A WOMAN OF MYSTERY : Like V.I. Warshawski, her hard-boiled Chicago detective, Sara Paretsky goes through life with her elbows out and her heart on her sleeve.

IT IS THE DAY AFTER THANKSGIVING, an unseasonably warm afternoon in Chicago, and Sara Paretsky is almost happy. Almost.

The best-selling author of the V. I. Warshawski murder mysteries, Paretsky has recovered from the exhausting, maddening publicity that preceded the summer premiere--and box-office bomb--of “V.I. Warshawski,” starring Kathleen Turner. Now it is comeback time: Paretsky’s new novel, “Guardian Angel,” will hit the bookstores in January. Her face, pale and drawn last spring, is smooth. Her raucous, explosive laugh, a cross between a bray and a whinny, is softer, almost giggly. At home, in her office crammed with papers and books, she is wearing a black sweater and jeans that are spattered with mud from walking her dog.

For Paretsky, the worst thing about the movie was not the reviews (although she felt bad for Turner, whom she likes and admires), but the misery of watching other creative minds working over and changing her character. “Last spring, I was going through a very rough time, because I felt I was being invaded by the movie process,” Paretsky admits. Then she saw the finished cut: “I felt enormous relief. I mean, I wish it had been a better movie, that it hadn’t had that adolescent humor. But I felt the movie was so different from what I do . . . that my V.I. is intact.”

Yet chronic doubts about her own talent linger. “I’m trying to recapture a sense of myself as a writer,” she says, choosing her words slowly, as if they hurt. She is already a month late in starting her eighth V.I. novel. A series character is “the story you tell yourself every night, your secret playmate,” she observes. “What I’m worried about is what I’ll write when I write a non-mystery novel,” something she may attempt after V.I. mystery No. 8.

And then there’s the new book, No. 7: Paretsky has gone from hating it (“I always hate them, but I hate this one more,” she said in April) to annoyance: Her publisher, Delacorte Press, has scheduled a 14-city tour. “I’ll be home for only six days in February,” she says morosely. “This book is gone for me now--it’s going to be horrible to go back and be intimate with it. I hate reading my stuff, and people sort of expect it. One of the things I do at readings is rewrite it, because now I can see all the infelicities of style.”

Can this self-deprecating woman be Sara Paretsky, who spearheaded a revolution in women’s popular fiction during the ‘80s, bursting into print nine years ago with “Indemnity Only”? Her main character is V. I. (Victoria Iphigenia) Warshawski, a hard-boiled, hard-hitting female private eye in Chicago whose wise-guy patter and glorious self-confidence turned the mystery genre inside out. Yet Paretsky herself remains curiously conflicted--one part V.I. chutzpah, one part Paretsky reserve. “It’s easy for me to speak out for someone else’s causes, but if it’s my own, it’s very hard,” she says, pronouncing each word carefully after the other. “V.I. says and does things that perhaps I’m strong enough to think, but I might not be strong enough to do.”

The ineffable but stubborn tension that exists between the writer’s real self and her fictional alter ego--and the energy that springs to the page when she lets V.I. loose--is central to Paretsky’s success: V.I. says and does things that a lot of people might want to but don’t. In “Blood Shot,” published in 1988, she asks a man why he is angry with his daughter, and he answers that she “got herself pregnant.”

“ ‘Louisa got herself pregnant?’ I echoed. ‘With a turkey baster in the basement, you mean? There wasn’t a man involved? . . . You’re disgusting, Djiak. You’re terrified of women. You hate your own wife and daughter. No wonder Louisa turned to someone else for a little affection. Who was it to get you so exercised? Your local priest?’ ”

Djiak lunges across the table, hits her with his fist and insults her mother in predictably ugly language.

