Category Archives: Sara Paretsky

She gave up on me first

Posted on by

I wrote a couple of weeks ago that I was struggling with Sara Paretsky’s BREAKDOWN due to the overtly political nature of the book’s content. After putting the book aside for a week or so I picked it up again last weekend and persevered for another week before giving up for good yesterday. For someone who normally reads 2-3 books a week only managing 73 pages of a single book in a week is an indicator that the two of us are never going to get along. One of the reasons I tried to struggle through to the end was so that I could feel able to review it properly but as the book glowered at me from the bedside table for the last week I realised I needed it gone from my life more than I needed to prove a point.

By the time I gave up on the book Paretsky had made me both sad and cross. About the only experience I can liken reading BREAKDOWN to is going to a meeting of Get Up (an Australian left-leaning multi-issue political group similar to Move On in the US or 38 Degrees in the UK). I admit I have only been to a couple of meetings but I found them full of people believing fervently in their own moral superiority on just about every issue you can think of yet so full of vitriol for anyone who dared to have an opposing opinion that I could not wait to leave. I saw little evidence of the tolerance and thoughtfulness the group demands from its opponents. I felt the same way as I picked up BREAKDOWN every night this week and read a few more pages of Paretsky’s didactic, lengthy prose on a variety of subjects that had little to do with the story she was meant to be telling and her thinly disguised and mean-spirited caricatures of real figures from current public life in America As soon as I opened the book each time I couldn’t wait to put the book down again.

I’m sure it would have been harder, but someone as intelligent and well-educated as Paretsky has the potential to write a book which makes all sorts of people stop and think about their view of the world. Instead it feels to me like she’s taken the easy route in which she’s given words of encouragement and succour to the people who already think like she does and treated everyone else like a child. Or evil personified. It’s like she’s given up trying to change the world through her writing and is happy to reinforce the stereotypes and divisions she sees. She’s certainly forgotten how to tell a ripping yarn.

 

This book is Political with a capital P

Posted on by

I am currently reading Sara Paretsky’s latest V.I. Warshawski novel, BREAKDOWN. It’s set in the present day and sees the series’ long-suffering heroine chance upon some teenage girls who are in a cemetery performing a ceremony they’ve learned from a series of popular books which will call upon vampires. Or something. Unfortunately they’re also in the presence of a murdered man and in trying to shield the girls from the unsympathetic eyes of the police Vic opens up a world of trouble for herself.

I’m about a third of the way through the book and am increasingly frustrated by the political agenda it makes no attempt to hide. I don’t imagine anyone who’s ever read one of Paretsky’s books or seen her interviewed would be surprised that the book takes a left-of-centre view of things but here it is not much more than a diatribe against Fox News (sorry Global Entertainment Network or GEN as it appears in the book) and various thinly disguised commentators and politicians. The plot device used to clunkily wedge all the “we on the left are very hard done by” messages is that several of the teenage girls are related to important Chicago political figures whose opponents use the escapade to trot out hate-filled campaigns against them.

The frustrating thing about this dominant feature of the book is that I have no idea what earthly purpose it serves. It is surely only preaching to the converted as no one who is even vaguely right-leaning in their politics would read much beyond about page 50 unless they had a strong masochistic streak. And do those who share Paretsky’s views really need 430 pages of reminding that their world has gone to hell in a handbasket? The more worrying prospect is that such a book doesn’t just do no good, it might actually do some harm. Can it really help to have yet another extremist view of the world thrown thrown into the cesspool that is modern politics? Do we really need to separate out into “us” and “them” at every turn? Can’t someone take a more nuanced position? Please?

My ultimate concern as a reader is that the story isn’t great and the reason it isn’t great is that there’s too much preaching and kvetching and polarising going on. When Vic isn’t being bitter she’s being so bloody righteous that she makes me want to vote conservatively (and for the record I voted for The Greens in our last election because the mainstream left wing party wasn’t socially or financially liberal enough for me).

I like fiction that explores social issues but this book isn’t exploring in any kind of thoughtful way: it’s daring readers to disagree with its agenda and ridiculing them if they do. On top of being annoyingly superior that’s bad writing in my view, and exactly the kind of thing that “liberals” often get upset about when “the other side” does it. Tsk Tsk.

Have you read BREAKDOWN? What did you think about its political overtone? Do you like books that have this kind of political overtone? Should I finish the book (I am on page 116 of 430)?

