith Goldman was born in Denver in 1932. Her parents divorced when she was a child and her mother married Harry Barnard. The family eventually settled here and Harry Barnard was surely an important influence on his step-daughter.

He was a prominent newspaperman, historian and biographer of, among many, notably Illinois Gov. John Peter Altgeld. A frequent radio show guest, Harry was once asked the meaning of literature on the Studs Terkel show in 1967. He said, “If the work enriches the person reading and causes deep thought, it is literature.”

Judith graduated with a bachelor’s degree in English from the Ohio State University and later earned a master’s degree at Northwestern University. While marrying and having two children — Cynthia and her brother Andrew — she wrote journalism, criticism and film scripts. She also published “The Past and Present of Solomon Sorge” in 1967, which Kirkus Review called a “fair first novel.”

She was seven years divorced in 1977 when she was visiting Esther Fain, a close friend who had been hospitalized. At the bedside was Esther’s son Michael, who had come back home from Canada.

He had grown up in Rogers Park and Uptown before enrolling in the University of Chicago, where he studied geology and worked in a lab to help pay tuition. He never completed a degree but became a self-taught aerospace engineer, working for more than 20 years in high-tech companies in the U.S. and Canada, including NASA. He was also a talented photographer and writer of scientific articles that appeared in newspapers, magazines and journals.

As Barnard recalled for a Tribune reporter, “We courted in the (hospital) corridors … went downstairs for coffee. And I would go dancing down the stairs outside at the end of the day, thinking what a wonderful day it was, and then I’d remember that my friend was in there dying. So it was a very bittersweet time.”

They married in 1979 and moved into Barnard’s tiny apartment on Stratford Avenue. They started writing together, modest articles for newspapers and magazines. They enjoyed these collaborations so much that eventually they decided to tackle a book.

That book would be 1982’s “Deceptions,” the story of what happens when identical twin sisters — Sabrina, a jet-setting socialite, and Stephanie, a suburban New Jersey housewife — decide to switch lives. It was an immediate hit, became an NBC miniseries starring Stefanie Powers, and so empowered the authors that they kept the novels coming at a steady pace, such titles as “A Tangled Web,” “Possessions,” “Acts of Love” and “A Certain Smile.”

They had a solid working method. After months of mutual research and basic outlining, Judith would start to write and Michael to edit. He would also outline upcoming scenes for Judith to write. Then he would edit some more, she would rewrite and on and on, through as many as five or six drafts.

As Judith told the Tribune’s Cheryl Lavin many years ago, “Writing is a very lonely business, but it’s less lonely if you have a partner. Writing is so personal, especially fiction, that it’s essential to have someone you really trust, because you’re putting your ego on the line every time you show your work.”

As Fain told the Tribune in 1997, “Our ideas come from a combination of everything. It’s what we see, what we read and what we hear all filtered through our psyches and our experience — our view of the world and people.”

As Barnard said, “There are two ways we do this. One is, we start with a fantasy. We always look for a fantasy. And partly we look at this as novelists, so we need to have a theme that will make a good story.”

Yes, there were the inevitable tensions and disputes, but those evaporated as their books would park for weeks on best-sellers lists.

As Fain told me on Sunday, “The collaborative experience made us different but better people. I have never found another couple who collaborated — in work of any type — the way we did. What a deep understanding of one another that brought us.”

There were some who diminished the novels, lumping them with the frothy stories of such bestselling contemporaries as Danielle Steel or Judith Krantz. But I read more than a few and would tell you that, yes, they were peppered with glamor and fantasy but were also suspenseful and more arrestingly driven by character than action, provocative rather than prurient.

“We specialized in why people think about what they are doing,” Fain told me. “Which enabled them to cope with and overcome life’s obstacles.”

In the novels, Cynthia Barnard says, “you will find real people with real dialogue and real problems, humor and sadness and honesty. And yes, a little fairy dust to make it a romance and a happy ending, but demanding serious thinking along the way.”

The books’ success allowed the authors to move to a much larger apartment, with striking views of Lincoln Park. It enabled them to travel the planet, much of it in research for their novels. They also expanded a home they owned in Aspen, Colorado.

They split their time between both cities and in each were enthusiastic supporters of local institutions. Through their Barnard Fain Foundation, they helped youth science efforts, a few political candidates, but most energetically funded performing arts institutions, with an emphasis on theater, often becoming major donors, as they were with our TimeLine Theatre, whose new theater owes thanks to the couple.

One of their close friends was Rhona Frazin, who recently lost her husband, Julian. “We actually met Judith and Michael in Aspen at a Renaissance Weekend,” she told me. “Following that chance meeting, we bonded through a mutual love of Chicago theater, books and writers. We enjoyed wonderful hikes along Colorado trails and weekends at Judy and Michael’s home outside Aspen. She was an expert cook and a magnificent host. She had strong, well-informed opinions on a wide variety of topics, and was invariably correct in those beliefs.”

In addition to her husband and daughter, Barnard is survived by son Andrew Sharpe; five grandchildren; and a brother, David Barnard. And, of course, all those Judith Michael books.

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