Speaking for Herself--and Others

Last week, I mentioned here how novelist Sara Paretsky’s loss of her Diamond Dagger tie-pin, given to her by the Crime Writers’ Association, had led the jewelry company Cartier to renew its sponsorship of Britain’s most prestigious award for crime fiction.

Now, in this weekend’s London Times, John Freeman offers up an interview with that Chicago-based fictionist, creator of P.I. V.I. Warshawski, and author of the new memoir Writing in an Age of Silence, in which Paretsky details her journey into print as well as her concerns about both crime fiction and fiction publishing, in general. Writes Freeman:

For almost 25 years V.I. (“Vic”) Warshawski has roamed Chicago’s South Side, turning up bodies of dead journalists (Blacklist), friends of the family (Burn Marks) and ex-hockey stars (Deadlock).

But lately, Paretsky has begun to wonder if she hasn’t stumbled upon a mystery that even Warshawski cannot solve: what the American market-place is doing to books. “I was just reading a story in The New York Times,” she says with the flat, sonorant nasal register of a lifelong Mid-westerner, “which showed how, because big-box retailers now dominate music sales, the variety of what’s available has contracted very sharply. I think we are already starting to see that happen with the printed word.

“Publishers used to take a gamble on writers who were just starting out,” she explains, “but now, they really look for the blockbuster or you are out.”

Paretsky is especially piqued by this issue because, to hear her tell it, she almost didn’t find a voice herself. As she describes in a new collection of essays, Writing in an Age of Silence, she grew up in the era of McCarthyism in a small Kansas town where, as a young girl and then a woman, her opinions didn’t count.

Paretsky’s personal journey into print is not only interesting, but it reinforces the conventional wisdom about how rabid readers often end us as writers:

“I read crime fiction to the exclusion of everything else,” Paretsky says. The works of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler inspired her to pack up and move to New York for a botched attempt at the writing life. She ran out of money quickly, and limped back to Chicago, where she drifted for almost a decade.

Paretsky stumbled into academia, into a Ph.D. in history and into a corporate job. She was lucky in friends, romance and healthcare, but “it wasn’t really until I was in my early thirties that I sat down and said, this is the year I write a novel. It was 1984.”

As much as Paretsky loved crime fiction, she remained determined to write something that reflected a woman’s point of view. “When I went back to Marlowe as an adult, what struck me the most was how painfully lonely Philip Marlowe was.”

As a woman, and as a feminist, she thought there had to be another way to tell a story. “So, from the beginning, my detective starts gathering a community around her of friends and mentors--so that it is a different model and fits much more into this kind of more emotionally realistic landscape.”

You can read the entirety of The Times’ talk with Sara Paretsky here.