Female Private Eye Packs a Punch, Widens Genre

I don’t have such grand ideals as a detective. Not only do I not think I can save the world, I suspect most people are past redemption. I’m just the garbage collector, cleaning up little trash piles here and there.

--V. I. Warshawski in

“Bitter Medicine” by Sara Paretsky

For the better part of the 20th Century the professional private investigator in American fiction was in the male domain. The writers were men and their tough, case-hardened protagonists were, too. Sure, an amateur, like Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple or Nancy Drew, solved the occasional mystery. But it was the lone-wolf, macho detective--Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe or Dashiell Hammett’s Sam Spade--who earned the hard-boiled detective label by protecting society from the mean streets and by seeking justice with a capital J.

Enter Sara Paretsky and her fictional offspring, V. I. (Victoria Iphigenia) Warshawski. Warshawski is a career private eye who favors silk jackets over trenchcoats and jogging over smoking cigarettes. No stranger to danger, this Chicago sleuth with feminist sensibilities, a seedy downtown office and a bulldog tenacity to see her cases to the end has taken on organized crime, exposed corruption in the Catholic Church and uncovered nefarious doings in the world of big business.

“Detectives come in two varieties--hard-boiled and soft-boiled,” says Ray Browne, a scholar of the mystery genre at Ohio’s Bowling Green State University. “Author Sara Paretsky’s (V. I. Warshawski) is very, very hard-boiled. And Paretsky is looked upon as one of the leading new hard-boiled detective writers.”

Paretsky, an elegant woman of 41 with a silver blond frizz of hair framing her face, might blush to hear such praise. Warshawski would not. “V. I. is much, much better than me. She’s much braver and more fit and more straightforward,” Paretsky said recently in the turn-of-the-century Chicago home she shares with her physicist husband, Courtney Wright, and a golden retriever named Cardhu.

Unlike V. I. Warshawski, Paretsky is married (“I have the best marriage in Chicago”), soft-spoken and shy. Nor has Paretsky, as has her heroine, ever broken a hood’s jaw with one swift blow, been beaten up by the Mob and thrown in a swampy pond for dead or strapped a Smith & Wesson under her linen jacket and fearlessly used it when necessary.

But, like her protagonist, Paretsky tirelessly cheers on the Chicago Cubs, reads the Wall Street Journal daily, takes pleasure in a glass of good Scotch and champions women’s causes.

“When I think of V. I., I don’t think of how our lives agree or don’t agree in every particular. When I tell her stories, I like to think they reflect the changes that have taken place in many women’s lives over the last 20 years.”

Paretsky was a middle manager at an insurance conglomerate when she took a writing course with respected mystery writer Stuart Kaminsky. With his encouragement, she wrote her first novel, “Indemnity Only,” in 1979. Her fifth and latest novel, “Blood Shot,” was published by Delacorte Press late last year.

An avid reader of mysteries and detective novels (“I used to read anywhere from two to three a day”), it had “never before occurred to me that anything I wrote could be publishable,” Paretsky said. “I wrote for my own internal satisfaction. If I broke up with someone, I’d write a short story in which he was a real crumb and that was my purge from a bad affair.”

At 31, she made a New Year’s vow to write a mystery. “You go through something around the age of 30. You realize there’s not endless time stretching in front of you, that you no longer have the physical wherewithal to be a gymnast or a ballerina. But you can always write. I figured I had better buckle down and do this or it never was going to happen.”

Adhering to the dictum “write what you know,” Paretsky hung the plot of “Indemnity Only” around the insurance industry. More important, she introduced the hard-boiled female detective.

“I was struck when I read (Raymond) Chandler by the fact that every villain in his books was a sexual woman. I began to see this as a persisting pattern in the mystery. Women who were sexually active were prima facie villains. It still goes on. I just read a book that opened: ‘The trouble began in bed.’ Now you know immediately that the woman in bed with the detective is setting up all the evil machinations.”

V. I. Warshawski defies this trend. She grew out of Paretsky’s desire to create “a credible woman character” who combined toughness with feminist ideals and a keen sense of compassion and justice. In Paretsky’s mysteries, the dame isn’t causing the trouble, she’s solving it. (And you’d better not call her a dame.)

Because Paretsky was “scared and still lacking confidence” when writing her first novel, she followed most of the conventions of the hard-boiled detective genre. “I made V. I. an orphan (hard-boiled detectives aren’t supposed to have parents) and included (the requisite) amount of violence.” Still, the fast-paced, first-person novel went through countless rejections before succeeding in 1981 at Dial Press.

There were a lot of things going against it. Publishers presumed that the mystery addicts who accounted for the bulk of their book sales were primarily men. The thinking was they would never accept the idea of an independent woman working alone. There was also a strong bias against the Chicago setting. The sphere of the hard-boiled detective was viewed as Los Angeles or New York.

But since V. I. hit the fictional streets in 1982, “we’ve seen a slew of strong, believable women characters in crime. And we’re also seeing men writers--Michael Z. Lewin and Peter Dickinson come immediately to mind--who are creating some of these believable women characters,” Paretsky said. And, while it’s difficult to ascertain, she guesses more women are now attracted to the genre.

At the same time, Paretsky detects a troubling trend. “We’re seeing a marked increase . . . in the level of violence against women (in today’s crime fiction) and in the public acceptance of these books. The murder mystery has always had a sort of pornographic form to it, but in the past that was never in the mainstream. Today writers are writing books with very graphic violence against women and getting reviewed in the most prominent national publications,” she said.

Paretsky has organized other women mystery writers, publishers, booksellers, and reviewers in an alliance called Sisters in Crime. Its aim: to promote women’s mystery books, reverse the trend of violence against women in the genre, and ensure that women mystery writers get their due when it comes to awards and reviews.