SOURCE: Brandt, Kate, and Paula Lichtenberg. “On the Case with V. I. and Kinsey.” Hotwire: The Journal of Women's Music and Culture 10, no. 1 (January 1984): 48-50.

[In the following essay, Brandt and Lichtenberg compare the fictional detectives V. I. Warshawski and Kinsey Millhone created by authors Sara Paretsky and Grafton, respectively.]

Chicago private investigator V. I. Warshawski has been kidnapped at gunpoint and beaten up by criminals several times. She was unconscious for six hours after her car crashed (the brake fluid had been drained); her back was burned when acid was thrown at her. Her face has been slashed with a knife; she's been shot at. She's been tied up and thrown into a polluted swamp, chased into icy Lake Michigan, and trapped in a burning building.

Kinsey Millhone, a private eye in Southern California, has been shot twice and abducted at gunpoint; injected with barbiturates; had her nose broken twice. She's been run off the road, totaling her car and ending up with a banged-up leg, whiplash, bruised ribs, and a head injury. Oh, yes, and then there was the time a package bomb exploded, resulting in temporary deafness, a mild concussion, bruises, burns, and shock.

Is this any way to earn a living?

It is, if you ask the numerous fans of these two fictional detectives. Feminist readers have always been attracted to strong, independent, athletic characters in literature, so it's no surprise that V. I. and Kinsey—the creations of award-winning novelists Sara Paretsky and Sue Grafton, respectively—are so popular with women mystery lovers.

But are these two literary shamuses people you would actually want to know?

Even Lotty Herschel, V. I.'s close friend and doctor (and if V. I. doesn't have good medical insurance, she had better be on good terms with a physician!), admonishes her (in Blood Shot), “You seem to be in love with danger and death. You make life very hard for those who love you.”

But that may be one of the things that readers like about V. I. and Kinsey: while we battle daily with the inequities and indignities of being women in a sexist society and a crumbling economy, we can't help but applaud these two feisty detectives for always putting the bad guy in his place. Sara Paretsky, who was in corporate management when she wrote the first three Warshawski books, points out in The Armchair Detective (summer 1991) that a private investigator can thumb her nose at authority—“V. I. was able to do things that I, of course, as a middle manager would be fired for saying or doing.”

In many other ways, however, V. I. and Kinsey are just ordinary working girls like the rest of us. Their jobs keep them so busy that there's little time for housecleaning or cooking—not to mention relationships (both are divorced). They struggle to make ends meet on a modest income. They jog to keep in shape, unwind from the stresses of work, and avoid dieting. They have trouble fitting strictly social dates into their schedules—and usually resist doing so in any event, because they are so focused on work.

They are feminists, having had their independent sensibilities passed along to them in childhood. In Indemnity Only, V. I.'s mother tells her, “Any girl can be pretty—but to take care of yourself you must have brains. And you must have a job, a profession. You must work.” And in D Is for Deadbeat, the aunt who raised Kinsey advises her, “A woman should never, never, never be financially dependent on anyone, especially a man, because the minute you are dependent, you could be abused.”

Although both characters are heterosexual, lesbians in particular can relate to V. I. and Kinsey, since they both find solace and roots in chosen families rather than biological ones. While many lesbians find themselves estranged from (or even disowned by) their birth families because of their homosexuality, V. I. and Kinsey are orphans, without brothers or sisters. V. I.'s mother died of cancer when she was a teenager; her father, a policeman, died from emphysema ten years later. Kinsey lost her parents in an automobile crash when she was five years old, and the aunt who raised her is also now dead.

So V. I. and Kinsey create their own families. For V. I., the older Dr. Lotty serves as mother and comrade, patching up her confidence and her psyche as well as her injuries. She has two protective father figures: her late father's police protégé, Lt. Bobby Mallory, as well as her elderly neighbor Mr. Contreras. The lieutenant takes on the sterner aspects of the job, castigating V. I. for the risks she takes, and her neighbor assumes the nurturing ones—cooking meals and noting what time she comes in at night (and with whom).

For Kinsey, it is her landlord, the eighty-three-year-old crossword puzzle creator Henry Pitts, who acts as parent. Henry worries about Kinsey, gives her advice, and feeds her (he is a former commercial baker), as does local restaurant owner Rosie, who often decides what Kinsey is going to eat, whether she likes it or not (such as a green pepper salad in B Is for Burglar: “I bet you been eating junk, right? … Here's what you gonna get.”)

IF THEY MET, COULD V. I. AND KINSEY BE FRIENDS?

V. I. and Kinsey have so much in common that one could see them being best friends and partners: going out for a morning jog together, solving cases as a team, unwinding with a big meal and a drink at Rosie's (or at the Belmont Diner or the Golden Glow Bar in Chicago). It's a scenario that makes fans of the two detectives swoon—but could it ever happen?