Sisters in Crime Challenge Post #1: The PI novel

Posted on by

One day in 1987 I asked a librarian to recommend some mysteries by contemporary women writers. I walked away with my first books by both Sue Grafton and Sara Paretsky, so the two are inextricably linked for me. Both have long-running series featuring gutsy female private investigators and my 19 year old self adored them. Until that point virtually all of the non-dead women I’d encountered in my mystery reading had been children (Nancy Drew and Trixie Beldon) (perhaps we’ll leave for another day the fact that it’s always been easier to find smart, feisty characters for young girls to identify with in fiction than to find intelligent, feisty women for adult women to look to for inspiration), elderly (Miss Marple who is at the other end of the ‘sexless’ scale) or bits on the side for the men who solved crimes (I can’t name you one particular woman) (which is, in its way, my point). The very notion of a young woman running her own business, solving crimes on her own, being at the centre of a story instead of the periphery (not to mention having a healthy sex life without being married) was a revelation. My 43 year old self is still pretty fond of both the characters that I first encountered all those years ago.

There’s a number of reasons to like Sara Paretsky‘s work, not least of which is the character of V I (or Vic to her friends) Warshawski. I think she might be in a minority of fictional private investigators who wasn’t first in the police, though she was a lawyer with the public defender’s office. She’s independent sometimes to the point of endangering herself, can have a mean temper and is prone to sarcasm (anyone who knows me personally is wondering if I am accidentally describing myself at this point) (which probably explains my fondness for Vic).  Her business is never exactly flush with cash but she stays afloat with some steady corporate clients. The investigations that form the heart of the novels usually have some aspect of social commentary about them and it is this aspect of the books that I love most but which has also proven unsuccessful occasionally when the book has turned into more of a political rant than work of literary art. However in most of the 14 books Paretsky does a bang-up job of exploring some aspect of modern American life that undoubtedly needs some investigating. Whether it be the privatisation of prisons (1999′s Hard Time), the lengths some insurance companies will go to to weasel out of making payments (2001′s Total Recall), the aftermath of the Iraq war (2010′s Body Work) or one of the countless other social and political issues Paretsky has explored there’s always something to think about at the end of one of her novels. The BBC’s excellent monthly radio show World Book Club tackled Paretsky’s first novel, Indemnity Only, in 2007 and the show is a treat to listen to as Paretsky talks about the impetus for creating Vic, the death of the PI novel and lots of other meaty subjects.

Sue Grafton‘s work is less political in content and in some ways is even a more direct descendant of the hard-boiled PI novels that clearly inspired the series. Starting with A is for Alibi in 1982 (the same year Paretsky’s first novel was published) Kinsey Millhone has searched for missing people, investigated cold cases and generally looked into things that the police have stopped investigating in 22 books to date. The series will finish in four books’ time with (Grafton has announced) Z is for Zero. Kinsey is a real loner, a twice divorced ex-cop whose ‘family’ consists of an octogenarian landlord and a grumpy Hungarian bar owner, but she is tenacious and she does fiercely look after the few people she is close to. I know that starting all the way back at the first book of such a long series would be daunting for new readers but I think this is one series you can dip in and out of fairly easily and I think the last 2 instalments, T is for Trespass and U is for Undertow were both terrific reads. ‘U’ is particularly good being a departure from the earlier novels as it contains an entire thread of historical fiction from the 1960′s. I have to admire an author who chooses not to keep writing the same book over again even though, at this point, she could almost be forgiven for doing so.

So if I count Paretsky and Grafton as one (because I found them both at the same time) then I can mention three more ‘similar’ authors according to the rules of the challenge. Some less well-known private investigators then…

Australian author Marele Day‘s Claudia Valentine appeared in a series of four books starting with The Life and Crimes of Harry Lavender which was published in 1988. I didn’t read the book until much later but, having moved to Sydney that year I can attest to the way that Day captured the time and place to perfection. Fans of feisty female PIs like Warshawski and Millhone will enjoy Claudia Valentine too and for those who’ve never tried a female PI book perhaps you should start with a smaller series :)

An author who has crossed genres and other literary boundaries over the years is English writer Sarah Dunant but her early 90′s trilogy featuring private investigator Hannah Wolfe is another firm favourite of mine. The first book, Birth Marks, involves Wolfe in an investigation into the death of a young girl who was heavily pregnant and the case allows Dunant the opportunity to explore the complex issue of surrogate mothers. In the remaining books animal experimentation and women’s body issues are both explored in depth in these intelligent books.

I can’t talk about celebrating the women who write private investigators without mentioning the person who created this challenge and who I recently discovered as an author. Barbara Fister has written two books (so far) featuring Chicago-based private investigator Anni Koskinen. In 2008′s In the Wind Anni is asked to help a woman who is believed by some to have been responsible for the murder of an FBI agent many years earlier. Something about Chicago must prompt politically-themed writing as Fister’s work shares this trait with Paretsky’s but she’s done a first-rate job of ensuring the story came first in this book. I have the second book in this series, Through the Cracks, near the top of my TBR pile. Why don’t you?

