FACTS AND FICTIONS

Before being found dead, slumped forward in the passenger seat of a Volga sedan with his forehead on the dashboard and "a copeck-sized bullethole in the back of his head," he had made his reputation as a journalist much admired for his reports on the Russian mafia and business corruption, among other pervasive social conditions hindering democratic reform in the former Soviet Union. Police at the scene of the execution-style killing said the bullet was fired from a 10 millimeter or .45 caliber automatic pistol.

The journalist was not Paul Klebnikov, the 41-year-old American editor of the Russian edition of Forbes magazine who was "struck by four bullets" and shot dead Friday night in Moscow on the sidewalk outside his office, when "one of three men sitting in a Zhiguli sedan pulled out a Makarov semiautomatic pistol and started firing," according to the Baltimore Sun.

But like Klebnikov, "who began reporting on Eastern Europe and Russia for Forbes in 1989" and "spent years tracking the shadowy deals that underpin many of Russia's personal fortunes," he tried not to worry about his personal safety. More than that, he tended to dismiss threats against his life. His name was Mikhail Milyukin. And he received letters like this:

Your piece about St. Petersburg's "Cosa Nostra" was one of the most stupid, misleading piles of shit I have ever heard anyone gob out on national television. There is no such thing as "the Russian Mafia." The whole idea of a Mafia has been made up by people like you who try and make money out of selling scare stories. ... Our business methods have to be ruthless sometimes if only because in this stupid, backward country of ours there exists no understanding of supply and demand and free enterprise. If someone lets you down in business there is no real legal mechanism to enforce a contract or to have him pay compensation. So we break his legs, or threaten his children. Next time he'll do what he's supposed to. A man doesn't pay a share of his profits to his partners, we'll burn his house to the ground. This is just business. You are an intelligent man. You should understand this. And yet you continue to sell us the dead horse about the Mafia. A number of my business colleagues are very angry about this. ... So a word of warning. Stop it now. Because the next time you choose to describe joint ventures, traders, private businessmen, cooperatives as Mafia-run, you might not live to regret it.

We don't know whether Klebnikov received such letters, in part because nobody has yet chronicled his life with the richness of detail that Philip Kerr has brought to the story of Mikhail Milyukin's life. Chances are that nobody ever will, because few writers are as expert as Kerr in painting a word portrait, but also because Milyukin is, after all, a fictional character. He appears in Kerr's superb, out-of-print, 1993 thriller "Dead Meat."

Given its continuing relevance and its remarkable depiction of a society in collapse -- not to mention that Kerr writes the smartest, most vivid thrillers around -- maybe some publisher will see fit to put it back in print.