For starters, there's the problem of location. V. I. is Chicago born and bred, a diehard Cubs fan, as gritty as her Midwestern city, while Kinsey works out of Santa Teresa, a Southern California beach town. And although one would never describe Kinsey as “laid-back,” she definitely has the personality of a woman who has never had to dig her car out of knee-high snow drifts.

It's as difficult to imagine Kinsey in Chicago with the Wabash el shaking her office window as it is to visualize the intense and urban V. I. jogging on the beach under palm trees. So where would they live?

And who would rent to them? Both have had their apartments destroyed as a result of their work. After her place was set afire, V. I. moved into a new building, where she met Mr. Contreras, who turned out to be the only neighbor who didn't want to have her evicted after her new apartment was broken into. And Henry, bless his heart, completely redesigned and rebuilt the converted garage in which Kinsey lives after her enemies blew it up; would you move away from a landlord like that?

Even if they found a mutually compatible city, their approaches to their jobs differ. Kinsey, an ex-cop, is accustomed to dropping by the police station for help from her former colleagues. V. I., who was a lawyer before becoming a private eye, has an antagonistic relationship with the local police; this is due in no small part to her surrogate father Bobby, who works there and often expresses his opinion that she should leave her unladylike line of work and do something more feminine (like marry and have children).

Still, the ties between V. I. and Bobby are strong, almost blood ties, and that's another reason why V. I. and Kinsey might be at odds if they tried to work together. V. I. has a strong sense of family. She adored her mother, Gabriella, an Italian opera lover and singer in her native country, and her Polish-American father, police sergeant Tony; she speaks of them often. V. I. also has relatives in the Chicago area, and while she has little in common with them, and they share Bobby's disdain for her work (although it doesn't stop them from involving her in cases to solve their problems), V. I. still recognizes and respects their relationship to her.

Kinsey, on the other hand, is an orphan by temperament as well as by circumstance. Having lost her parents at such a young age, she admits to little connection with them. However, in D Is for Deadbeat she acknowledges having been influenced by the unconventional aunt who raised her: “She'd taught me to shoot when I was eight. She'd refused to teach me to cook, as she felt it was boring and would only make me fat.” And when Kinsey discovers in J Is for Judgment that she in fact has aunts, uncles, and cousins living nearby who want to re-establish contact with her, she is more horrified than excited: “I could see in a flash what a strange pleasure I'd taken in being related to no one. I'd actually managed to feel superior about my isolation.”

For Kinsey, this isolation frequently extends to her relationships with other women. With the exception of Vera Lipton (an insurance adjuster at the company where Kinsey used to be employed) and gruff restaurateur Rosie, Kinsey has no female friends, and even Vera and Rosie can hardly be classified as close confidantes—certainly not call-in-the-middle-of-the night-and-cry buddies.

V. I.'s relationship with Lotty, on the other hand, is more intimate. The two have been friends for twenty years, and V. I. definitely has shown up on Lotty's doorstep at all hours, even if it's usually to have a wound stitched up. Still, they know all aspects of each other's lives and feelings, and when their friendship is jeopardized in Guardian Angel, it is a potential loss that V. I. takes quite seriously.

Faithful readers would have a difficult time envisioning our two tough investigators sitting at the kitchen table together, schmoozing over a cup of coffee. (What, and take time away from a case?) And we certainly couldn't picture them chatting about their boyfriends. When it comes to romantic relationships, the word “commitment” is not in the vocabularies of these women. Whether because of a fear of abandonment caused by their parents’ deaths, an aversion to having their independent lifestyles curtailed, or a lack of eligible men (who aren't threatened by strong women), neither V. I. nor Kinsey has had a sustained relationship throughout their respective series of books.

But both have “fallback” boyfriends—ex-lovers they can call for conversation or companionship or, more likely, contacts. Not surprisingly for these single-minded workaholics, their exes are men with whom they have professional as well as personal relationships. V. I. frequently calls newspaper reporter Murray Ryerson when she needs to know what his sources say about a case in which she is involved. But, as V. I. acknowledges in Burn Marks, “At times we've been friendly enough to be lovers, but both of us covering the same scene and having strong personalities makes it hard to avoid conflict.”

Kinsey has a police contact in Jonah Robb, a Missing Persons lieutenant who was her lover during the “off” phases of his on-again, off-again marriage (until she finally decided in J Is for Judgment that she had troubles enough, and removed herself from “the situation”).

These two women—self-reliant loners with empty refrigerators, perfunctory love lives, and dangerous jobs—have become favorites of readers, especially women readers. Their exploits routinely make it to the best-seller lists. Maybe that's because when those lists are otherwise filled with advice books on how to communicate with men or how to increase our efficiency so that we can “do it all”—not to mention the thrillers where the only female characters are corpses—we prefer to identify with the quick-witted Kinsey Millhone, who admits that her notion of setting an elegant table is to not leave the knife sticking out of the mayonnaise jar (D Is for Deadbeat), or the determined V. I. Warshawski, who breaks into buildings but also leaves the breakfast dishes in the sink with last night's supper plates and those from a few other meals (Killing Orders).

And really, what are a few gunshots between friends?