“I got up slowly,” V.I., as narrator, says, “and went over to stand in front of him, my face close enough to smell the beer on his breath. ‘You may not insult my mother, Djiak. Any other garbage from the cesspool you call a mind I’ll tolerate. But you ever insult my mother again in my hearing, I will break your neck.’ ”

Tough and independent, V.I. (only paternalistic throwbacks call her Vicki) lives alone and likes it. She packs a gun, drinks Johnnie Walker Black Label scotch and is a Chicago Cubs fan. Sublimely indifferent to what people think of her, she tosses bills in the trash and sleeps with men who take her fancy. V.I. gets beaten up at least once in every book, but not in a woman-as-victim way: She can pulverize a man’s jaw with a single blow, and it takes at least two, sometimes four, thugs to overpower her.

But Paretsky has made V.I. much more than Philip Marlowe in drag: This heroine is a credible working woman and feminist coping as best she can. Her body hurts when it gets hit; she misses her parents, both dead--her father a Chicago cop of Polish Catholic descent, her mother an Italian Jew who escaped the Nazis. She loves her friends, fully drawn characters with histories and idioms of their own, and she loves her dog.

If the heroine and dialogue crackle and spit, Paretsky’s chiseled prose evokes the big city in a style as terse as anything by Chandler or Hammett. “The night air was thick and damp,” begins “Indemnity Only.” “As I drove south along Lake Michigan, I could smell rotting alewives like a faint perfume on the heavy air.”

But what allows Paretsky to transcend the mystery genre without diminishing it as entertainment is the fact that her whodunits are also “whatdunits,” driven by the author’s unblinking social conscience.

While Ronald Reagan and George Bush were winning landslides, Paretsky created a “meddlesome priestess,” as Warshawski is described in “Burn Marks,” a woman who specializes in snide remarks about Republicans, male chauvinists and white-collar criminals. (Her Chicago is a man’s town where the fix is always in.) Among her targets: greedy millionaires (“Indemnity Only” and “Deadlock”); the Catholic Church and homophobic parents (“Killing Orders”); anti-abortionists (“Bitter Medicine”); child molestation, incest, corporate negligence (“Blood Shot”) and the plight of the homeless (“Burn Marks”).

Not everyone likes the social dimensions. Otto Penzler, owner of the Mysterious Bookshops in New York and Los Angeles and founder of The Mysterious Press, says that Paretsky “conveys a strong political point of view in a way that some people find offensive.” But Penzler believes that Paretsky’s mysteries work as mysteries. Deft, complicated tales of high and low skulduggery, they are fast-paced and full of quirky surprise; even the fanatics and thugs are rounded enough, or stupid enough, to be credible. Paretsky may herself be a meddlesome priestess of social reform, but she also resolves the tension between polemics and plot in favor of realistic storytelling.

If she has the social conscience of Charles Dickens, she lacks the ego. “How can I possibly care whether someone 200 years from now is going to read my books?” she asks. “When I think of 200 years from now, I’m terrified that there won’t be a planet.” Nor does money interest her: She concedes, reluctantly, that her current three-book contract with Delacorte is “in six figures” and that the next could be in seven. But, she adds pensively, “I’m not sure I want it. Money doesn’t hurt, but writing to contract is. . . .” Writing any way is for her an agonizing process; when she was behind schedule on “Guardian Angel,” she threw out 210 of the first 260 pages.

Does she want, then, to save the world?

“Well, some of the people in it,” she snaps, and then erupts in a raucous laugh. “It is true that I think I want to save the world,” she says a moment later. “There’s a sense that if I haven’t burnt myself to an ash, I haven’t done enough.”

AT 44, PARETSKY IS TALL AND WILLOWY, WITH A LONG FACE AND luminous eyes. Her hair is a cloud of prematurely white curls, her step tentative since an old back injury got much worse in 1989. She has sensitive skin on her back from nerve damage and an ulcer from the medication she takes for it.

On the surface, at least, V.I. and Paretsky are very much alike: They both love the Chicago Cubs, whiskey and golden retrievers (Paretsky’s is named Cardhu, after a brand of Scotch), and both rarely make their beds. But unlike her fictional persona, Paretsky has been happily, almost blissfully, married for 15 years--to Courtenay Wright, a 67-year-old professor of physics at the University of Chicago--and she is something of a physical coward: When a deranged woman shouted at her in a restroom recently, she locked herself in a stall until someone else arrived. Actually, she confides, “I’m a little bit shy.”

