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MIAMI —
Thirty years ago, Sara Paretsky published a crime novel
about a character that until then hadn’t really
existed: the tough, wise-cracking female private
investigator. “In Indemnity Only” — an anniversary
edition is due to be published this year — she
introduced the world to V.I. Warshawski, the
Polish-American detective in Chicago with a law degree,
a way with a gun and a taste for a stiff drink and an
attractive man.
“It’s
hard to believe it’s been 30 years,” admits Paretsky,
64, whose latest Warshawski novel is “Breakdown”
(Putnam, $26.95). “The year the first book was
published was the first year Chicago allowed women to
serve as regular police officers. It happened a year
before in New York. … There were riots. Cop wives
picketed and were furious that women would be on patrol
with their husbands. They were worried about affairs, of
course, but mostly worried that women wouldn’t be
strong enough partners. But time has shown women are
very effective in the police force.”
Times
change, and so has Warshawski — but only a little.
She’s 50 in “Breakdown,” but she’s still not
afraid to go toe-to-toe with sleazeballs, bureaucrats or
the rich and powerful (and she still looks great in a
slinky dress). This time out she has to sort out a
dizzying number of investigative threads stemming from a
murder in a cemetery. (“My books are like a suitcase
that someone tried too put too many clothes in, and
there’s a bra strap sticking outside,” Paretsky
muses.) Unwittingly gathered near the victim lurked a
group of tweens obsessed with the popular Carmilla
books, horror novels about shapeshifters; they were
engaged in an initiation ritual. The case grows even
more complex, and Warshawski has to cope with terrified
and secretive young girls; a close friend’s
dangerously shaky mental state; anti-immigration
hysteria; her ex-husband and his high-end law firm; a
wealthy Holocaust survivor with a secret; politicians
with mysterious agendas; and attack-style TV journalism
more concerned with ratings than facts.
“I
worry about that constantly; it’s the heart of the
story to me,” she says of the latter. “That’s the
biggest threat to our democracy: the loss of really
good, reliable, independent journalism.”
If
Paretsky, who lives in Chicago, ever gets tired of
Warshawski, she has a bright future writing the Carmilla
novels. Young adult horror pays pretty well, as
Stephenie (“Twilight”) Meyer can attest. Paretsky
laughs at the idea but hasn’t ruled it out; she’s
already got the pen name, Boadicea Jones.
“My
dream is to be able to afford my own airplane so I can
take my dog to Europe,” she says. “I’d like to go
to France, but I’d be lonely without my husband, and
he won’t go without the dog.”
(EDITORS:
STORY CAN END HERE)
Q: How
did you come to create V.I. Warshawski?
A: I
think I was born with a chip on my shoulder that matured
and sharpened as I got older. I was a huge reader of
crime fiction my whole life starting as a teenager in
Kansas. I got to be a more sophisticated reader, and I
started feeling annoyed that women were defined by their
sexuality in fiction. I wanted a woman who could solve
problems and have a sex life that didn’t make her
wicked. Women solve problems in their lives all the
time. If they do it in fiction they’re mean. I wanted
someone who was like me and my friends and had a job
that didn’t exist for women. V.I. really came out of
that.
Q: How do
you keep a series going for 30 years?
A: You do
it one book at a time! One of the funny things is a
couple of years ago I thought, ‘I should really create
a younger character’ — someone who’s kind of more
hip in the youth culture — and I came up with two
different possible detectives. I wrote short stories
about them; one was an engineer and the other a police
officer, but neither of them grabbed me emotionally in
the way V.I. does. It was a marketing exercise, not a
work of passion. That’s the one thing I’d say is
constant for me with V.I.: The level of passion I do
feel for the character remains strong.
Q: Does
it help you to write the non-series books?
A: It
totally does. It cleans her out of my brain for the
couple of years I’m working on a different book. Then
I can come back thinking about her in a new or fresher
way. It’s a conundrum for me as a writer that
publishing thinks of writers as being brands. It’s
hard to sign a contract for a book that isn’t in the
series. A braver writer than I am, like Britain’s Liza
Cody, says ‘Oh, well, I’ll do it without a contract
and do what I want,’ but I’m not quite that gutsy.
Q.
“Breakdown” deals with a series of politically
charged themes, including immigration. Do you think of
the series as political?
A: I
think the books fluctuate. In some ways they’re always
political; they deal with social justice issues. A
couple really stand out as having been more directly
political, this one and “Blacklist,” which I wrote
after 9/ 11 when I was fretting about the Patriot Act. I
don’t know, someone could be listening to this phone
call now, but I can’t be bothered by it now! By and
large in Europe they’re seen as consistently a
political body of work.
Someone
wrote me once, “Don’t leave your liberal views on my
doorstep like a bucket of stinking fish.” Well, it’s
not like I forced you to read this book! The last time I
dealt with immigrants was in “Blacklist,” where an
Egypt teenager is on the run, and I got a tremendous
amount of hate mail. … One of my great uncles was
deported during the Palmer raids for his leftist views.
He was in Montreal, and he would sneak over the border
for conjugal visits with my aunt. So maybe I have a
romantic view of the whole immigration story.
Q.
Chicago plays a prominent part in your books. Do you
think it’ll always be a source of inspiration?
A: It’s
kind of like South Florida for Carl Hiaasen. You
couldn’t make this stuff up; my political stuff is
tame compared to the real Chicago. Sherlock Holmes said
that there was more crime happening out in the country
than in the city. If he lived in Chicago, he wouldn’t
have said that.
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