Literary Spotlight: Sara Paretsky

Author Sara Paretsky created the famous female private eye, V I Warshawski, who was portrayed by Kathleen Turner on the big screen. Her novels are international best sellers. She received the Diamond Dagger Lifetime Achievement award from the British Crime Writers’ Association and the Gold Dagger for best novel for her book Blacklist. Her latest book is Bleeding Kansas.

Q: Some credit you with revolutionizing/modernizing the mystery novel with your introduction of V I Warsahwski. What’s your response?

A: I believe I played a significant role in the way crime fiction depicted women and women's lives. I was not, by any means, the only pioneer: Marcia Muller, Amanda Cross and others came before me, and Sue Grafton and I developed similar characters with similar sensibilities in the same year, followed soon after by many other writers. But my character, with her combination of femininity, feminism and a gritty blue-collar edge has been one of the most important voices in rethinking the roles of women in fiction. I set out to come to terms with my own sense of voicelessness and helplessness, and, through V I, have been able to speak to others who feel similarly voiceless.

Q: What was it like being taped on MSNBC for inclusion in a piece they were creating on America’s Top Sleuths? Who are some of your favorite authors of detective fiction? Why?

A: It was great fun, although at the same time a little confining, because they had a list chosen by viewers, and I couldn't add my own favorites to it. I read eclectically and have a hard time remembering all my favorites--Marjory Allingham, Michael Gilbert, Liza Cody, Nevada Barr and Valerie Wilson Wesley are a sampling of older and newer writers whose work I like. Good writing--an attention to English style and nuance is an essential. A good story, interesting characters--and not a story built around serial killers and graphic rape/dismemberment.

Q: Why did you depart from your detective series to write Bleeding Kansas? What was the motivation? What role did your own life there play in the book?

A: I grew up in eastern Kansas in the valley of two rivers, the Wakarusa and the Kaw. On maps, you’ll see the Kansas River, but we call it the Kaw, as the Indians who first settled there did, and that is the name I use in this book.

I’ve been away from Kansas for forty years now, but it still is in my bones. The landscapes of childhood are so familiar that it is hard to write about them: I see Chicago more clearly than I do the prairies where my brothers and I hiked and worked and played. It took eight years of thinking about the people and places I knew before I could write this novel.

In the 1850s, the ferocious struggle over slavery in Kansas earned the territory the nickname of “Bleeding Kansas.” The wars fought on that soil were among the bloodiest in our nation’s history as pro- and anti-slavery forces battled over whether the territory would join the union as slave or free. John Brown’s name is well known, but at least a thousand anti-slavery emigrants were murdered in cold blood by “border ruffians,” as they were called, who poured into Kansas Territory from the neighboring slave state, Missouri, with the tacit consent of Territorial Governor Shannon, himself a slave owner. In 1859, Kansas came into the union as a free state, but Lawrence suffered a bloody massacre in 1863, in which hundreds were murdered by raiders led by the Missouri slave supporter, William Quantrell, who took advantage of most of the able-bodied men being away fighting for the Union.

I grew up on that history, on knowing I shared a heritage of resistance against injustice.
A century after Kansas came free into the Union, it was painful to acknowledge that Lawrence was a segregated town. In the 1960s and ‘70s, in a reprise of Bleeding Kansas, the town of Lawrence and the University of Kansas became the site of some of the bloodiest campus battles in the nation, over segregation, over women’s rights, the Vietnam War, Indian rights, African-American rights.

This novel is set in the present, against the backdrop of that history. It is set in the farms of the Kaw Valley where I grew up. In 1958, my parents bought a farm house east of town to escape the poisonous segregation of the era, which most affected African-Americans, but, to a lesser degree, Jews as well. The house we lived in had been owned by the Gilmore Family, who at one time farmed 10,000 acres in the Kaw Valley.

Q: You founded Sisters in Crime. How has that advanced the careers of other women writing in this genre? Why are such organizations so vital to new writers?

A: I think they're vital to all writers, whether new or more established. Today's publishing market is ruthless, and for the most part, except for three or four "super-stars," women are being sloughed by publishers faster than men; women are being consigned to small presses, to paperback publication only, ignored by reviewers, and in general, sent to the margins with a vengeance. I hope Sisters will be up to the challenge of confronting this ominous situation.

Carlotta Holton is the author of Salem Pact and Touching The Dead, and is a member of the National Federation of Press Women and an affiliate member of the Horror Writers Association.