MOSCOW - Ever since the police investigator Porfiry Petrovich used subtle psychology to probe the conscience-stricken hero of Dostoevski's Crime and Punishment, the brainy Russian detective has been the stuff of literary legend.
Today, there is a new twist on an old tradition. In post-Soviet Russia, the heir apparent to this legacy is not, like Porfiry, a St. Petersburg man. She is a Moscow woman, Anastasia "Nastya" Kamenskaya.
The fictional character is a colonel in the modern Moscow police force. She can be both as gentle as a breeze through a wheat field and as hard as the stones in Red Square. (Her name is derived from the Russian word for stone.)
Attractive and brainy, she worries about her weight and coolly outwits the blindly macho police bureaucracy. She never carries a gun on duty but likes to meditate as she squeezes off rounds at the firing range.
Just as remarkable as Nastya is her creator, Marina Alekseyeva. The 45-year-old mystery writer was, until she retired a few years ago, a lieutenant colonel in the Moscow police's elite Criminal Investigation Division.
Writing under the pen name Aleksandra Marinina, Alekseyeva has produced two dozen novels about Nastya, selling more than 30 million books in Russian and a half-dozen other languages. She's been called the "queen of the Russian mystery novel" and ranked by one publication as one of Russia's most influential people.
But she is almost unknown in the United States, where she has not been able to find a publisher. The problem, perhaps, is that American readers may have a hard time identifying with her protagonist and alter ego, Kamenskaya. She quietly solves crimes that stump her macho male colleagues with her quick wits and insights into human psychology. But she does not try to challenge the customs and values of her male-dominated society.
The character appeals enormously to Russian women, the bulk of her readers. They say they appreciate Nastya's vulnerability - her self-doubts and ability to identify with victims and criminals - and her toughness.
"I like the fact that she has a man's mentality, a man's analytical mind," says Ludmilla Blinova, a 40-something secretary, who says she has read almost all of Alekseyeva's 25 books. "But she has a woman's character. People like her, and she is feminine."
Through her novels, Alekseyeva has helped chronicle the devastation of Russian society after the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991. While murder and other sensational crimes were rare under the old communist police state, they multiplied through the 1990s as criminal gangs fought over economic spoils.
Politically connected crime bosses escape unpunished, in real life and Alekseyeva's books. But at least in the author's novels, Nastya always figures out who did it and why. In real-life Russia, things are generally a lot murkier.
Alekseyeva's knack for capturing the Zeitgeist can seem a little spooky. In a popular 1998 novel, Men's Games, she invented a string of seven grisly murders that Nastya's boss at 38 Petrovka St. - headquarters for Moscow's Criminal Investigation Division - insisted were the work of a serial killer. Nastya discovered the crimes were contract killings ordered by government officials bent on sowing terror and seizing control of the Kremlin in the elections of 2000.
A year later, someone bombed two apartment buildings in Moscow and another in southern Russia, killing more than 300 people. Former Kremlin insider Boris Berezovsky, a fugitive business tycoon, has blamed Russia's security agency for the bombings, saying they were staged to whip up public support for the presidential campaign of President Vladimir V. Putin.
In an interview in her agent's office in an affluent northeast Moscow neighborhood, Alekseyeva appears wearing fashionable glasses, her trademark blond hair tied back in a bun. She says her intricate plots always start with a simple idea.
Sometimes, the inspiration comes from a conversation, a scene from a film or maybe a newspaper story. Whatever its source, she reworks the details - especially if the story is true.
"In life, it is much more boring than it is in books," she says.
One novel is based on newspaper accounts of a desperate Russian woman who threw her children out the window of a high-rise and then committed suicide by jumping. Alekseyeva built the story into a mystery, but one with a twist on the original story.
Another time, Alekseyeva saw a television show about a teen-age girl who wanted revenge for the death of her family and sought help from a middle-age hit man. What if the roles were reversed, she wondered.
Inspired, she wrote a story of an 80-year-old woman's relationship with a young drug addict. Alekseyeva isn't coy about mining her personal life for her work. Of course, she shrugs, she bases characters on friends and acquaintances.
"I don't make an exact portrait of such people," she says. "I can take the character and mentality and give the person completely different looks. Still, people recognize themselves."
She admires the giants of Russian literature: Pushkin, Dostoevski, Tolstoy. Among contemporary English-language authors, she is a big fan of Sidney Sheldon, another writer of international best sellers. (The Guinness Book of World Records has called him the most translated author in the world.) "You open the first page and you read it to the last page, and you never stop in between," she says.
A Moscow native, Alekseyeva studied the history and theory of filmmaking in high school, and law at Moscow State University.
"I was fond of detective novels and have been reading them since my childhood," she says. "When I was a teen-ager, I was playing at writing poems and stories. But I was not serious. And I never showed them to anybody."
After graduating from college in 1979, she found herself drawn to police work.
She was always interested in the sociology of crime, she says. A specialist in statistics, she is the author of more than 40 articles, including the United Nations monograph "Crime and Crime Prevention in Moscow." Mention the city's homicide rate and she can still describe in detail how it fluctuates in relation to the overall incidence of crime.
Only after more than a decade of police work - which she calls "this cruel stuff" - she rediscovered the desire to write. She co-wrote her first mystery story with a colleague in 1991. Her first novel, Concurrence of Circumstances, was published in the police department's magazine, Militia, in 1993.
By 1995, she had landed a contract with a major publisher and began writing furiously in her spare time. "I was so encouraged. I started writing on a wave of encouragement and hope," she says.
She wrote a dozen novels in just two years. But the celebrity became too much of a distraction for her colleagues, she says, some of whom resented all the attention she was getting. So she retired to write full time in 1998.
For a while, she tried working at home, but it was a disaster. After working at the police department her entire adult life, she found herself cut off from all her former friends and colleagues. "I gained almost 40 pounds in one year and was in deep depression," she says. "And I was only 43."
So, she started working in a room in the office of her literary agent. She shows up each morning as though she has to report to work, puts in a full day and returns home in time to have dinner with her husband, a police colonel. (Her stepson is a lieutenant in the Moscow force.)
Celebrity in reserved Russian society is a much easier burden to bear than in the West. When some of Alekseyeva's millions of fans recognize her on the street, as they often do, they don't rush up and demand autographs. "Usually they don't say anything," she says. "They just smile and look."
Today, she works at a relatively leisurely pace, finishing a book every six months. She has even begun to venture out of the detective-novel genre - writing a family saga. Despite her prodigious output, she says she is filled with doubts familiar to many first-time authors.
"Each time I start to write a book, I'm scared that it will be the last one," she says. "I ask myself, What if I don't have any inspiration? I'm afraid either that I won't have any ideas, or I won't be strong enough to finish."
But strength is something that Alekseyeva - and the long-suffering women of Russia - seem to have in abundance.
One of the principal characters in The Stylist falls in love with Nastya and in the final chapter bitterly accuses her of using him to find one of the murderers. Yes, she admits. He is right. "Sometimes I have to hurt people," she tells him. "I hope you can understand that."