CHICAGO — Sara Paretsky returned to the scene of the crime. It was early June and traffic in River North on a Saturday morning was slow and quiet. Pet owners, pooches, strollers and the smell of toast. Paretsky was walking her dog along the north branch of the Chicago River. She was also out of poop bags. She asked a stranger for a spare. The woman, tugging back at the reigns of her own dog, warned Paretsky not to come any closer. The woman’s dog punctuated this, straining and choking at its leash.
Paretsky stretched out a cautious arm to accept a fresh bag and the woman hustled away behind her restless Labrador. Then Paretsky turned and could not find the poop that her dog had just left. The poop was there one minute but then gone the next. I couldn’t find it, either. Though I was aware of it. The odor remained. It was a mystery.
“Hmmm,” Paretsky said. “Strange.”
We moved on, covering the waterfront.
Paretsky knows the waterfront.
In “Deadlock,” her second novel, a member of the Chicago Blackhawks is murdered on a local shipping dock, a crime that leads to much uglier, far-reaching offenses, and eventually the mansions of the North Shore. “Overboard,” her new novel, about yet another conspiracy just beneath the veil of everyday Chicago, is her 21st mystery featuring her beloved private detective V.I. Warshawski. Paretsky began publishing V.I.’s adventures 40 years ago, helping to spark a revolution in crime writing that transformed the genre. They also serve, by now, as a kind of ongoing mirror history of Illinois. Read them all and you would have a fairly decent understanding of the social upheavals and political machinations of the past four decades in Chicago. Or just GPS the locations in a V.I. Warshawski novel and tour the city. I doubt there is a block of greater Chicagoland V.I. hasn’t investigated. As I cracked “Overboard” last spring I had that moment no doubt many Chicagoans have had since 1982: You read a little Paretsky and think, Oh, I know where that is. In this case, the story opens on lakefront rocks off Sheridan Road, where Rogers Park meets Evanston. But eventually turns to the Chicago River. Specifically, just off Chicago Avenue and Larrabee, where we stood.
“Kind of soulless, right?” Paretsky asked, looking at condos and office buildings. “I had no idea there was this much money here. But it also seems so disconnected. It’s odd.”
She turned to me.
“Why would anyone want to be the mayor of this place?”
During the pandemic lockdown, her dog broke a foot and since Paretsky wasn’t allowed to linger at the vet visits, she would wander by the river and think about her next mystery. She led me down to a walkway along the river, past apartment buildings and a gym, past the corroding medieval guts that once raised and lowered the bridge on Chicago Avenue. “There’s an underwater feel to this and it kind of makes my skin crawl being here.” Across the river, a casino may be built soon, and there’s the printing plant of the Chicago Tribune. Money, media, power — you see what she sees, a potential for corruption, drawing together local and national controversy, filtered through V.I. and a South Side working-class sense of a world being stacked against average Chicagoans.
Not that it comes together smoothly.
Paretsky has a hard time writing. Her friends mention this. She mentions this. She never feels like a real writer. She watches TED Talks by writers who describe a process, she hears in workshops that books need five acts — she has no idea what these people mean. “I’m doing it wrong, I assume.” It’s strange to hear after two dozen books, millions of readers and a legacy of activism that expanded the profession in which she works. OK, her plots could be tighter. Publishers Weekly noted, in an otherwise positive review, “Overboard” strained credulity. Paretsky thought, “You’re telling me!” She didn’t like the ending, “which did strain credulity, but then, in 2022, I feel the world strains credulity.”
We stood at the riverside.
She traced the path of a crime here — there’s always more than one in a Paretsky mystery. This new mystery has shady nursing homes, the mob, antisemitism and hungry developers. You can picture the physical cover even if you don’t read it. You can see it waiting for you on a rack in an airport shop. You can even imagine the letters she will eventually receive, as always, because she incorporated a sizable dose of her politics.
Like any consistent genre writer with a long history, Paretsky is taken for granted.
“When she and a few writers like her arrived at the same time, it marked a departure we didn’t notice right away,” said Dominick Abel, her longtime agent. “But it was the start of strong females in an area once dominated by hard-boiled men. She changed things.”
