Sara Paretsky

Author

• Born: June 8, 1947
• Place of Birth: Ames, Iowa

Biography

Sara Paretsky is credited with creating American fiction's first hard-boiled woman detective. Born in Iowa, she moved with her family to eastern Kansas when she was young. Growing up in the 1950s, Paretsky confronted traditional gender roles in the community and at home. The only girl of five children, she received little encouragement for her writing from her family, even though she published a story in American Girl magazine at age eleven. She reports that as a teenager, she seldom spoke above a whisper because, as she wrote in an article for the New York Times, “so fearful I was of the criticism that dogged almost anything I said or did.” Expected to marry and raise children rather than pursue a career or attend college, Paretsky financed her own education while her parents provided tuition for her four brothers. Her father, a professor and scientist, did not believe that girls were worth educating.

Paretsky enrolled at the University of Kansas and majored in political science. When she was nineteen, she was greatly influenced by a summer spent as a community service worker in Chicago. At the same time, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was organizing supporters in a nearby neighborhood to gain open housing and equal pay for minorities. Deeply concerned by the poverty and oppression she witnessed, Paretsky determined to write about the lives of people whose voices went unheard. She abandoned the romantic tales she had composed since childhood in favor of stories about people on the margins of society. However, she had yet to acquire enough confidence in her own voice to share her writing with others.

After completing her Bachelor’s degree in 1967, Paretsky moved to Chicago and began doctoral studies at the University of Chicago, motivated less by scholarly interest than by a need to prove her intelligence to her family. She continued to write creatively, publishing a short story in 1973 about a woman so trapped in her role as stay-at-home parent that she escapes into madness. Paretsky also read mysteries by the dozens and started to think about creating a woman detective.

In 1976, Paretsky married Courtenay Wright, a physicist. After completing her PhD in 1977, she began working as a marketing manager for an insurance company, Continental National America (CNA). However, she remained determined to write detective fiction and resolved to complete a novel within the next year. To facilitate her efforts, she enrolled in a writing course at Northwestern University, where mystery writer Stuart Kaminsky was teaching. With Kaminsky’s encouragement, she completed Indemnity Only (1982), which is dedicated to him.

Indemnity Only challenged the traditions of the detective fiction genre, and Paretsky’s strong and outspoken protagonist seemed a direct response to her rigid upbringing. V. I. Warshawski, a licensed detective rather than an amateur sleuth, solves crimes, resorts to violence, and even rescues the man in her life. While fiercely independent, she is neither a loner nor an emotional stoic. Because V. I. was such an atypical woman character in detective fiction, finding a publisher for the first novel proved difficult for Paretsky. Finally, after two years and thirteen rejections, the book was accepted by Dial Press.

Paretsky completed her next two novels while continuing to work full-time for CNA, an experience that provided a wealth of background for writing about the white-collar crimes that are the mainstay of her plots. However, her job required her to travel two weeks each month; at the same time, she managed a household that included three stepsons, sang in a choir, and tutored children from a Chicago housing project. As a result, her health suffered. In the mid-1980s, Paretsky accepted an offer from Disney Studios that allowed her to quit working for CNA. Disney purchased character rights to V. I. and, in 1991, released the film V. I. Warshawski, starring Kathleen Turner.

As the Warshawski novels progressed, Paretsky allowed her character to grow older and more complex, while continuing to take on liberal causes and raise political issues. Although she has been criticized for Warshawski’s aggressiveness and outspokenness, Paretsky has refused to soften the character, whose main purpose, she has repeated, is to speak for those who cannot speak for themselves. In addition, she has taken steps to ensure that Warshawski remains in good company by helping establish Sisters in Crime, an organization founded in 1987 to support women mystery writers. By the mid-2020s, the organization included over 4,500 members and sixty regional chapters.

In 1995, Paretsky took a break from detective fiction and began work on the novel Ghost Country, which, upon its publication in 1998, was favorably compared with Chicago writer Nelson Algren’s The Neon Wilderness (1947) and The Man with the Golden Arm (1949). Following four more Warshawski novels, she published a well-received memoir, Writing in an Age of Silence (2007), as well as another stand-alone novel, Bleeding Kansas (2008), before returning to her established series. Throughout several more novels, including Body Work (2010), Critical Mass (2013), and Brush Back (2015), she continued to maintain the complexity and interest of Warshawski's character, often weaving social and political issues into the plots. In her 2017 installment in the series, Fallout, she set the character's newest case in her hometown of Lawrence, Kansas. Following Fallout, Paretsky continued to publish into the twenty-first century, including Shell Game (2018), Dead Land (2020), Overboard (2022), and Pay Dirt (2024). In 2020, she published Love & Other Crimes, a short story collection. 

Not surprisingly, Paretsky has received much favorable attention from feminist literary critics. In addition, her works are widely popular and have been published in almost thirty languages. She has received a number of awards, including two honorary doctorates, the 1993 Marlowe Award from the German Crime Writers’ Association, and the 1996 Mark Twain Award from the Society for the Study of Midwestern Literature. From the United Kingdom’s Crime Writers’ Association, she has won two Silver Dagger awards, for Blood Shot (1988; published as Toxic Shock in the UK) and Tunnel Vision (1994), and the 2004 Gold Dagger for Blacklist (2003), as well as the 2002 Cartier Diamond Dagger for lifetime achievement. In 2011, the Mystery Writers of America presented her with the award for Grand Master as part of its Edgar Allan Poe Awards. In 2019, the organization presented her with the Sue Grafton Memorial Award for Shell Game.

