“Anger is a very bad place to start” says Sara Paretsky An interview by Bob Cornwell

Sara Paretsky is weary. There is anger too, and that comes later. But first things first. To publicise Fire Sale, the latest novel to feature her hard-wearing but increasingly vulnerable heroine V. I. Warshawski, she has undertaken an exhausting two week schedule for Hodder & Stoughton, her new UK publisher. It has included, amongst many other events, the Bath Literary Festival, London’s Jewish Book Week, and (the one I’d have sacrificed a night or two of good sleep to attend) a session with Reginald Hill at Keswick’s Words by the Water. Nor was last night’s late-finishing “production” meal at a trendy restaurant quite the pleasant diversion that was, no doubt, intended.

It’s another cold wintry day in mid- March and the slight, classically dressed Paretsky and I have finally selected a spot close to the open fire in the lounge of her hotel in London’s Victoria. She’s got a cold, the cold , she points out, “that everyone in England appears to have,” the one I have, up till now, managed to avoid. She’s passed the contagious stage, she assures me, but then adds mischievously, “but you never know.”

The last Warshawski novel, Blacklist (2003), the CWA Gold Dagger winner, written in the aftermath of 9/11, split her American fans down the middle, usually on political grounds, at least judging by her reviews on Amazon and elsewhere. Indeed, one American fan magazine reviewed the book without even mentioning that key elements of its plot were rooted in the HUAC hearings of the 1950’s and its echoes, both political and personal, in the post 9/11 present.

“It’s really funny to me” says Paretsky, “that Blacklist is the only one of my books in the States that was regarded as political, because it dealt specifically with politics... I think Fire Sale is a very political novel.”

Indeed it is. Potent even. But even here, Paretsky is at pains to balance the personal with the political. “Nothing escapes unscathed” runs the Hodder ad campaign supporting the novel. Not least Warshawski herself as she deals on one hand with Conrad, an ex-lover, and a wounded Morrell, this time with an attractive (female) ex-colleague dancing attendance, and on the other hand with her past and her conscience. Not least as regards the role of store-front churches in run-down inner city neighbourhoods; not least about the activities of predatory business corporations conscious only of their balance sheets.

In fact, says Paretsky about the book, “American readers wrote me e-mails saying, thank goodness you got away from politics and returned to just telling a story. OK guys, I thought, whatever pays the rent, I’m happy.”

Viewed from this side of the Atlantic, such reactions seem almost wilfully blind. It was always clear, for instance, from Indemnity Only, the first V.I. Warshawski novel in 1982, as well as from some of her public pronouncements, that Sara Paretsky had a few things on her mind besides entertainment. Back in 1988 in an interview for Contemporary Authors she stated that her most overt agenda was “to try to combat some of the typical sexual stereotypes of women in literature...not just in the mystery.” In 1990 or thereabouts she assured John Williams (for Into the Badlands, his influential book of interviews with key US crime writers) that, “For me telling a story is...more valuable than writing an essay. That’s why I like to write stories, and having them be political is not a very great goal of mine.”

But it was inevitable that sooner or later Paretsky’s feminist beliefs would take Warshawski into more overtly political areas. In Killing Orders (1985), Warshawski came into conflict with the Catholic Church, in Bitter Medicine (1987) with the medical profession. In her CWA Silver Dagger winner Blood Shot (1988, Toxic Shock in the USA), she embraced environmentalism and took on the chemical companies. Burn Marks (1990) involves her directly in local politics and in Guardian Angel (1992) she takes on high finance.

This more overtly political content was perhaps first spotted by British critic (and author) Joan Smith, who said of Killing Orders, when the book came out in the UK, that it “restores politics to its rightful place in the mainstream private eye novel, and in so doing revitalises the tradition.”

It’s a view that Paretsky herself perhaps now endorses. There does seem to be, I mention, a lot of readers, particularly American, though not exclusively, who demand what they call ‘escape reading’ and actively resent crime fiction that deals, however obliquely, with issues. “I do believe that crime fiction in particular,” she says, “maybe more than general fiction, is very political. Even though much crime fiction supports the status quo, and is not seen as political...

