Taught by her older brother, Paretsky cannot remember a time when she couldn’t read, and since early childhood she was writing short stories, occasional mysteries and much fantasy. It was after that life-changing summer in Chicago that she began experimenting with more naturalistic stories, but it wasn’t until she was in her early thirties, working in New York for an insurance company, that she sat down to write her first detective story. She is interesting on the influences of the hard-boiled private eyes of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, whose lone campaigns against the corruption of the powerful elevated them to the status of public heroes, part of the national mythology. When she created her private eye, it was in conscious emulation of this myth, but her Polish-American heroine, V. I. Warshawski, has a humility, a humanity and a need for human relationships which they lack. Her territory is Chicago, not the Chicago of the dramatic city centre or the prosperous suburbs, but the city’s southeast side, the neighbourhood of the poor who live in shanties on the contaminated marshland known as Dead Stick Pond. Paretsky creates a powerful vision of the Chicago where V. I. Warshawski grew up and where she operates as a courageous, sexually liberated female investigator. Through her heroine and in her private life of speaking and journalism, Paretsky conducts her campaign against injustice and, in particular, the right of women to control their lives and their sexuality.
No other modern crime writer has so powerfully and effectively combined a well-crafted detective story with the novel of social realism and protest. The details she gives of life in America today are frightening — the loss of long-established liberties, the small acts of personal injustice and repression. They convey a warning to a wider world which some may feel is already too late. This small book is both a testimony and a polemic; it is one woman’s voice among many, but it is a powerful one.
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