Author Works

Long Fiction:

Indemnity Only, 1982

Deadlock, 1984

Killing Orders, 1985

Bitter Medicine, 1987

Blood Shot, 1988 (pb. in England as Toxic Shock)

Burn Marks, 1990

Guardian Angel, 1992

Tunnel Vision, 1994

Ghost Country, 1998

Hard Time, 1999

Total Recall, 2001

Blacklist, 2003

Fire Sale, 2005

Bleeding Kansas, 2008

Hardball, 2009

Body Work, 2010

Breakdown, 2012

Critical Mass, 2013

Brush Back, 2015

Fallout, 2017

Shell Game, 2018

Dead Land, 2020

Overboard, 2022

Pay Dirt, 2024

Short Fiction:

“This Is for You, Jeannie,” 1973

“At the Old Swimming Hole,” 1986

“Dealer’s Choice,” 1988

“The Case of the Pietro Andromache,” 1988

“Settled Score,” 1991

“Freud at Thirty Paces,” 1993

“The Great Tetsuji,” 1994

“The Man Who Loved Life,” 1995

“A Taste of Life,” 1995

Windy City Blues, 1995

“Publicity Stunts,” 1996

“Murder at the ‘Century of Progress,’” 1999

“Photo Finish,” 2000

"Wildcat," 2017

Love & Other Crimes, 2020

Nonfiction:

Case Studies in Alternative Education, 1975

“Words, Works, and Ways of Knowing: The Breakdown of Moral Philosophy in New England before the Civil War,” 1977 (dissertation, University of Chicago)

“Private Eyes, Public Spheres,” 1988

“Wild Women out of Control,” 1989

“Protocols of the Elders of Feminism,” 1994

“Property Rites: Women, Poverty and Public Policy,” 1996

“Dashiell Hammett and the Maltese Falcon,” 1999

“Writers on Writing,” 2000

Writing in an Age of Silence, 2007

Words, Works, and Ways of Knowing: The Breakdown of Moral Philosophy in New England Before the Civil War, 2016.

Edited Texts:

Beastly Tales, 1989

A Woman’s Eye, 1991

Women on the Case: Twenty-six Original Stories by the Best Women Crime Writers of Our Time, 1996

Sisters on the Case: Celebrating Twenty Years of Sisters in Crime, 2007

Bibliography

Cline, Rob. “Sara Paretsky: Acclaimed Author Releases New V.I. Warshawski Mystery.” Iowa Source, 7 May 2024, www.iowasource.com/2024/05/07/sara-paretsky. Accessed 12 July 2024.

Dallas, Sandra. “"Pay Dirt" by Sara Paretsky, More Mystery Books to Solve this Month.” The Denver Post, 6 May 2024, www.denverpost.com/2024/05/06/sara-paretsky-novel-mysteries-month. Accessed 12 July 2024.

Jones, Manina. “Shot/Reverse Shot: Dis-solving the Feminist Detective Story in Kanew’s Film V. I. Warshawski.” Diversity and Detective Fiction. Ed. Kathleen Gregory Klein. Bowling Green: Bowling Green State U Popular P, 1999, pp. 22–37.

Kinsman, Margaret. “A Band of Sisters.” The Art of Detective Fiction. Ed. Warren Chernaik, Martin Swales, and Robert Vilain. New York: St. Martin’s, 2000, pp. 153–69.

Knight, Stephen. Crime Fiction Since 1800: Detection, Death, Diversity. 2nd ed., New York: Palgrave, 2010.

Lindsay, Elizabeth Blakesley. Great Women Mystery Writers. 2nd ed., Westport: Greenwood, 2007.

Mizejewski, Linda. Hardboiled & High Heeled: The Woman Detective in Popular Culture. New York: Routledge, 2004.

“Novels.” Sara Paretsky, saraparetsky.com/books/novels. Accessed 12 July 2024.

Paretsky, Sara. "Fallout, a Conversation with Sara Paretsky." Interview by Mark Rubinstein. The Huffington Post, 18 Apr. 2017, www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/fallout-a-conversation-with-sara-paretsky‗us‗58f6700ae4b0c892a4fb732a. Accessed 12 July 2024.

Paretsky, Sara. Writing in an Age of Silence. New York: Verso, 2007.

Reddy, Maureen T. Sisters in Crime: Feminism and the Crime Novel. New York: Continuum, 1988.

Scaggs, John. Crime Fiction. New York: Routledge, 2005.

Shuker-Haines, Timothy, and Martha M. Umphrey. “Gender (De)Mystified: Resistance and Recuperation in Hard-Boiled Female Detective Fiction.” The Detective in American Fiction, Film, and Television. Edited by Jerome H. Delamater and Ruth Prigozy. Westport: Greenwood, 1998, pp. 71–82.