Yes and no. On scholarship at the University of Kansas, Paretsky graduated in three years and headed the school’s first commission on the status of women. At the University of Chicago, where she was president of a 300-member graduate-student group, she took her two graduate degrees while working full-time at CNA Financial Corp., the multinational company where she had taken a job when she saw the market for bright new history professors evaporating.

She stayed at CNA for nine years as a middle-level manager, experience that proved crucial: When not stumbling on murder, V.I. specializes in insurance fraud (something Paretsky learned about from colleagues’ investigations). And it was while sitting through endless meetings, taking notes on business jargon and verbal circumlocutions--which she immediately threw away, afraid of being caught not paying attention--that she decided to try writing a novel.

On New Year’s Day, 1979, hung over but determined, she started what became “Indemnity Only.” She chose the mystery genre, instead of starting off with the big novel about the business world that she had envisioned, because she read crime fiction all the time, and she thought she would be “less likely to fail at it.” She liked the idea that in mysteries, at least, there are solutions, and she has never liked me-centered, non-detective fiction: “Excuse the Kansas expression, it makes me puke.”

Not that mysteries were perfect. “When I read Chandler for the first time, when I was 22, it really hit me--it just hit me--that if you were a woman who was beautiful and sexual, then you were evil,” she says. She found John D. MacDonald’s Travis McGee novels less misogynistic, but “the cure for any woman’s problem was to spend a week on the houseboat with Travis,” Paretsky observes dryly. “A good orgasm gets rid of incest, child abuse, frigidity--God, what a guy!”

After completing about 70 pages of “Indemnity Only,” Paretsky took a course at Northwestern University from veteran mystery writer Stuart Kaminsky. “Men always say that they did something, and women always say that they’re lucky, but I was very lucky,” she says. Kaminsky took her character seriously and helped her see herself as a writer; he even recommended her to his own agent. When she finished the book, she dedicated it, “For Stuart Kaminsky. Thanks.”

“When I first read ‘Indemnity Only,’ I was blown away. I had never read anything quite like it before,” says Sharon M. Rose, editor of “A Suitable Job for a Woman,” a quarterly newsletter published in Chattanooga about women in mystery fiction. V.I., for many readers, was the first aggressive, credible, no-nonsense female PI.

There were always smart women sleuths (Miss Marple, Harriet Vane); the ‘60s saw the arrival of Amanda Cross’ professor-sleuth Kate Fansler and a few full-time detectives such as Dorothy Uhnak’s New York homicide cop Christie Opara, P.D. James’ cerebral and ladylike Cordelia Gray, Marcia Muller’s kinder, gentler private investigator Sharon McCone. But six months after V.I. smart-mouthed her way into print, Sue Grafton’s equally lippy Kinsey Millhone appeared in “A Is for Alibi.” After getting over their surprise, critics declared a trend in tough, sexy female private eyes.

Today there are dozens of female shamuses--created by women--who shoot straight, get hung over, rescue themselves when they get in a jam and burn dinner on those rare occasions when they turn on the stove; their success has made room for softer, funnier female protagonists as well. Among the best-known women mystery writers: Edgar Award winner Julie Smith, Susan Dunlap, Lia Matera, Margaret Maron, Nancy Pickard, Barbara Mertz--and three strong new voices, Patricia Cornwell, Linda Barnes and Sarah Shankman. Although Paretsky ranks among the top 10 mystery sellers at mainstream stores such as Barnes & Noble, it is in specialty stores, such as Sherman Oaks’ Scene of the Crime, that Paretsky sells best, usually ranking among the top three sellers, with 1990 sales about equal to Grafton’s and trailing only Tony Hillerman’s.

Paretsky’s feminism took shape at the University of Kansas and hardened at a student meeting in Chicago: “This guy quoted the Stokely Carmichael remark, that ‘the position of women in the movement is prone,’ ” she recalls, still furious after all these years. The remark radicalized her: “I suppose I should send him a thank-you note.”