Paretsky turned 75 earlier this summer. That may come as a shock if you remember her arrival as a brave, energetic voice that brushed cobwebs out of the antiquated image of nosy British dowager sleuths, poisoned husbands and tea. Paretsky is at that age where authors are evaluated, and some retire, or merely phone it in. Outwardly at least, she doesn’t seem interested in this stuff. The posterity stuff. She doesn’t plan to stop, and the Edgar Allan Poe Award from the Mystery Writers of America on her living room mantle — along with her formal designation by the group as a “Grand Master,” a title she shares with Agatha Christie, Stephen King, James M. Cain and John le Carré — remind you her legacy is secure. There will be no victory lap. Just a new V.I. book every two years, from here to eternity.
But Paretsky herself has changed.
She said she couldn’t connect to being old. It did not feel real. But she admits, once a lot of ideas sparked and “now it’s not the same. (Herman) Melville wrote a letter to (Nathaniel) Hawthorne about needing to be in the green grass growing place where stories came from. My level of anxiety these days about the world, it doesn’t allow me to relax into that green grass anymore. No, it’s not the same.”
When I visited her at home in Hyde Park, at the same house she has lived in since 1973, she pointed to where water had leaked through a part of the roof last winter, which she hadn’t noticed until Marzena Madej, her housekeeper of 12 years, noticed. Nothing gets done to the house now unless it’s a crisis, she said. Without Madej around, she would be like Miss Havisham, the reclusive wealthy spinster of “Great Expectations,” “and just let the place collapse around me.”
It’s a beautiful old home. “Victorian maybe? I should know more about it,” she said. Despite containing a lifetime of possessions and walls of family photos, it also feels palpably empty. She’s sad and tired these days, she said. She has “limited stamina” — though she rarely seemed it as we spoke. She spoke for hours, walked faster than I could, seemed eager to talk. Still, a decade ago a speeder on Lake Shore Drive slammed into her car from behind, and she didn’t walk normally for two years; her back never felt the same again. She had been a loud opponent of the Obama Presidential Center in Jackson Park, near her home; she lost that fight. Most importantly, four years ago, her husband, Courtenay Wright — a renowned particle physicist who came to the University of Chicago decades earlier at the urging of Enrico Fermi — died; they had been together nearly 50 years and married more than 40. Soon after was the pandemic, and Paretsky was home alone for the first time in decades, in a large, quiet house.
She chokes up talking about her husband.
He had been her best reader and one of the few people she trusted to read early drafts. But it was an “uneven marriage,” she said. He took an enthusiastic interest in her career and “I was like ‘Oh, that’s nice, darling. Now go smash some more atoms.’ Beyond a vague level, I didn’t understand his work that much.” It was a home filled with Wright’s sons from an earlier marriage, a lot of electric guitars, TVs blaring and Wright working patiently despite the chaos, solving his math problems. Paretsky mourns all of that.
“I think Sara is missing her husband every day,” said Marcia Festen, a friend of Paretsky’s who sits on the board of the author’s philanthropic foundation, the Sara & Two C-Dogs Foundation, which gives money to women in arts and sciences and supports reproductive freedom. “I think it’s been a struggle. When he died she said to me that you think you might be relieved that they are out of pain, but no, you miss them in unexpected ways.”
Couple that with her politics, the abortion rights activism, the political moment — it’s a dark time. I emailed her the day Roe v. Wade was overturned, and she responded that all of her energy needed to go into that fight right now, so she would get back to me. Not that her writing doesn’t overlap with her politics. V.I. has wrestled with national security, segregation, gentrification, health care, outsider art, Nazi plunder, #MeToo, immigration, community action, the misuse of park land and Chicago police’s Homan Square station.
Paretsky gets a lot of angry mail, all the time — “MAGA mail,” she calls it. Mostly from people who don’t want politics in their mysteries. But as Paretsky once wrote in The New York Times: “Mysteries, like cops, are right up against the place where people’s basest and basic needs intersect with law and justice. They are by definition political.” Her husband provided support when criticism flooded in. He was 24 years her senior. They met at a “dope and dancing party” in Hyde Park. Paretsky was studying history there (and would eventually get her doctorate). She found a new confidence from their relationship.
Her childhood had been rough.
She came from Lawrence, Kansas, where she had grown up in a farmhouse. She likened the household to “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” in its suffocating unhappiness. Her parents met in graduate school. Her father became a cell biologist but her mother, because of nepotism laws, quit school to be a homemaker. “It was hard for them to navigate life,” she said. “I had four brothers and became the main caretaker of the youngest. It was a time of patriarchy. They didn’t care about my education. They had anger and emotional fragility.” Paretsky’s mother told her she was an ugly baby, and so did not have a baby photo taken until she was 1. Paretsky grew up as a shy, timid child, one who read mystery but hated Nancy Drew — her life was too tidy and easy.
