“Crime Fiction ... Is Very Political”

After previously interviewing such fascinating players in the crime-fiction field as George Pelecanos, Newton Thornburg, Lee Child, Henning Mankell, and Michael Malone, Tangled Web contributor Bob Cornwell now turns his attention to Sara Paretsky, the author most recently of Fire Sale.

In a profile marked by its thoughtful assessment of this Chicago author’s literary evolution, Paretsky talks about the necessary (and longstanding) political content of her private detective V.I. Warshawski books, “rage” as a plot propeller, how language can “date” fiction, and her next novel, a non-Warshawski yarn titled Bleeding Kansas, which “will utilise diaries from the 1850’s when Kansas was at the centre of one of the bloodiest battles over slavery the [United States] experienced before the Civil War.”

Look for Cornwell’s full Paretsky profile here.