Her activism extends beyond her novels: Paretsky has made appearances at Amnesty International meetings and worked for 20 years (until sidelined by back pain) with the National Abortion Rights Action League of Illinois. These days she’s working with the literacy program at the Midwest Women’s Center. She also founded Sisters in Crime in 1986, an organization for women mystery writers that now numbers more than 1,600 members on four continents.

The group publishes “Shameless Promotion for Brazen Hussies,” compiled by mystery novelist Linda Grant, based in part on Paretsky’s own efforts to publicize her books, and it lent its name to a successful anthology series edited by Marilyn Wallace. Perhaps most significantly, Sisters in Crime tabulated book reviews and found that as of 1988, although women wrote more than a third of mystery fiction, they received less than 20% of the genre’s reviews. A letter-writing campaign to editors and newspapers ensued. Nowadays, says Susan Dunlap, a member of the original steering committee and immediate past president, women get about 35% of mystery-review space.

Reminded of her activism, Paretsky shrugs. “I think I have a visceral reaction to all large institutions that try to dominate or control people,” she suggests. “Having had a rather authoritarian father, I just have this hypersensitive skin to anyone who thinks that”--she lowers her voice to a growl--” ’You do what I say because I’m telling you to do it.’ ”

SARA NANCY PARETSKY was born in 1947, the second of five children and the only daughter of David and Mary Paretsky, a scientist and a librarian. He was the son of Eastern European Jews; she was a Midwesterner, “a WASP who obligingly converted to Judaism,” her daughter says.

Jews were not welcome as landowners in Lawrence, Kan., where her father taught at the university, so the family settled outside town, and Sara went to a rural, two-room schoolhouse; when she wasn’t in school she was caring for her brothers--cleaning, baking, diapering. Sometimes, unable to sleep at night, she walked by herself to the river, a mile away.

Paretsky was and remains keenly aware of her mixed heritage, and it influenced the creation of V.I.: “I used to think I was the half-fairy, half-mortal child in Gilbert and Sullivan’s ‘Iolanthe’--he can turn invisible from the waist up, so his head and arms will go through a keyhole, but there are his legs, sticking out on the other side. So that’s how I always felt, sort of a WASP from the waist down, and I thought that if I gave my character a partially Jewish heritage and a partially--something else?--that it might be a way to figure out how to integrate these things.”

Other details about her early years are not forthcoming. “I don’t want to bore you,” she says. So it is a surprise when, at a public forum a day later, her prepared speech is peppered with painful, personal revelations. The audience is composed of about 300 booksellers from Kroch’s & Brentano’s, a large bookstore chain in Chicago. Wearing a black pantsuit of soft wool, a cerise silk blouse and matching lipstick, Paretsky looks striking and waif-like.

She eases into the story of how she came to write for publication with a long, slow windup: Chicago is a great place to write because of the Chicago Cubs, “and it is a well-known truth that great art is built on suffering.” During the filming of “Warshawski,” she ran the bases at Wrigley Field: “I trod the sacred turf, I kissed the ground that Andre Dawson stood on, I may even have touched a blade of grass which he himself spat on.” And then the pitch: Unlike boys drawn to the literary life, she had no assurance that there was a place for her as a writer. When a teacher gave her extra help with writing, her mother put a stop to it. When she entered a writing contest, her father said her submission was so derivative that the judges would suspect plagiarism. When she wrote the judges to explain that she hadn’t plagiarized, her father, she tells the audience, “became furious in the frightening way that only a very violent person can become.”

Her parents sent her brothers to college. She had to get a scholarship. Her parents required her to take the high school secretarial course, though she was in college-track courses. She got the scholarship and was accepted at the University of Chicago for graduate school. “Don’t be surprised when you flunk out,” her father said. “You have a second-rate mind, and it’s a first-rate school.” She got her doctorate in history the same year she got her MBA, both from Chicago, in 1976.

The anger that bubbles just below this formidable woman’s calm exterior is apparent in her detective. Reviewing “Blood Shot” in 1988, Marilyn Stasio called the book a “genuine heroic quest” but added about Warshawski: “More self-destructive is the abrasive, intractable and unforgiving side of her nature, which she tends to confuse with an independent character.”

