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CORRALES — If you think the political campaigns going on in New Mexico right now are nasty, you don't have Melvin Eisenstadt's imagination.

Today's campaigns are the essence of civility compared to the one detailed by Eisenstadt in his novel "The Dynamite Campaign" (PublishAmerica, 2006, $19.95).

Eisenstadt's fictional campaign for a congressional seat in northern New Mexico includes the death of a young man because of water poisoned by polluters, which leads to the blowing up of a building, which leads to a court trial involving one of the candidates.

Then a candidate gets assassinated.

Oh yeah - and then there's the information coming out of Los Alamos National Laboratory about uranium being smuggled out of Iran through Iraq into Libya that lends the bitter flavor of international intrigue to the novel's New Mexico campaign.

"I started writing it because I wanted to say something about what lousy candidates we have today," Eisenstadt said during an interview at his Corrales home. "But it didn't turn out that way. I just followed the characters and, actually, the politicians turned out OK."

It's just everything else than goes nuts.

"The novel turned out to be about all the screwy things that can happen in an election - some things that you can control and some things that are out of your control," Eisenstadt said.

Like Iran, Iraq and Libya for example.

Eisenstadt, 75, has lived for more than 30 years in Corrales in this house, which he designed and had built.

He was trained as an aerospace engineer and taught engineering at the University of California at Santa Barbara and the University of Puerto Rico.

His first book was a 1971 text titled "Introduction to Mechanical Properties of Materials."

But he knows something about politics, too. He got a law degree from the University of New Mexico in 1976 and served for 10 years as a municipal court judge in Corrales.

And his wife, Pauline, served 12 years in the New Mexico Legislature - eight years in the House and four in the Senate.

"Mel weaves in all his knowledge and past skills, so you get the science, the engineering and the law in his novels, but you get the politics, too," Pauline said.

Eisenstadt started writing novels - three have been published - when he retired about 20 years ago.

He describes them as environmentally conscious suspense novels.

"I started writing about things that ticked me off," he said. "The first one published ("Navajo Afterglow," 2000, Creative Arts Book Co.) was about Navajo uranium miners who got screwed because their mines were not safe and could have been.

"The second one ("Noah's Millennium," 2005, PublishAmerica) is about global warming. It's set largely in New Mexico in the years 2050-2090, but it's not science fiction."

He has written another, still unpublished, called "Water War." It is set 20 years in the future and is about a Navajo youth who becomes a solar engineer.

Eisenstadt definitely has points to make in his fiction. But that's not the main reason he writes his novels.

"I have a good time doing it," he said. "If you don't have a good time, you shouldn't do it. Because it doesn't pay that much."

Still, if you're tired of all the sniping and guerrilla warfare tactics in the present political season, it might pay you to read "The Dynamite Campaign."

Maybe it'll make you feel better about the way things are, make you thankful they're not the way they might be.