By KATHY WOODRELL
One might expect the creator of the revered V.I. Warshawski private investigator series to give a talk on violence or crime, but author Sara Paretsky kept 185 people riveted to their seats as she declared her hopes and fears, discussed the sanctity of words and literature and imparted the process by which she found a voice that was initially denied her. Ms. Paretsky's lecture, "Moving to the Page," was loosely based on an essay written for The New York Times series "Writers on Writing." After her lecture and book signing, Ms. Paretsky held a live online chat in the National Digital Library Learning Center.
![Sara Paretsky](images/woman.jpg)
Sponsored by the Humanities and Social Sciences Division, the April 3 event was the third lecture delivered in memory of Judith Austin. Austin was head of the Main Reading Room at the time of her death in 1997 and former head of the Local History and Genealogy Reading Room. Sara Paretsky was introduced by Austin's daughter, Jennifer Luna, who caught "the mystery bug" from her mother. Chief of the Humanities and Social Sciences Division Stephen James declared Ms. Paretsky's presentation "a fitting tribute to our friend and former colleague."
Sara Paretsky's spirited and articulate lecture ranged from such topics as her literary heroines, such as Jane Eyre, who "battled against the limited odds of female experience," to the absurdity of Nancy Drew's influence on V.I. Warshawski. Ms. Paretsky also declared truths that many do not have the courage to address—about a meanness of spirit that pervades society, about the travesty of denying girls a destiny expected of boys and about the impact of an affluent society that covertly sanctions "crime, homelessness, parents selling their children for a nickel bag and a host of other ills."
In addition to a volume of short stories, Ms. Paretsky has written nine novels featuring Private Investigator V.I. Warshawski as the savvy, tough and determined central character. The first of the series, Double Indemnity, was published in 1982, while Ms. Paretsky was working as a marketing manager for an insurance company in Chicago, where both the author and her working-class heroine reside. Other titles followed steadily until 1994. After a five-year hiatus, during which she wrote Ghost Country, a novel of "the sacred and the dispossessed," the character of Warshawski returned in 1999 in Hard Time.
Sara Paretsky created V.I. Warshawski to respond to the dearth of worthy female characters in mysteries—most of whom had insignificant or unflattering roles. "My own heroine, V.I., is a woman of action," said Ms. Paretsky. But her primary role is to speak. She says those things that I am not strong enough to say for myself. That is why she can grow older—unlike most fictional detectives—because her success depends not so much on what she does, but on her willingness to put into words things that people with power would rather remain unspoken."
Ms. Paretsky's parents funded her four brothers' college tuition, but refused to pay hers because "girls were not worth educating." She financed her own studies, and holds a Ph.D. and an MBA from the University of Chicago. During her lecture, she declared that "the result of such an upbringing was to leave me essentially voiceless. As a teenager and a young woman I barely spoke above a whisper, so fearful was I that my opinions were either wrong, or too trivial for anyone to attend to."
When Ms. Paretsky left her parents' home at the age of 17, it was to do community service work on Chicago's south side. During the same summer, Martin Luther King Jr was organizing near the neighborhoods where she was assigned, and the confluence of events inspired her.
"That summer," she explained, " I felt a sort of desperate need to start writing down the lives of people without voices. Instead of princesses who lived happily ever after, I began writing about ordinary people whose lives, like mine, were filled with the anomie that comes from having no voice, no power." As a result, Ms. Paretsky's powerful words on behalf of the disenfranchised resound from the pages of her novels.
Following the lecture, Ms. Paretsky participated in an online chat. Approximately 40 people from around the country signed on to ask the author questions or to observe the conversation as it happened. Questions ranged from the legitimacy of mysteries as a literary genre to why the author cheers for the Chicago Cubs instead of the White Sox.
One participant asked "Do you have to do much research for your novels? V.I. seems to use computer databases such as Lexis-Nexis lately. Do you mostly do research via the computer or do you use any of those great Chicago libraries?"
Ms. Paretsky responded: "I do a great deal of research for my books. I have a compulsive need to get things right, even though, of course, I make mistakes. For my newest book, to be published this fall, I used the archives at the Imperial War Museum in London for memoirs of Kinder transport children. I went online to learn about Swiss and German insurance companies and their refusal to pay Holocaust claims. I met with English doctors who trained in London in the 1940s and ‘50s to get their firsthand perspective, and I read a number of books, including The Swiss, the Gold and the Dead. You now can guess the theme of the novel. This is typical of my mix of research."
Sara Paretsky's new book, Total Recall, will be released Sept. 10.
Ms. Woodrell is a reference librarian in the Main Reading Room.