“You might think she’s (Warshawski’s) humorless because she’s very serious about her business and issues that concern her. But underneath that seriousness is a character with heart and soul,” says Sara Ann Freed, an editor at Mysterious Press. “The thing with Sara is--she really is all heart.”

If people sometimes talk about Warshawski and Paretsky in the same breath, it’s because, for all their differences, it is hard to keep them apart. Paretsky says she has replaced her earlier anger at her parents with sadness; in “Burn Marks,” V.I. makes a sad but resigned peace with her male-chauvinist surrogate father. Although Paretsky continues to maintain that there are “many situations in which it’s very difficult for me to have ‘a voice,’ ” she does speak up for her own causes--just like V.I.

If, that is, the provocation is sufficient. When the film company was in Chicago with “Warshawski,” the writer was at first characteristically torn: She worried that “I’ll feel that V.I. has been taken away from me.” Then a producer told her that the sequel, if there is one, will deal with V.I.’s midlife crisis. “I said,” Paretsky recalls, “ ‘I don’t know how V.I.’s going to resolve these issues, but she won’t be getting married and having a child.’ And they said, ‘Well, we think you need to rethink that.’ ” She pauses, considering. “I started feeling so--like these guys were taking over my head, and finally I just said, ‘You know, you guys get too out of hand, and I’m going to kill her off because I’m not going to let her go on, spinning out of my control.’ I don’t think he thought I was serious. But I am serious.”

It is unlikely that Paretsky will bump off V.I. any time soon. In March, Delacorte reissued “Indemnity Only,” and “Burn Marks” came out in paperback, 419,000 copies strong.In September, Delacorte published “A Woman’s Eye,” a collection of new stories by women mystery writers edited by Paretsky. Her new mystery, “Guardian Angel,” is a slam-bang story full of ruthless “greedheads” and big business turned personally vicious. In it, V.I. takes a black lover, a handsome, smart, sensitive man who is unapologetic about wanting to protect her.

As usual, the novel began for Paretsky as a slow, even torturous process; she was frequently sidetracked by her chronic self-doubt and what she calls the “fog” of writing. Then, in December, she dreamed that she took tea with Virginia Woolf and broke the English writer’s favorite knickknack. Paretsky’s writer’s block disappeared, and by February she was willing to admit she just might make her deadline. The new book starts when V.I.’s dog, Peppy, delivers eight puppies (“I think that’s the closest V.I. will get to motherhood,” she snorts).

ON A COLD, WINTRY morning, wrapped in a parka with an ice pack tucked against her spine, Paretsky takes time for a drive through south Chicago. This is where, at 19, she spent the summer with a Presbyterian youth project, and this is where V.I. grew up. Paretsky points to a bright blue row house that stands out from its gray, paint-chipped neighbors. “That would have been the house where V.I. lived,” she says thoughtfully.

Further south--past abandoned steel plants, past more neighborhoods, past the city dump where birds circle overhead--she comes to Dead Stick Pond. In “Blood Shot,” three men waylay V.I. when she’s out running, knock her unconscious and leave her to drown in the pond. “This all used to be swamp,” Paretsky says, gesturing widely. “Starting in 1880, when Andrew Carnegie dumped his first load of cyanide into it, thinking this would make a hell of a place to have a steel mill, it’s all been filled in. This is the last wetland for migratory birds in northern Illinois, and they’re about to pave it over and put an airport into it.”

She pulls up at a stop sign on the deserted road. Suddenly, from the right, an 18-wheel truck appears, moving fast, heading into a turn--and into her car. Still talking in a matter-of-fact voice, Paretsky slams into reverse. The car jumps back 20 feet. The truck--improbably--makes the turn, speeding through the space where the sedan’s front seat had been seconds before. Paretsky sighs. “This poor car,” she says evenly. “Is the hood smoking? I think I just stripped the gears.”

It’s the sort of thing V.I., who doesn’t scare easily and who seems to expect people to cut corners, would do and say. “That would be nice to think,” Paretsky says, considering. She allows herself a smile, then her great, unconditional laugh.

“It’s nice to know,” she says, gasping for breath, “It’s nice to know that I really can do more than sit and yak.”