Spurred by her family’s politics — her father’s parents had met while walking a union picket line in New York City — she left Kansas to volunteer in Gage Park for Martin Luther King Jr., who came to Chicago in 1966 to stand against segregation, unequal pay and discriminatory housing practices. She also stayed and got married and began a comfortable career with CNA Insurance in the Loop, selling computers to businesses.
Not until the mid-1970s did she even begin thinking about writing, after she had an idea for a new kind of detective novel — essentially, a female private investigator who solved cases without the help or permission of a man. She was reading Raymond Chandler and a century of hard-boiled detective stories, cataloging the ways women were usually portrayed. “Virgins, victims, vamps or villains,” she explains. One of the closest examples of what she had in mind were the novels of Lillian O’Donnell, whose 1970s mysteries told the adventures of Norah Mulcahaney, a New York City homicide detective.
Paretsky wasn’t picturing a mere second-wave feminist response to Agatha Christie, but rather a female detective “who didn’t take (expletive) from anyone, a character who was closer to me and my friends in Chicago, who were the first generation of women to be in our professions in large numbers.” She took a class with the Chicago mystery writer Stuart M. Kaminsky, who urged her to adopt that authorial truism — write what you know. In her case, it was the white-collar business world. That is why, when Paretsky published her first novels in the early 1980s, their crimes tended to involve insurance scams — it’s what she knew. And from the start, critics were kind: “Not since crime fiction master Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett has a mystery writer integrated character and environment so seamlessly,” Chicago magazine wrote about her debut, “Indemnity Only.” She didn’t expect to stay with V.I. Warshawski but her agent asked for two more.
Then more, and more.
A following developed — one that eventually included Bill Clinton, a big fan. Paretsky said those V.I. initials just came to her. “I’m Jewish but my family came from Germany, Lithuania, Poland, Netherlands, England. I gave V.I. a Polish father (a cop), but an Italian mother because I wanted her to have warmth in her life.” She also gave her an office in the Loop, a UC education (on scholarship) and a blue-collar South Chicago childhood.
Her timing was perfect, said Ann Christophersen, co-founder of Women & Children First bookstore in Andersonville, which opened three years before Paretsky debuted. “It felt new, terrifically different at a moment when women were filling the roles they hadn’t yet. Here was a female detective with real urgency, and not afraid to get down in the mud.”
Paretsky also captured that thin line in Chicago separating authority figures, public service and illicit acts. Her city was losing its industrial heart. In “Blood Shot,” V.I. drives through neglected South Side neighborhoods and reflects on a time before poverty, “when eighteen thousand men poured from those tidy little houses every day into South Works, Wisconsin Steel ... when each piece of trim was painted fresh every second spring and new Buicks or Oldsmobiles were an autumn commonplace.”
Her books landed alongside a handful of other young female crime debuts with similar ideas, including Sue Grafton and Marcia Muller — and were soon joined by more.
“The market skewed slightly to women and had been steady,” said Dominick Abel, “but for women, that meant the cozy mystery — quiet, character-driven, Agatha Christie, Miss Marple, Jessica Fletcher’s ‘Murder, She Wrote’ books. Characters who had never had the (expletive) beaten out of them. Sara and the new female writers were tough broads.”
This gig as a writer of bruising female detective tales was still so uncertain Paretsky didn’t leave the insurance business and write full-time until she had published three V.I. novels. Aside from a non-V.I. novel here and there, and a rousing 2007 memoir, it’s been all V.I. ever since. For decades, you might say that the worst thing that happened to the trajectory of the V.I. series was the 1991 film adaptation “V.I. Warshawski,” starring Kathleen Turner and produced by Jeffrey Lurie, now the owner of the Philadelphia Eagles. It was a critical and financial disaster. Disney still owns the screen rights to the character, Paretsky said; since acquiring Fox, there’s been talk of an FX show. But to this day, when NFL season starts, Paretsky roots for whatever team plays the Eagles.
