LONDON -- Maxim Jakubowski is the Londoner who makes crime pay. He owns and operates Murder One, reputedly the world's largest crime-book shop. Here, the books are piled high, the backlist is enormous and mystery lurks on every shelf.

"Our policy is, if a book is in print in the English language we stock it, even if we have to bring it in from anywhere in the world," Jakubowski says.

This is where books by P. D. James, Ian Rankin and Raymond Chandler never go out of style. It's where J.D. McDonald's 20 Travis McGee novels sit side by side with the dozens of other books penned by the author as he struggled to find his voice and fortune.

And overseeing it all is a life-size model of the caped, pipe-smoking Sherlock Holmes, the fictional father of the modern mystery.

"We're not the prettiest shop in London," Jakubowski says. 'We're fairly stark, functional and dusty. We're not selling coffee and atmosphere, we're selling books."

And apparently he's doing quite well, with a $3 million annual turnover. The shop caters to locals and tourists, and even a couple of members of British Prime Minister Tony Blair's Cabinet. The shop's all-time biggest purchase was set by a Japanese tourist who came in, plunked down $1,600 and took away boxes of books.

With his salt-and-pepper hair, wrinkled shirts and easy manner, Jakubowski can be found behind the cash register -- when he's not writing his own mysteries. Writing -- and radical thought -- is apparently in his blood. His mother was a Paris-based left-wing journalist and a friend of Eric Arthur Blair, more famously known as George Orwell. And his Polish-born father fought against fascism in the Spanish Civil War.

"I've lived and breathed books ever since I was born," Jakubowski says.

Crime and erotica are the writing passions for Jakubowski, who wrote his first novel at 16. Among his works are "The State of Montana, An Erotic Novel," and "It's You That I Want to Kiss, A Crime Novel." Among the collections he has edited is "The Mammoth Book of Erotica." Veering as he does from crime to sex to death, it's hard to figure out if Jakubowski aimed to follow in the footsteps of Dashiell Hammett or Henry Miller.

For a time, he ended up in publishing, setting up Virgin's book division for British entrepreneur Richard Branson. Ten years ago, "bored with writing full time," he established Murder One. Two years after the launch, he relocated and now operates from Charing Cross Road, the heartland of book buying and selling in London.

And location counts. The street was immortalized in Helene Hanff's book "84 Charing Cross Road," which became a film starring Anthony Hopkins. Jaku- bowski emulated the format of letters between a fan and writer and wrote his own version, "71-73 Charing Cross Road," after the address of Murder One.

The area is still jammed with Victorian-era shops bursting at the seams with every book imaginable.

While tweed-suited country gentlemen tip their walking sticks to the leather-bound volumes on one side of the street, the other side has book signings by the likes of Quentin Tarantino.

Murder One's customers queued around the block for 12 hours for Tarantino's signature, and the young director was very happy to sign. Jakubowski, after all, had selected Tarantino's "Reservoir Dogs" for the London Film Festival, eight months before the film secured distribution in Britain.

Jakubowski describes his customers as "people that like reading books. They're not after the first edition, but reading copies." Hence the huddle around the second-hand crime novels -- musty, long forgotten tales given a second chance to thrill new generations of readers.

Currently, the store's biggest-selling novelist is James Ellroy, whose bloody potboilers like "The Big Nowhere" and "L.A. Confidential" describe the seedier side of life in America.

So what makes crime pay in London? According to Jakubowski, American killers are "slightly sordid. They're a bit too down-to-earth."

"When you look at British ones, like Agatha Christie's, they're slightly glamorous or even upper class," he explains. "That's the fascination."

Pub Date: 03/14/99