Crime writers, I think, have a higher than average fear level. We write out of the things we are afraid of. And we also write about the things that we wish were true. I don’t mean this in a grandiose way. You know V.I. versus the corporations is kind of like Theseus versus the Minotaur. It’s the same story. And the things that go bump in the night are terrifying and we want someone who saves us, so that’s the wish, and that’s what we write....”

Elsewhere Paretsky has spoken about the difficulty of writing Blacklist in the aftermath of 9/11. Was it any easier to write Fire Sale, I ask?

“I start a new book with an idea of the crime, but I can’t really write until I have characters that come to life for me and that I am very engaged with, and can take the story forward. So that’s kind of where I start. At that point the hardest part for me is thinking it. I don’t say that to be funny. I don’t think well. So, in some senses, it i s very seldom that a book is easy for me to write. I do a lot of stopping, starting, discarding, going back. In another way, I have to say that I am operating these days at a level of rage, and at a level of feeling helpless that makes it very hard for me to dial back and think about what is a real story, and what I can say.”

That “level of rage” is once again apparent in Fire Sale. In it Warshawski returns to South Chicago, that area of the city that first fuelled Paretsky’s own political energies back in 1966, and which is Warshawski’s birthplace, and where she lived her early life. “Going back to South Chicago has always felt to me like a return to death.” says Warshawski in Chapter One. “The people that I loved the most, those first fierce attachments of childhood, had all died in this abandoned neighbourhood on the city’s southeast edge... In my nightmares, yellow smoke from the steel mills still clouds my eyes, but the giant smokestacks that towered over my childhood landscapes are now only ghosts themselves.”

It’s the perfect milieu in which to explore the ever-widening social divisions of modern America. The area has “the highest drive-by shooting rate in the city” Paretsky tells me, and, “with the death of the steel mills, we are on our third generation of kids growing up without seeing anyone around them working. There’s 40-50% real unemployment.”

So how did Fire Sale finally come together? “I was kind of interested in going back to the world of private medicine because it now dominates the American healthcare delivery system. It’s just shocking. But I told that story in Bitter Medicine and I didn’t think I could revisit it. And then I happened to see an article in the paper. That’s where I get a lot of my ideas, from just ordinary newspaper stories or from reading the business press.”

The newspaper was the Wall Street Journal, like the UK’s Financial Times, known not necessarily for its progressive opinions but for its scrupulous reporting. The story concerned the business activities of the ‘big-box’ retailer Home Depot, operating from 100,000 sq.ft. warehouses selling everything for the home. In size and philosophy it most closely resembles Seattle-based Costco, now with close to 40 units in the UK. Or think Walmart.

“Costco isn’t as bad [as Home Depot] from the business standpoint”, says Paretsky, her professional background both as a freelance business writer and in management coming to the fore. “They pay a living wage, and they pay benefits which is important because we don’t have your National Health system. In Walmart one of the first things they do is to show new employees how to sign up for welfare, because they know they are not paying them enough. Home Depot and all these corporations are huge backers of the Bush regime, give huge amounts of money to the Republican Party.

“Anyway the article was saying that at least once a week, somewhere in America, a worker or customer is very seriously injured in a Home Depot store, [through] unstable shelving, items falling off and crushing people, and that they had calculated that it was cheaper to pay a settlement than to construct their stores properly. Then at the same time, at the other end of the chain, they are lobbying the government to completely eliminate all occupational safety and health regulations.

So that was kind of where I started. And then I started doing a lot of research on how the big-boxes operate, but then I didn’t have a story. All I had was my anger. And that’s not a good way to write. I think anger is a very bad place to start.”

Paretsky was finally to find the key to her story in the role played in areas like South Chicago by the churches of various denominations. She has a very good friend, a building contractor, who lives and works in South Chicago.“Braver than I am,” she says, "and who does a lot of work for the local churches. It’s about the only stable social institution”. It’s a role fore-grounded by another American crime writer, George Pelecanos, in for example, Shame the Devil (2000).

