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Linda Carter and Loni Anderson are Partners in Crime - and they plan to make it pay.

In the new series, the two girls take over a detective agency willed to them jointly by a man to whom each had been married.

Instead of bullets and fast cars, they use wit, charm and their beauty to make San Francisco a safer place in which to live.

"We're not Cagney and Lacey," says Linda. "We're not policemen - although we do use them. We just... figure it out, use whatever we can."

Tall, elegant Linda, and bubbly bosomy Loni make a contrasting sight - and so do their characters, Carole Stanwyck and Sydney Kovak.

Linda plays a once-wealthy debutante, now working as a photographer, but still carrying all the bearing of her formal social standing.

Loni remains the street-wise, fight 'em toe-to-toe type, a lady who takes no for am answer, re-shapes it into something unprintable, and hurls it back like a grenade.

Thus when they arrive at a mansion behind whose heavy gates lives a man they desperately want to question, Loni shakes the iron bars and yells: "Let us in, you pinhead!"

Linda quietly takes her by the arms, to return another evening, this time in elegant clothes, to join a crowd of people attending a party at the mansion. They simply slip in unnoticed.

They nab their man.

The premise for the show was set with a two-hour opening movie, in which the girls attend a reading of the will of the late Richard Caulfield. They are shocked to learn he has left thorn his agency, which he ran from an elegant San Francisco mansion.

Linda's first impulse was to run. She does not want to be a private detective, does mot want anything to do with anything that belonged to her ex-husband. And she seriously doubts she wants to be partners with the woman to whom he had been married before her.

But then they discovered Caulfield was actually murdered - and Loni talked Linda into staying around to solve the crime.

Explains Linda: "Part of the charm of the show is that Loni and I ARE so different. As characters, we're not really jealous of each other, and what we have is a growing friendship.

"We realize we must have some qualities in common, to have both married the same man. We combine her street smarts, with my superior education, to solve crimes."

The role for Linda Carter - a former Miss World who won stardom as Wonder Woman - is a major departure, her first shot at comedy.

"This," she says, "is the aspect I adore, just love. And I think my timing is pretty good - at least, Loni says so. Our scenes work well together."

She also enjoys the location - the picturesque bays of San Francisco, the hilly streets, the sunny atmosphere.

But while writers for the Carson Productions group work on twisting plots for Partners in Crime, Linda Carter is locked into some heavy plotting of her own.

January 29 she married Washington D.C. attorney Robert Altman. and ever since she has been working on a complicated schedule to meet him on weekends at her Malibu ranch.

"I wish I had gotten Scarecrow and Mrs. King," Linda laments. "We spend a fortune on plane tickets. It takes five hours when I fly there, and it takes four and a half hours when he flies to Los Angeles. We're always arriving tired.

"It's mot the easiest thing in the world. We knew what we were getting into. We were aware it was going to take some extra effort."

Linda had signed to do another series before the marriage, and Altman knew this.

Partners in Crime came about when she bumped into Loni Anderson when she was out shopping in Beverly Hills. They started chatting, and both discovered they shared the same agent, and that each of them was looking for a project.

"We liked each other immediately," says Linda. "And when you're doing a series, you had better like the other person!"

Loni also helps Linda arrange her schedule such that she has as many three-day weekends as possible - so she can travel to Washington.

On regular weekends, Altman flies to Los Angeles.

But Linda insists there is a bright side to all this jet-lag.

"It IS very romantic," she says, "meeting in different cities. When we're together, we shut out everything else, and have quality time.

And then, there's the excitement of two distinctly different worlds.

"I LOVE Washington society," says Linda "The conversation is so much more interesting than what you hear in Hollywood. It's much more balanced, everything from policy in Central America, to the Democratic convention, Presidential nominations, what is going on in Congress.'

And with a sister-in-law working as a lawyer for the Treasury Department, directly responsible to the Secretary, Linda feels she is "in the know".

"The caliber of people in Washington is so high, it's marvelous. They're so damn smart. And they have great stories."

Stories good enough to make a television series?

Linda laughs. Clearly the thought has crossed her mind.

"I would shoot anything in Washington," she says. "I have every good reason to be there.”

For Linda, marriage the second time around is totally different from what it was to her manager, Ron Samuels, the man, some say, who made her a star, negotiating the deals that saw her zoom to the top as Wonder Woman.

Linda and Ron were together every hour of every day. He took an active role in every decision she made.

At first, she says, that was "absolutely wonderful," but in the last months of the relationship it became "suffocating". By the time they split up, Linda was so turned off she went into seclusion.

"It was such a terrible experience," she says. "I swore off men, and swore I'd never marry again."

Today she explains: "Robert gave me a lot of good reasons to change my mind."