The PI novel has a long history within the crime fiction genre, allowing authors to explore storylines and themes that other sub-genres sometimes can’t. There are things that would simply be incredible in a police procedural that a PI novel can get away with and there is an appeal about the idea of a private investigator that has never gone away. For much of the genre’s history though the field was dominated by male writers and their male creations and it wasn’t until the late 1970′s that American Marcia Muller’s first Sharon McCone PI novel gained general acceptance then Paretsky and Grafton followed in the early 80′s. Personally I think these women writers have contributed significantly to the depth of the genre in terms of storylines, thought provoking themes and female characters who are a force to be reckoned with in their own right.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

To celebrate the 25th anniversary of Sisters in Crime (US) author, blogger and current Sisters in Crime board member Barbara Fister issued book bloggers the challenge of writing about women’s contribution to crime fiction. There are three levels of the challenge and I’m aiming for the expert level which requires me to write ten blog posts about works of crime fiction by a woman author and, for each, mention three similar women authors whose works I would recommend.  Though I am taking Barbara at her word and using the “whenever” deadline as a concrete goal, so it may take me a while to do all ten posts. And it turns out I might find it hard to stick to recommending just 4 authors per post. Even if you only occasionally blog about crime fiction why not join in the challenge and help celebrate the women who write it?

Celebrating the women of crime fiction

Posted on by

March 8 is International Women’s Day and 2011 marks the 100th annual celebration of “a global day celebrating the economic, political and social achievements of women past, present and future”. Interestingly only 4 countries (Austria, Denmark, Germany and Switzerland) celebrated the inaugural day in 1911 while today it truly is an international event and is even a public holiday in some countries. In a world where lots of activism focuses on our failures and the things we humans have yet to achieve, I like the fact this particular day is focused on celebrating the positive strides the world has made in its treatment of women.

In the world of crime fiction women sometimes have a rough time of it. They certainly appear far more often as victims of crime, often brutally tortured and murdered victims at that, but I shan’t clutter up this celebratory post with such dark issues. Instead I shall highlight just a few of my favourite women of crime fiction (in no particular order):

Of course you can’t really celebrate the women of crime fiction without giving a nod to Dame Agatha Christie, if not the world’s favourite crime writer of all time she is, apparently, the best-selling (having sold a rather astonishing 2 billion books in 45 languages). Of course she has her critics but its hard to argue her mastery of the suspenseful plotting of detective stories. The fact that one of her most loved characters is not only a woman but an unmarried, elderly woman is to be congratulated. Even today it’s not that easy to find women over 60 being taken seriously by anyone, so seeing Jane Marple solve a series of crimes and be respected by people that matter has to be seen as a positive achievement for women.

Sara Paretsky and the protagonist of her 15 crime fiction adventures, private investigator VI Warshawski, are both worth celebrating on this particular day. Paretsky was one of the first modern crime writers to create a strong female character who wasn’t ‘a victim or a vamp’. VI is smart, independent and possessed of a social conscience (reflective of Paretsky’s own). She was an eye opener for me as a lover of mysteries in search of just such a character (though I didn’t know what I was looking for until I found her). Some of the books have stepped over the boundary into political rant but the last couple have returned to top form and it’s definitely a series I will keep following.

Denise Mina is a Scottish crime writer who has two different series featuring really strong, vibrant female characters. The Garnethill trilogy features unlikely amateur sleuth Maureen O’Donnell, of whom I wrote in my review of the first book

“Maureen is funnier than Bridget Jones, has better friends than Carrie Bradshaw and is the kind of practical, non shoe-obsessed woman that fiction needs more of. She is ‘pathologically independent’ (Mina has a way of describing things perfectly yet succinctly), a loyal friend, a helpful though perhaps misguided patient (she makes up stories that she thinks will make her therapist happy) and doesn’t define herself only terms of the bad things that have happened to her. In a nutshell she’s fantastic.”

Maureen is so fantastic that I have been saving the remaining two books to feature her for a rainy reading day. Mina’s other series to feature a strong female character is a more conventional procedural series but all of her writing that I’ve read has an interesting combination of gritty reality and humour as well as superbly complex female characters.

The first Scandinavian crime fiction writer I can remember reading (though my notebooks tell me I’ve read others) is Åsa Larsson who has written three intriguing novels which all feature two strong women, lawyer Rebecka Martinsson and Police Inspector Anna-Maria Mella. The novels probably do conform to the stereotype of dark Nordic crime fiction but the characters, particularly these women, are so credible and interesting that you don’t mind being enveloped in blackness for a while. These books always make me feel like I have been invited into another world for a little while.