But Paretsky’s general views on the church and its role are rather different to those of Pelecanos. “Just because I don’t like it, doesn’t mean that it’s not making a difference to some people’s lives,” she says. “The scene in the church where V.I. puts money into the collection, that happened to me. And it was a moment of such embarrassment, to think that I was that oblivious to the acute poverty down there. And I thought I was putting money onto the plate to say thanks for your hospitality, and letting me be here as an observer. Everybody was so warm and friendly towards me, they didn’t expect me to come to Jesus, they were just glad I was there. And I thought, I’m flaunting my money and I’m flaunting my ignorance. So then I started seeing V.I. in that church – and then I had a story.”

Structurally the book follows well-established Paretsky/Warshawski lines – with one exception. Perhaps responding to those critics who sometimes complain that her books are slow to get off the ground, this book has a prologue. Ten lines in and Warshawski already has a shard of metal from a burning Southside factory buried in her shoulder. Paretsky acknowledges the criticism. “Not exactly critics in the press,” she says,“more from readers. The readers are the people who support me, so I try to pay attention to their concerns...”

It seems a good time to raise an aspect of Fire Sale that bothers me. Given for example, its setting, its high-octane prologue and its initial scenes as Warshawski coaches a Southside basketball team composed of teenage girls, refugees from the local gang culture which otherwise might overwhelm them, the lack of ‘street’ obscenity (apart from a dramatic use of the C-word later in the story) is striking. I’m expecting fireworks at this point but Paretsky replies thoughtfully. “I used the C-word, and not happily and willingly, but it seemed to me necessary”, she says. “But when I look at the difference between Chandler and Hammett, I think Hammett’s language feels dated, because it was authentic to the time. He knew street slang and he used it. Chandler is an incredible stylist and he conveys the feeling of the situation without using the language. That’s really a model for me. I felt that in some ways my books are very dated because they are so grounded in contemporary events. So I don’t want to make them even more dated by having language so grounded [in the here and now]. And then trying to keep track of it...”

Reading and re-reading her work over the last couple of months, that “level of rage” Paretsky mentioned is apparent in most, if not all of her recent books. First there was the moving and highly personal Ghost Country (1998), the non-series, non-crime novel she took time out to write between Tunnel Vision (1994) and Hard Time (1999). Ghost Country highlighted, amongst other issues, the plight of the homeless in big American cities. In Hard Time she started to map some of the other consequences of Reaganomics into such areas as the privatisation of prisons and the corporatisation of media, whilst in Total Recall (2001), she explored Warshawski’s own mentor Lotty Herschel’s past as a refugee from Nazi Germany and its repercussions in the present.

Not that Paretsky neglected her lighter side over this period. I treasure her collection of short stories Windy City Blues (1995) which not only contains a rare and fascinating glimpse of Warshawski from a third person perspective (The Pietro Andromache), but also her Dashiell Hammett tribute, The Maltese Cat, which proves that she can write in stripped down mode with the best of them.

Perhaps though, she wonders, that angst reflects Paretsky’s own ageing “ I mean I’m such a sixties kid and I still look back on that time without cynicism”, she says. “We may have been totally wrong, we may have done things that were counter-productive but we really thought we could change things for the better. And now I see that there is less of my life in front of me than is behind me And it’s getting worse not better, and I think that ratchets up my level of [angst]..."

Of course Paretsky’s activism does not end with her novels. She has also been active in the National Abortion Rights Action League, and Amnesty International. To support women in the arts, letters and sciences, she established the Sara and Two C-Dogs Foundation, and has endowed several scholarships at the University of Kansas.

But now, the more than usually poignant ending to Fire Sale suggests that the point is not so much that such endeavours should be successful, but that such endeavours are made at all. Indeed Paretsky has herself mentored “ a young woman, who might be one of those Southside basketball players...” But the relationship fell apart when Paretsky brought in professional help “to get her skills up... She finished high school, and she was first in her class, and she was reading at about an eleven year-old level, because it was that kind of school.”

