When you speak—and when you are heard—you are committing a political act
July 14, 2015 2:43 AM   Subscribe

It’s true that my detective is physical—she is sometimes criticized for being too physical, for courting danger and taking her lumps. Her main function, though, is to speak, to say those things that people in power want to keep unsaid, unheard. Her job is to advocate for those on the margins. It is her speech that unleashes a physical reaction against her: she does not provoke the powerful by punching their noses, but by speaking when they want her to be quiet.
The Detective as Speech: Sara Paretsky talks about the origins of V. I. Warshawski in the context of Second Wave Feminism's high point and why it's important to have female heroes who didn't become detectives out of unresolved trauma.
posted by MartinWisse (16 comments total) 31 users marked this as a favorite
 
I love the VI novels fiercely and this reminded me why. Lottie and VI's friendship is so good. The last book didn't quite work for me, but I'll keep buying and reading anything she writes because she has women I recognise in her pages.
posted by dorothyisunderwood at 3:15 AM on July 14, 2015 [2 favorites]


Thank you for this! When people tell me that they don't read mysteries because the writing isn't as good as literary fiction, I tell them to read Sara Paretsky.
posted by hydropsyche at 4:05 AM on July 14, 2015 [2 favorites]


Terrific essay! Any recommendations on where to begin with this author?
posted by bird internet at 4:26 AM on July 14, 2015 [5 favorites]


A slight derail from the speech/agency topic, but: I was going to post as a question but here are some c. 2014 numbers on male-female representation in the field, along with some tiny but clear pie charts on where & how often they're getting reviewed. Short version is that the review situation is still not great (though a lot better than when 'Sisters' was started), even though somewhat more than half of mystery/crime writers are female.
posted by lodurr at 6:17 AM on July 14, 2015 [3 favorites]


When people tell me that they don't read mysteries because the writing isn't as good as literary fiction, I tell them to read Sara Paretsky.

I don't know Paretsky, but I usually tell them to read Laurie King.
posted by lodurr at 6:25 AM on July 14, 2015


It's been a long time since I read Paretsky, but I think a good place to start would be Blood Shot.
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 6:31 AM on July 14, 2015


Terrific essay! Any recommendations on where to begin with this author?

As with any series, start with the first published novel: it was obviously good enough to publish sequels to and you start with the same knowledge as the original readers.
posted by MartinWisse at 6:40 AM on July 14, 2015 [3 favorites]


I would start with the first and move onward, as the books are in chronological order. If you really just want to dip in, I'd go with Hard Ball or Guardian Angel.

I love Warshawski because she is often unlovable, but has all of these terrific friendships, and realistic relationships with exes and their friends. She's also aging realistically, along with me, and that's prime!

Laurie R. King is probably a strong writer, but her particular Holmes pastiche gives me the heebie-jeebies. (Not to derail.)

Paretsky has taken a lot of lumps for her work, and her voice, but I find the world a much better place for her presence in it.
posted by allthinky at 6:54 AM on July 14, 2015


It’s true that my detective is physical

The entire genre is obsessively interested in the physical body of the detective. This often takes the form of an obsession with its aging, decline or decay. You get also odd manifestations, like the culinary litanies of Robert Parker. Honestly I was relieved I didn't have to read descriptions of Spenser's bowel movements.
posted by thelonius at 7:34 AM on July 14, 2015 [5 favorites]


I really enjoyed this. It's always good to listen to the people who saw our modern tropes being born, and can help us shake off the feeling that they're natural.

Chandler's women often read as paradoxically progressive to me, reading in 2015. They're not afraid to act on their plans and desires, and they aren't raped as a punishment or easy motivation. The fact that they're consistently punished or rewarded for their sexual choices is more visible to Paretsky than it is to me -- not that it isn't true, but that I grew up with a media landscape where women are punished just for existing, so it's harder to instinctively see that these older works have a pattern.

Anyway, Chandler's women can still induce a powerful cringe. He's a racist and misogynist writer whose prejudices inform both his hero and his world. But they always clear the hell out of the low bar that is "Is this character independently motivated?" and "Does this character act for her own pleasure?" -- and even, sometimes, "Does this character have a cause greater than herself?" and I'm honestly not used to seeing that.
posted by thesmallmachine at 7:40 AM on July 14, 2015 [4 favorites]


The entire genre is obsessively interested in the physical body of the detective.

I think that's super key, to the point where any book that's really invested in keeping the score of the hero's body damage will resonate with me in that hard-boiled way, even if it's about something that has nothing to do with investigation.
posted by thesmallmachine at 7:44 AM on July 14, 2015 [4 favorites]


I recently started reading Paretsky (thanks to the anime Detective Conan of all things) and I love it. Warshawski is both easy and hard to love. I'm so glad that Paretsky writes the way that she does.
posted by Ms. Moonlight at 8:11 AM on July 14, 2015 [2 favorites]


I was only vaguely familiar with Warshawski from a half-watched Kathleen Turner joint that I remembered as meh; I picked up Deadlock in a $5 bag of books deal from the library and was pleasantly surprised, even if it is largely concerned with the details of Great Lakes cargo shipping, sometimes to the exclusion of actual P.I. action. It's kind of profoundly nerdy, but it's well written and fun. It does suffer a bit from the homme fatale telegraphing, but the tropes are a great place for Paretsky to set up jokes, and one thing that doesn't come across in her essay here but was definitely apparent in Deadlock is that Paretsky has a sharp sense of humor that makes the book a breeze. It's an interesting contrast to the world-weary cynicism that's the default for fictional detectives, in that she seems to enjoy her job more than any fictional male detective I've read. They often end up there because they can't function in any other role; Warshawski's conflicts didn't seem existential on the same level. She's not tortured by regrets or anything, just happily doing a job she enjoys. It's similar to Mikael Blomkvist as a journalist's Mary Sue (I once had to explain to a Swede how much of the descriptions of journalism in those books are what we'd all love but never get).
posted by klangklangston at 10:43 AM on July 14, 2015 [1 favorite]


Omg I love Sara Paretsky and that essay really resonates with me. I loved the Stieg Larsson books but yeah, I'm tiring of reading about tortured female protagonists. Similarly Patricia Cornwalls Kay Scarpetta was so boring that I stopped reading those books. V.I. is great female detective.
posted by biggreenplant at 10:55 AM on July 14, 2015 [2 favorites]


The Kathleen Turner movie was terrible. It's one of the very few movies I've ever walked out on because it was not the V.I. Warshawski movie I'd been promised.
posted by Karmakaze at 2:22 PM on July 14, 2015 [2 favorites]


It was a V.I. Warshawski novel I read in fifth grade (I think Bitter Medicine?) that showed me an actual adult sex scene in fiction. It presented sex as fun and not a big deal but nothing to take lightly, and the scene was written so deftly that it took me a couple of tries at the paragraphs to figure out what was actually going on.

My favorite detail was how V. I. carefully put her late mother's wine glasses away so they wouldn't break during yada-yada-yada. It's still a wonderful piece of writing.
posted by infinitewindow at 4:00 PM on July 14, 2015 [5 favorites]


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