Rita Rudner maintains her stand-up showcase at Harrah's Las Vegas is her first love, but she also conjured steamy scenes for the Las Vegas-based novel "Turning the Table."

Rita Rudner hasn't yet recorded the audio book for her recent novel, "Turning the Tables." Until that day, we'll just have to imagine how the stylish, mannered comedian with the lilting voice will verbalize the prison-yard smack talk.

"What am I gonna do? I don't even know," Rudner says with a laugh. "I'm not the best at accents. With (her previous book) 'Tickled Pink,' I had to try German... I did my best."

Rudner is way beyond her trademark shopaholic jokes and husband-bashing in the Las Vegas-based comic novel. The narrative goes to prison, but also strip joints, a swingers convention and a Thai sex club. While "Pink" was heavily autobiographical, "I had to go much more outside myself with this one, because it's a made-up story."

Though Rudner reopens at Harrah's Las Vegas today with her more familiar stand-up act, fiction is something she plans to stick with. The comedian says she is happy to share the Harrah's showroom with Wayne Newton -- who likely will spell her again in May and June -- to devote more time to writing.

"I started as a dancer, and then I stopped dancing and stood perfectly still as a comedian," she says. "And when I'm in my 80s, I'll be sitting down. I'll be writing."

She and her British husband, Martin Bergman, have collaborated on two movie screenplays ("Peter's Friends" and "A Weekend in the Country"). Their circle of friends includes several British actors and comedians who have crossed over as novelists in England: Stephen Fry, Hugh Laurie and Ben Elton, who had his own run at the Strip as writer-director of the Queen musical "We Will Rock You."

(When Rudner told Elton she was working on a Las Vegas novel, he replied, "You'd better hurry up. I've started mine, too.")

The British precedent for comedian-penned novels encouraged Rudner to tell her own tale of a young casino publicist and her ex-husband, a down-and-out magician named Barry Houdini, who are framed in a casino rip-off.

"So many comedians do essay books, which I love to do too," she is in fact, working on one now, "but I always wanted to try to do something that's maybe a departure." In the early chapters, one-liners sound as though they came straight from Rudner's stage act. Disgusted with the swingers convention, the heroine proclaims, "I'm going back to the real world where people sleep together either because they care about each other or for money."

But as the narrative takes hold, the story carries its own weight. Rudner's favorite character to write became the male magician, she says, because of his character transformation.

Though played for comic exaggeration, the book reads with an informed eye for the new trends of the Strip. There's an insider's level of detail, thanks to Rudner's having worked Las Vegas since 2000. She and Bergman even lived inside the MGM Grand for seven months before deciding to sell their Southern California house.

"What I didn't put in the book was how difficult it was to walk a sheepdog every morning through a casino," she says.

Rudner and Bergman have endured more than enough marketing meetings to lampoon casino management structure at the mega-casino named Heaven. And if she wanted to know more about, say, the surveillance room, she knew the right people to ask.

"There's so much going on here that hasn't been documented," Rudner says of most Las Vegas writing, which is still fixated on gambling strategies or mafia-era clichés. "One of my favorite things to write was the time-share (pitchman), where you get accosted on the street."

Rudner and Bergman are shopping a TV show idea to follow "Ask Rita," their syndicated effort of a few years ago, and she is about to introduce a line of handbags.

The two bought a beach house in Laguna Beach, Calif., last year. Rudner says last year's three-month vacation -- after New York-New York closed her venue to make way for a nightclub -- was good for the duo and their 4-year-old daughter.

But if she were forced to do only one thing, she says it would be stand-up. Why, she asks, do people such as Jerry Seinfeld and Ray Romano do it if they don't need the money?

"It's fun. They don't have to do it. They want to do it. It's an immediate gratification. What's better in life than that? You tell a joke and people laugh. It's right there."

Harrah's is a bigger, "grander" old showroom than her retrofit space at New York-New York. "Because I always keep the lights up, it still is very intimate. I never like to be blinded by a spotlight. As long as I can see people's faces, it's just easier for me to connect and for them to connect with me."

But don't think she is taking it easy up there. "I do three jokes a minute, for an hour and 20 minutes. It keeps me on my toes. You always have to be thinking. Your mind can't wander for a millisecond."