“She had the brains,” continues Paretsky, “but if she hadn’t had that life experience, she would have been off to Harvard. And she had the personality too. So I was frustrated and thought the whole thing was a crock.”

It took a friend, also African-American, to put the exercise in perspective. “She turned it around, saying she graduated high school against improbable odds, she was the first in her family to complete high school, and that’s an achievement. Who knows if I had played a role in it? So I’m always preaching that sermon to myself.”

Well, at least she can look back at her other personal achievements with some pride, I suggest. Almost single-handedly she established the female private eye as a real and credible figure, and made it possible for writers such as Janet Evanovitch to pursue lucrative careers. I am about to mention a string of other female writers when I am interrupted by a hoot of laughter from Paretsky. “Janet Evanovitch is a multimillionaire,” she says,“I get the glory, but she gets the bucks.”

Her work with Sisters in Crime, the organisation she was instrumental in founding back in 1986, has also been crucial. In 2005 about 45% of crime titles published in the UK were written by women, a not surprising number given the UK tradition. “I think its about the same in the States now,” says Paretsky, “when we started it was about one third women, two thirds men.”

A key tactic in the campaign was to reverse the apparent bias against women crime writers amongst the crime reviewers of the time, predominantly male.” That was the big thing that I think we achieved with Sisters in Crime,” says Paretsky, “something concrete we can point to. When we started, a book by a man was seven times more likely to be reviewed than a book by a woman. What we did, because we need reviewers on our side, we were very careful not to be confrontational, but we did write to all the publications and say, look we are running this monitoring project and you might like to see how your numbers stack up.”

US reviewers at the time tended to be men (a situation duplicated in the UK even now) and men, I suggest, tend to review men. Paretsky agrees: “I mean, it wasn’t something they were doing to be mean...

You know, [Sue] Grafton and I, her first book came out just about the same time as mine, a little later but really, essentially, the same time. And we were always reviewed, and I think it was because we were writing in the hard-boiled form, which does seem more masculine. Other [female] writers were not so fortunate. Later we put out a book of women crime writers, taking it directly to libraries and booksellers. And I think we did really grow readership.”

More recently her regular public lectures in the States (“I get paid for it”) has included a strand which she calls Truth Lies and Duct Tape. TLDT (for short) starts with quotes from John Mortimer and Sylvester Stallone, moves on to the wholesale shedding of writers from conglomerate-owned publishers and the gradual withdrawal of funding from libraries and then grows into a full-blown attack on the post-9/11 activities of the George W. Bush government, exploring what Paretsky calls “the daunting issues of speech and silence”.

The lecture first saw the light of day in 2003 in Toledo, Ohio, shortly before the Bush-led government launched its attack on Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. I suggest that in the run-up to a possible war, that was an incredibly brave stance to take. Did you feel, I ask, that you were very much a lone voice? “I did" she replies. “I knew the little goober wanted to go to war, [but] I did keep hoping some miracle would come along and it wouldn’t happen... The day before [the attack] I was scheduled to speak at the Toledo public library. The day before I flew into Toledo, two days before the bombing, they called me. Sue Grafton had been there a few months before, and they wanted me to talk like Sue did: something funny and something about how I write. They were getting complaints from patrons about my subject matter, and people were turning in their tickets and asking for refunds. So I asked just how many people and they said, we can’t tell you but very many... And I was scared. I’m not very brave, I don’t like confrontation, and then I thought, but this is what the whole point is, so I have to go there and give this talk. And I said, I’m sorry but I have to give this talk.

And I will tell you that I was physically shaking when I got to the podium. But the talk starts by making people laugh, and then they are complicit with me. And I got a standing ovation that night. And some of them came up to me and said, I came here not agreeing with you, but now... And some people said, we thought we were the only people in America that felt the way we did.”

On her return to the States, another lecture is imminent. “The week after I get back I’m going to western Kansas, and it’s one I agreed to give before Hodder here set their publication date. Should I give my Truth Lies talk in the middle of a ‘red’ [Republican] state or one of my easier to swallow talks? And I don’t know what I will do.”