We stepped outside to walk her golden retriever, who is 10, gentle and named Chiara. Like V.I., Paretsky is a doting dog owner. But that may be the only thing she has in common with her character. She apologized often for not being a “thrilling” crime writer: “Patricia Cornwell could take you up in her helicopter! Not me!” She opted to make me a cappuccino. For fun, she likes to eat peanut butter with her dog. Standing on her porch, she said she didn’t know almost anyone on her street, despite living there for 50 years. And she lamented not visiting friends enough. “But I’m not a good schmoozer. There’s a group of young writers in Chicago in their 40s who I like and they have a wonderful friendship, but I have never known how to connect that way. It’s my failing.”
Chicago mystery writer Lori Rader-Day — whom Paretsky mentions whenever she’s asked about great new female crime writers — said they met at a meeting of the Midwest chapter of Mystery Writers of America. “Sara introduced herself by saying her publisher wanted pictures of her mingling, so could she get a picture of us mingling?”
Paretsky knows the urge to read an author’s life into their characters but says she’s not as bold, not nearly as smart at gathering information as her famous detective, and sort of naive — an easy mark. The closest she’s come to death, she added, was the time she peeled an anti-abortion bumper sticker off a car in Hyde Park and the owner saw her.
After her accident on Lake Shore Drive, she got into a tussle with a publisher for taking too much time to finish books. “They claimed I was ‘an unreliable author,’” she said. So she left for William Morrow, welcomed in by an editor named Dan Mallory — you know him better as the pseudonymous A.J. Finn, author of the bestseller “The Woman in the Window” and subject of a 2019 New Yorker story documenting the many ways he lied about his background. Now she has a new new editor, Emily Krump, who, asked if she expected Paretsky to retire, said: “Mystery writing is not a field where 75 is that old.”
But it is an age where Paretsky can watch the results of her pioneering work.
Among her faithful is Tracy Clark of South Shore, who writes a popular series of Chicago detective novels about former cop Cassandra Raines (Clark also works as an associate editor for Tribune Media Services). “I’ve been a super fan of Sara for years,” Clark said. “You didn’t know what Sam Spade did in his free time but V.I., she had a life, dogs, friends. I am from the South Side but for me, location was secondary. How Sara got female lives on the page, how she swung for the fences not just for herself but other female crime writers — she mattered.” Clark is a member of Sisters in Crime, which Paretsky created in 1986 to nurture the growing community of female crime writers.
Decades later, it has 4,000-plus members nationally (with a local chapter of about 150), and the mystery genre itself has edged closer to parity, skewing female among readers. Rader-Day, who served as its national president from 2019 to 2020, said their mission today is closer to “promoting equality in the mystery community” across gender and race. Membership now includes everyone from the famous to the not-yet-published.
Paretsky isn’t as involved as she once was. She’s more focused on reproductive rights advocacy, and, just beyond her front yard, fighting the development of a new Tiger Woods-approved golf course for Jackson Park. She doesn’t sound hopeful about either.
After returning from the dog walk, we walked through her home, up steep stairs that led to her writing room on the top floor, past African art collected by her husband, and framed works by local artists like Riva Lehrer and Nicole Hollander, the window overlooking a koi pond in her pretty backyard. At the top, she settled into a chair beneath the attic roof.
“I mean, what is a driving range?”
She sighed.
“I am so fed up with this city and the potholes and the schools and all the crap. That golf course. The fix is in, right? Someone is making money, this is Chicago. I mean, does Tiger Woods care about Chicago? And the park advisory council just wants to kiss ass.”
For the first time, she sounds like V.I.
“But I love my house, my garden, my dog. I think of moving — maybe back to Kansas — every day, but never seriously. I feel immovable.” Besides, here, in this room, there’s about 20% of the next V.I. novel already finished. She doesn’t tour like she used to, though sales are up. She’s fine. V.I. is a source of comfort. Augie Aleksy, the owner of the Forest Park mystery bookstore Centuries & Sleuths, said he likes how Paretsky has aged V.I. in her novels; she’s not Charlie Brown, trapped in the same body for decades.
“But I think I’m going to keep her around 50 now. Because my 50s were my best decade. I felt the most creative, I had the most physical energy. I’m keeping her there.”
Her parents died soon after she reached 50, though lived long enough to watch her success. Her father was happy to see his name on books. But her mother, she suspects, grew jealous. She had been a grand storyteller, the best storyteller in the family, Paretsky says. And so just before her mother died, Paretsky wrote an obituary for her to read, playfully filled with lies. Some were fanciful (she advised de Gaulle on how to fight Hitler). Some were paths she wished she had taken. The local newspaper ran it anyway.
Her mom had a gift for fiction, but it took a daughter to realize it.
