R Is for Revolution in Modern Mystery Genre : Literature: Hard-boiled private eyes are giving way to women, professors, accountants, even a Siamese cat named Koko.

I took another drag on the cigarette, poured a slug of Scotch in my cracked coffee cup and loaded a spare clip. Word is they’re looking for me.

Let ‘em come; I’m easy to find. Name’s on the door, after all, right above “Private Investigator.” Yeah, PI. So let ‘em try to run me out of business. I’m ready.

Suddenly, the door flew open. I snapped off the safety, raised the gun . . . and set it down on the desk. It was just a bunch of dames. A couple of shyster lawyers slid in behind them, followed by a hairdresser and a dwarf named Mungo. I almost laughed. If these folks think they can be detectives, I’ll eat my fedora.

Start chewing, tough guy. The mystery novel has changed, and the hard-boiled private eye has been surpassed by a new cast of crime-fighters: female PIs, cops and medical examiners; rare-book specialists, antiques experts and accountants; gay and lesbian detectives; historical crime-fighters in Colonial New York, frontier Alaska and ancient Rome, even a Siamese cat named Koko.

And all the clues show that mystery fans, including President Clinton, like the changes.

“The hard-boiled stuff is a tougher sell these days,” said Dana Isaacson, who edits mysteries at Pocket Books in New York. “The tough guys are politically incorrect, and the femme fatale isn’t really a positive role model.”

In the last dozen years or so, publishers have realized that mystery readers want characters they can identify with.

“About 75% of the people buying books in this country are women and they want to read about female protagonists,” said William Malloy, editor in chief of The Mysterious Press, a division of Warner Books. So Mysterious and other publishers have responded.

“Every week we get another ‘first-in-a-series’ written by a woman with a female protagonist,” said Tom Savage of Murder Ink on Broadway, the oldest of New York’s five all-mystery bookstores. “If you want to be successful today, you need a really tough, strong woman.”

And she doesn’t have to be a private eye. Writing as Amanda Cross, Carolyn G. Heilbrun, a former Columbia University English professor, set her mysteries on college campuses, with a fictional English professor, Kate Fansler, figuring out who done it.

Like Fansler, many of the new crime-solvers have regular day jobs--art critic, lawyer, repossessor, servant, even watch-dog trainer--so they only root out evil on a part-time basis. It’s a trend that some think has gone too far.

“It’s being done--I hate to say it--to death,” said John Douglas, manager of the Foul Play bookstore in Greenwich Village.

Even old-style private eyes are getting a new look. One of the most talked about new detectives, Easy Rawlins, comes straight out of 1940s Los Angeles, but with a twist. Rawlins, like his creator, Walter Mosley, is black.

“That was something long overdue,” Savage said. “And because of it, we’re starting to get more black customers. They’ll read Mosley first, but since there are only three books in the series, they finish him pretty quickly and move on to someone else.”

Mosley, who just signed a deal to write three more Easy Rawlins mysteries and one book out of the genre, got a boost during the presidential campaign when then-candidate Clinton said he was a fan.

Fred Branstetter, a New York banker who said he started reading mysteries about 10 years ago, likes the unusual slices of life he wouldn’t see elsewhere.

“I learned something about horses and horsemen that I never would have learned if it wasn’t for reading Dick Francis,” he said, prowling through the stacks at Foul Play one night.

“In the mystery, there is violence, danger and chaos, which the audience understands and observes in their own lives,” said Thomas Leitch, a professor of film and literary theory at the University of Delaware. “At the same time, there is always the promise of the affirmative ending. Everything will be resolved. The veil will be taken away, and we’ll see through the chaos, which is reassuring.

“It combines maximum disorder with maximum reassurance,” continued Leitch, who also taught detective fiction at Yale.

“The bad things happen to somebody else,” Malloy said. “People like that.”