The interview is taking a gloomy turn. I suggest that the US political situation is brightening, that the liberal media is taking steps to puts its house in order and that recent polls show the Bush ratings plunging. “Things are going better in that sense,” agrees Paretsky, “so I do feel less bleak. But I will say that the damage that [Bush] is doing every day will not be reversed in my lifetime. For example, they have taken off all controls on industrial pollution. The state of California, which sort of drives the country, has very stringent pollution controls to counter this, and Congress has just passed a law that saying that no state can force industry to meet stricter standards than the federal government passes... It’ll play out in the courts and it’ll be a real test of the people they are packing the courts with, whether they respect the federalist principle.”

“The damage is in so many arenas...” she continues, “....thirteen states now make it possible to block access to contraception; forty states make it impossible for poor women to get abortions. A librarian in Connecticut was arrested a month ago for offences under the Patriot Act. More people are speaking up, but I’m not optimistic because the economy is a wreck, and yet people continue with this triumphalist, 'we know best' spirit. I mean, I really love America. I’m an American; my grandparents would be dead if America hadn’t been there for them...”

Paretsky’s voice trails away. The interview is continuing its downward path, and I’m not helping. I’m scanning my notes to find a subject that might lighten the tone. Paretsky suggests chocolate (“no wonder the Dark Ages were so-called; they had no chocolate” she muses) then suggests baseball, specifically (and famously) her home team, the Chicago Cubs. But my knowledge of baseball comes only from the occasional brush with the stories of Ring Lardner. I seize on the upcoming cricket season (not in my notes!), and Paretsky brightens considerably. It elicits, for instance, the surprising response that UK crime writer Tim Heald has offered to take her to a match. But, so far, her UK publication dates mean that she is normally not here during the cricket season. Perhaps, I suggest, she could get Hodder & Stoughton to change her schedule. Last year however, visiting friends in Scotland, “huge cricket fans”, she found herself embroiled in “the Ashes” and “without understanding the rules, what an over was, what 150 for 13 meant, I thoroughly got into it.”

It is tempting to spend some time on the Laws of Cricket (48 pages in the 1980 version on my shelves) but time is running out. Continuing my emphasis on the positive, I turn to the CWA Silver Dagger that she won in 1988 for Blood Shot. But Paretsky has beaten me to the punch. At the mention of the Dagger, she leans forward to exhibit the exquisite Diamond Dagger brooch (awarded by the CWA for lifetime achievment in 2004) that she wears on her jacket lapel. “Pinned on me by Monsieur Bamberger of Cartier”, she tells me, proudly, “I always wear it when I’m on tour.”

Did those awards make any real difference to her career, I ask. “I don’t think so,” she replies, “at least in the sense that my sales have held steady for quite a few years now. I would like them to go up but they don’t.”

Did sales dip for Blacklist, I ask, after all the controversy? “No, says Paretsky,“I was sort of surprised by that. Sales held at the same level. The only book that I really took a hit on – and that was not because of the book – was Total Recall. It was published five days before 9/11, so it died.”

That was the fate of many books, movies too in the aftermath of that dreadful event, I suggest. “Sure,” agrees Paretsky, “but that did have a bad effect on my career because Delacorte, who had published me for sixteen years, was shut down abruptly by Bertelsmann, and I had to move publishers [to Putnam], and that really did affect my career... They looked at the sales of the previous book, and saw that they were nowhere... So in a way, I’m kind of having a regroup now, and I’m getting a little old and tired for that...”

It’s a regrouping that, in the UK at least, appears to be going well. Fire Sale has received terrific backing from Hodder & Stoughton, manifesting itself in the publicity tour and a raft of favourable reviews across the British press. “A narrative as gripping as it is emotionally wrenching,” commented Joan Smith in the Sunday Times. “Among her best” said Marcel Berlins in The Times. Val McDermid (in the Independent) had no doubts: “Paretsky proves yet again that she is one of the genre’s most significant practitioners.”

