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IN CONVERSATION

Challenging the status quo: Sarah Paretsky.

P.D. James, Spectator,

May 2007

“I thought it was time for a tough, smart, likable female private investigator,” says Paretsky. In a genre where women have traditionally been either vamps or victims — certainly in the early 1980s, when she began her career — she created a character who was neither an angel nor a monster but, rather, a strong woman who could be a whole person — sexual without being evil, moral without being saintly — and an effective problem solver.

“The first thing that V.I. does in the first novel, Indemnity Only, is to claim the night, the dark, and the solitariness that have historically marked women for victimhood,” she points out. “She goes to her office late at night, the electricity goes off and she goes by herself to the basement to fix the fuses and then meets a strange man in the dark. At no point does she question her right to occupy those spaces. It is that, more than the fact that she is a detective, which made her a revolutionary figure.”

The Winter 2007 edition of the scholarly journal, Clues: A Journal of Detection, focused on Paretsky to mark the 25th anniversary of the debut of her popular protagonist this February. But V.I. is obviously on a well-deserved break after her life-threatening adventures in Fire Sale, the last book in the series: she is missing in Paretsky’s newly released 14th novel, Bleeding Kansas, set in the farm country where the writer grew up rather than Chicago, Warshawski’s stomping ground.

Nevertheless, the new book stays true to another important hallmark of Paretsky’s fiction: the story unfolds within a social and political context that illuminates current events and trends. In Bleeding Kansas — “a tale of love and loss, of faith and bigotry, and the uneasy harmonies people establish when they have to live close to one another” — she takes on religion and religious extremism which, according to her, underlie much of contemporary American foreign and social policy. “I was trying to understand for myself the people who live with a fundamentalist mindset,” she says.

Paretsky believes that the crime novel, in which the intersection of law and society are starkly obvious, is the perfect vehicle for laying bare injustices of many kinds, including the social, racial, patriarchal, and economic. Even though detective novels generally support the status quo and are usually not seen as political, she says, “I do believe that crime fiction in particular, maybe more than general fiction, is very political.”

There are, of course, readers who do not share this view. In her essay for The New York Times series, Writers on Writing, she mentions a letter from a furious reader demanding to know why her books were “infested” with political issues when all she wanted was to be entertained. Her response: “When you’re writing about law, justice and society, you are either challenging or supporting the status quo. In Saul Bellow’s Humboldt’s Gift, he’s bristling with anger over street crime and is furious with what he sees as American judicial leniency. No one called this a political novel, but I don’t know how much more political a writer can be.”

She points out that in Europe her books have always been seen as political because they deal with questions of social justice. In fact, British author and critic Joan Smith commented positively on the overt political content of Paretsky’s work in a review of her third novel, Killing Orders, saying it “restores politics to its rightful place in the mainstream private eye novel, and in so doing revitalises the tradition”.

In the U.S., however, Blacklist, written in the aftermath of 9/11, was the only one of her novels seen as political by readers as well as critics — possibly because part of the subtext was a specific law, the Patriot Act, and the greatly enhanced powers it gives the police. The book split American fans down the middle, usually on political grounds. “Reviewers who were furious with me for writing Blacklist praised me for returning to a straight-forward crime novel in the next book,” she says. “However, in my opinion, Fire Sale was even more political than Blacklist because it looked at the enormous power that big box retailers have over the survival of entire communities.”

Paretsky’s non-fiction writing and regular lectures to a variety of audiences across the U.S. deal with contemporary issues even more directly. For example, in a blog titled “Where is the outrage?” posted in early December on The Outfit, a collective of seven Chicago crime writer-bloggers, she criticises the U.S. Supreme Court for upholding a lower court ruling that allows the San Diego welfare department to break into the homes of welfare recipients without a warrant: “I wish I could believe they would break into the home of Dick Cheney’s friends and former co-workers, who have been living on government welfare for seven years, enriching themselves at our expense, but of course that will never happen.”

The essays, some based on public lectures, cover a wide canvas: from her difficult childhood in rural Kansas to her life-changing involvement in the civil rights and women’s movements, from her sociological analysis of American crime fiction to her current preoccupation with political developments in the U.S. since September 2001.

The latter is the focus of the last, particularly poignant chapter of the book, titled “Truth, Lies, and Duct Tape”. Expressing her despair and outrage over the transformation of life in America since 9/11, she describes the various sources of censorship that currently threaten both writers and ordinary citizens: the market, the government and public hysteria.

Writing about the handful of mega conglomerates that have come to dominate book publishing and distribution, and thereby determine who and what is published, she notes that “forces of silence can come more subtly from the market than from the edicts of a totalitarian State.” She also highlights the simultaneous onslaught faced by libraries, which once sustained both writers and readers: “Just as libraries have been heavy losers in contemporary budget wars, they have also been on the front lines of today’s assaults against America’s most cherished liberties.”

She begins the final section of the chapter with the question, “What is the appropriate response of a writer in times like this?” Paretsky obviously believes that her role is to continue writing stories that people will want to read, making it clear that she is not interested in writing or reading propaganda novels — books written only to make a point. At the same time, she says, “I can’t stand idly by while my beloved country reduces its citizens to speaking in whispers out of fear of what their invisible, invasive government will do.”

In her review of Writing in an Age of Silence P.D. James wrote: “This small book is both a testimony and a polemic; it is one woman’s voice among many, but it is a powerful one”. What is more, the issues raised in it have relevance and resonance well beyond the U.S. — certainly in India today.

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