MY THRILLING LIFE SARA PARETSKY
In a women writers’ special, Jessica Mann meets a partner in crime and Madeleine Kingsley enjoys crying Woolf
IN BRUSH Back, the celebrated Chicago detective V. I. Warshawski is beaten up, chased through rodent-infested tunnels and pushed over a cliff into a tar pit. At nearly 50, is she getting a bit old for such ordeals, I ask her creator, Sara Paretsky, when we meet for coffee in her London hotel. She and I have a good deal in common: both married to professors (now retired), both crime novelists, both non-practising Jews, though Sara goes to Temple on High Holy Days.
But our memories are very different. I am the product of a happy home and a London day school with 10 per cent Jewish pupils. Sara’s childhood was miserable, her parents unkind and unaffectionate, her father a bully and her mother a frustrated, clever woman who took to drink.
Sara was expected to cook, clean and care for her four brothers. “My mother tried to make it impossible for me to succeed in the outside world,” she says.
In rural Kansas in the early 1960s, Sara and her brothers were the only Jewish children at their school and antisemitism was endemic. In 1965, she went to Kansas University. Then she escaped, going off to do a doctorate at Chicago University.
She has lived there ever since with her physicist husband, brought up her three step-sons and now has one grandchild: “She’s my pet project.”
We talk about why we write crime fiction, and agree that one writes what one enjoys reading. Also, Paretsky says, “I am not interested in novels of ideas. I am not an intellectual reader or writer. I’m driven by stories about people.” Her first novel was published in 1985. Its heroine was V. I. Warshawski, who, although by no means the first female private eye in fiction, rapidly became one of the best known.
She fulfils all the criteria originally listed by Raymond Chandler, who never dreamed that the hero might be a heroine: “Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid…”
V. I is a loner, an altruistic idealist who believes she can make things better. She has an indispensable support network of neighbours and old friends, plus useful press and police contacts. She is athletic (goes for a long run with her dog every morning) and brave, always climbing over or into private, guarded places, confronting enemies, refusing to co-operate with authority and making smart — often dangerously provocative — comments.
She comes out fighting for her clients, for justice, for causes her creator is passionate about. Paretsky has marched and argued against the use of the Patriot Act, the dominance of the religious right, and for women’s rights, embryo research, access to contraception, which, she tells me, “is increasingly under attack in the USA” and abortion— “which is now almost non existent.” She uses fiction to dramatise and humanise her arguments. As the late, great P. D. James said of her: “No other female crime writer has so powerfully and effectively combined a well-crafted detective story with the novel of social realism and protest.”
V. I’s work often takes her back to the places and people of her Chicago not-quite-slum childhood, her father a Polish-American cop, her musical mother a refugee from Mussolini’s Italy.
In Brush Back, she takes an old acquaintance’s case without charge; then she finds herself having to defend the reputation of her cousin Boom Boom Warshawski, still famous as a hockey player years after he died. Her return to the district she grew up in is a reminder of her contemporaries’ dead-end lives, stuck in gang-dominated streets in the shadow of defunct steel mills. This is all described in exact detail, reporter style.
Brush Back is the1 7th novel in the series. Paretsky says there are more to come: “In today’s publishing climate I can’t get a contract for a book that leaves V. I out.” But she has decided that Warshawski is not going to get any older. “She fits in a full day’s work, goes running with the dog, and I think, ‘What a girl.’ She’s my hero. I want her to stay vital and sexually active. I’m going to keep her in nevernever land for ever.”
Warshawski comes out fighting for her clients, for causes her creator espouses