SOURCE: “Women, Mystery, and Sleuthing in the '80s,” in Sojourner: The Women's Forum, Vol. 14, No. 7, March, 1989, pp. 16-7.

[In the following interview, Paretsky discusses her choice to write in the detective genre and her character V. I. Warshawski.]

Sarah Paretsky, author of a series of mystery novels featuring detective V. I. Warshawski, is known for bringing a feminist perspective to the hard-boiled Private Eye genre. V. I., or Vic, as her friends call her, routinely handles street thugs, corporate big shots, and Chicago cops with the same wise-ass bravado. Paretsky, also one of the founding members of the organization Sisters in Crime, was recently in Boston promoting her fifth book, Blood Shot, which takes a fascinating look at environmental issues, big city Democratic-machine politics, and incest. Paretsky's previous novels, all of which bring to life in vivid detail the ethnic neighborhoods of her hometown, Chicago, include: Indemnity Only, Killing Orders, Deadlock, and Bitter Medicine.

[Monica Hileman:] What was it like getting your first V. I. novel published?

[Sarah Paretsky:] I was fortunate enough to find an agent who liked the book and was willing to take it on. It's very hard for any writer to get their first novel published, and I don't think I had it any harder than most. There was some hesitation because they said that hard-boiled stories were passé, and I think it was hard for some New York publishers to imagine that people would want to read a book that took place in Chicago. There was some feeling too about a woman detective working alone. They seemed to think people wouldn't want to read it because she didn't have a male partner. They felt it should be more like Remington Steele.

But there was this editor at Dial Press who had grown up around Chicago and was something of a feminist. She had nostalgia for Chicago and liked the character. Getting published I think, is such a crap shoot.

When you write, do you write with any particular audience in mind?

I try to write for myself. I try to write about serious issues without taking myself too seriously—things like corporate white-collar crime and the impact it has on people's lives. The type of violence that doesn't necessarily arise physically.

Your books deal with physical violence as well. I wondered if you chose mysteries as a way to say something about the physical violence that women face?

I don't think I thought about that. I wanted to write a novel, and I picked mysteries because I always read a lot of mysteries, and I was most familiar with that form.

You're now working on another V. I. novel?

Right, I'm not interested in using some other character. When I think about mysteries, V. I. is the voice that I want to tell them in. I have toyed with the idea of doing a mystery that would be told from Lotty's point of view. [Lotty is V. I.'s closest friend, a feminist doctor who runs a women's health clinic.]

V. I. is a somewhat controversial character. How do women respond to her?

Generally, I get very good responses. I did get this one letter from a woman in Connecticut who was upset at the way V. I. talked back to men and didn't get beat up. V. I. is not perfect and people get pissed at her, and why shouldn't they? I wanted to create someone who was a real person, who wasn't a Miss Marple who always behaves herself. And I wanted to create a female character who could be sexual without being evil. You know in a lot of mysteries, that's how women are presented, either as virgins or whores. In so many mysteries written by men, the sexual women are evil or dangerous.

Did you set out to make V. I. different from the typical hard-boiled detective?

I set out to write a hard-boiled detective, and I did some stereotypical things at the beginning: I made her an orphan, for example. My conception of her was that she was a typical loner, but later I began to see that that's a very uncomfortable way to live. Now that I've thought about it, I see that she gets strength from her connection to other people. In some ways she operates in a network of connections much more than the typical male detective. That network of people was something that grew up around her.

Lately, I've been thinking about how V. I. might change. I don't know whether she might ever have a permanent liaison. I don't know how that would work without it getting saccharine. Sometimes I think maybe she should have a child. It seems very clear to me that V. I. has to change somehow. In a way I think I've explored what I think I can explore with her as she is now.

One thing I like about V. I. is the way she responds to the world in a physical way. Blood Shotstarts out with women playing basketball—I don't come across that much in fiction.

You know, it's not something I've thought about real consciously. I did play baseball: one of the high points of my life was when I was picked to play third base at school. But I grew up in the era when women didn't have many opportunities to take part in sports. One of the things I think is really wonderful for young women growing up today is the participation in sports.

It's important for women to develop confidence in their bodies. I think it's encouraging to have characters like V. I. who are confident and can hold their own physically as well as verbally.

Everybody reads it differently; I just got this book put out by a couple of women called Silk Stalkings. It's sort of an encyclopedia of women in mysteries, and they really trashed V. I. because they think she's too macho. They say “Not the kind of image we need more of.”

Sure, V. I.'s macho. That's part of the fun of reading the books—having a female character who doesn't shrink from whatever comes her way.

One letter that I got that really moved me was from a woman in Japan. My books are translated into Japanese, and the woman who translates them did a story about me and V. I. that ran in one of the Tokyo dailies. She got a lot of letters from women. One of them was from a woman who works for an electronics firm there, and she said that she read V. I. every morning before she went to work because it made her feel confident that she could meet the challenges of the day.

If I met that woman I wouldn't be able to communicate with her, and yet I wrote something that affects her life. You can't ask for more than that.

You've done a lot of interviews—is there a question that you'd like to hear that people never think to ask you?

I just taped an interview with the BBC. A question that they asked which no one had asked before was, did I think mysteries were about fear and the release from fear? I didn't say this at the time, but afterwards I thought about it, and it seemed to me that the idea of creating fear in the reader is really the idea of having somebody helpless, and when that person is invariably a woman or a child, what it's doing is reinforcing the hetero-patriarchy. It's showing you that they can terrify women and children. Well, we know that and we don't need mysteries to tell us.

V. I. does get scared, but it doesn't stop her from acting. The thing about V. I. is she's an adult and she takes responsibility for her actions, and that's what we're not expected to do as women in the culture and in mystery fiction—women get in trouble and are rescued. V. I. gets in trouble and she has to fix it.