It’s a response that makes it even more incredible that she has never received an award of any kind from the CWA’s US equivalent, the Mystery Writers of America. “Aaron Elkin once told me, when he was chairing the awards committee,” comments Paretsky, “that one of my books was ‘almost good enough to have been short-listed’ and that I should be very proud that they had considered it. And I said, “Thank you. That does make me very proud.” What else can you say?”

Does she ever wonder why, I ask? “Yeah,” she responds, a trifle wearily. “My theory is that when you are doing series work, that you are not looked at in the same way as if you are doing something new. And then I think that, it’s kind of hard to believe, but it’s been a little over twenty years. People look at me and think I’m this established figure... If I live to be eighty, and continue to write, then they’ll think, ‘oh, she’s a granny, we ought to do something for her.’ But I’m in that kind of in-between stage .”

Her next book, like Ghost Country, will be another particularly personal, non-Warshawski, project. Tentatively titled Bleeding Kansas, it is “set in the part of rural Kansas where I grew up” and will capitalise on the research she did for Blacklist in the archives of the Federal Negro Project. According to her website (www.saraparetsky.com) it will utilise diaries from the 1850’s when Kansas was at the centre of of one of the bloodiest battles over slavery the nation experienced before the civil war. “I see it quite clearly in my mind” she says, ‘but I can’t quite get a handle on the story.”

Her publisher is not happy. Ghost Country sold at around half her normal level. “A lot of the big chains wouldn’t carry it. Grisham can write whatever he wants and people will buy it, but I’m not at that sales level”, she says, matter-of-factly.

“But I don’t want to be on my deathbed thinking that I wouldn’t take chances. I don’t do it to be contrary, but if there is something else I want to say, I should say it. You know the trouble is that I want to be proper, rich, successful and I want to have integrity and a conscience and write what is on my mind.”

And does she have plans for V.I. Warshawski? “I’m not quite sure,” she replies. “I think that right now she is at a spa in Tuscany. She really got a beating in Fire Sale.” she adds, laughing. “I’m just going to have to think long and hard about this, and I may change my mind over the course of the next eighteen months or so. Morrell, V.I.’s partner lover, whatever it is that he is, was badly shot in Afghanistan [during Blacklist]. I left it open in Fire Sale. I actually wanted to write a book about Morrell being shot by the U.S. Army, for things that he had observed, and that they didn’t want reported. Putnam, my New York publishers, strongly advised against it, not on the grounds that they thought it was too controversial, though that may have been their agenda that they didn’t talk about. But really on the grounds that events were changing so rapidly, that by the time I’d finished the book it could have been passé... Now, I see that they were wrong, but who knew, and I thought it was sensible advice. But it is sort of staying in the back of my mind, because I had a friend, sadly dead very young of cancer, a forensic pathologist, who was very active in a group called Physicians for Social Responsibility, and worked with victims of torture around the world, and set up training centres for people in Israel, Africa and the Americas, on how to identify victims of torture, and how to work with them. And I still know people in that organisation that will help me if I wanted to do this book...”

It’s a tantalising prospect, and I’d love Paretsky to expand on the idea but it seems that time has finally run out. Paretsky’s publicity people have been circling anxiously now for some time, signalling that her next appointment is looming. One more question perhaps? I have always been intrigued that in Into the Badlands, Paretsky had mentioned to John Williams that Saul Bellow, then a neighbour of hers in the district of Chicago called Hyde Park where she still lives, had never said “Hello”. Bellow died last year, but did she ever elicit that belated greeting? “No,” says Paretsky, firmly. “He did not acknowledge my existence. I was a genre writer, he was a Nobel Prize winner. He used to whine a lot about the fact that waiters in restaurants in Hyde Park didn't recognise him. He’d say, if I was in Paris waiters would know who I am. I don’t think so. He had this fantasy that he was Jean-Paul Sartre.”

Conscious that a few of my questions remain unanswered (my prompt list has been prominent on the table between us) Paretsky suddenly turns from her preparations for a hasty departure, and gives me her mobile telephone number. “Ring me,” she offers considerately, “if there is something you need.” It’s an offer I can’t imagine Saul Bellow could ever have made. Or Jean-Paul Sartre come to that.

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