Australia has produced a crop of really wonderful female crime writers over the past couple of decades but my personal favourite is Leah Giarratano whose first book prompted me to start this blog (I had been thinking about it for a while but when that book came along I knew I wanted a permanent home for my thoughts about what I was reading). Giarratano’s heroine is Jill Jackson, a Sydney policewoman who has been through more trials than any half-dozen mere mortals ought to and while I know that isn’t really credible I love the way she is portrayed as facing her fears head on. So often women are shown as passively accepting their fate that I really like seeing someone who deals actively, if not always sensibly, with the crap life throws her.

So, which women of crime fiction would you celebrate on International Women’s Day?

 

Review: Body Work by Sara Paretsky

Posted on by

In her fourteenth full-length outing Chicago private detective V. I. Warshawski (Vic to her friends) seems to take on half the city at one point or another. Our story begins when Vic and some friends attend the club that Vic’s niece Petra works at to see The Body Artist, a woman who appears naked on stage apart from a covering of paint. The images painted on to various parts of her body are projected onto a big screen accompanied by some commentary before audience members are invited to paint on her as well. As she returns to the club several times to keep an eye on her niece Vic becomes aware of some tension surrounding The Body Artist with one regular audience member painting strings of numbers across her bum and another woman repeatedly painting an image that causes a young ex-soldier in the audience to fly into a rage whenever he sees it. One evening the woman who painted that particular image, Nadia Guaman, is shot outside the club and dies in Vic’s arms and the next day the ex-soldier who had flown into a rage whenever she painted the picture, Chad Vishneski, is arrested for her murder after supposedly swallowing enough pills to put him in a coma. Vic is hired by Vishneski’s parents to prove their son’s innocence.

In keeping with today’s publishing trend for bigger books than 30 years ago Body Work is nearly 200 pages longer than my copy of the first in this series, Indemnity Only (1982), and I think this is a disservice to the modern book. It feels too long, especially at the beginning when the action is slow and circular, for example Vic goes to and from the club asking the same questions of the same non-responsive people several more times than was entertaining. And I’m not sure if it was a publisher’s demand for greater length or Paretsky’s own desire to incorporate multiple political and social themes but either way I think it would have been a better book with one or two fewer threads to juggle.

Whinge aside, the book is a decent one, tackling a host of troublesome issues like homophobia, the impact of America’s involvement in the Iraq war on its soldiers and their families and an exploration of who profits from war and how little they care about the people who have to be trodden on for them to do it. If you’ve ever come across Sara Paretsky’s work before you’ll know what side of the political fence she sits on but for the most part here she weaves her themes into the story rather than preaching at readers as she has done to the detriment of a couple of earlier novels. The technique of using a small, individual story to demonstrate a much larger picture was successful in making this primarily a novel about two families struggling with things largely beyond their control and the attempt to give them some measure of justice. What we learned about the war, its profiteers and the pointless destruction of human lives it has caused was a byproduct of the story, as it should always be in good fiction. Some of the other threads had a little less clarity about them and I found the ending far-fetched but overall it was a good story which kept me turning pages.

This book offered a lot more exposure to the old favourite characters than did its predecessor (2009′s Hardball) which would have kept the those long time fans who enjoy that familiarity happy. Vic is still relaxing at the same bar, trading information with the same journalist, completing the same exercise regime and sharing dogs with the same neighbour as she has done throughout the series (though surely Mr Contreras has aged at a fraction of the rate at which Vic herself has done?). Among the new characters emerging in the series is the twenty-something Petra who will turn lots of Paretsky’s older readers off as she’s a credible character but as annoying as heck with her lack of personal responsibility and constant whining. However Vic’s current love interest, classical musician Jake, seems like he might be able to deal with the strong, prone to danger woman that Vic is so that looks promising. And Vic is still very much the same character as always: a bit too mouthy but with a very practical approach to helping people in need. I think this is the quality I have always admired most about her and still enjoy reading about after all these years.

I have renewed admiration for the way Paretsky manages to straddle the balance between keeping old readers happy and drawing new ones in as, like the last book in the series, Body Work could easily be read by newcomers to the series without them feeling at a disadvantage. This is a rare skill indeed. When combined with an entertaining story that explores a host of political and social issues and a protagonist you can’t help but want to see succeed it’s a recommended read.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Body Work has been reviewed at A Certain Book, Reviewing the Evidence (Karla) and again at Reviewing the Evidence (Yvonne)

I have discussed two of the earlier V.I. Warshawski novels on the blog, Deadlock and Hardball

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

My rating 3.5/5
Author website
http://www.saraparetsky.com/

Publisher Hodder & Stoughton [2010]
ISBN 9780340994115
Length 443 pages
Format audio (mp3)
Book Series #14 in the V.I. Warshawski series
Source I borrowed it from the library

Surmounting Series Struggles

Posted on by

Weekly Geeks poses some series related questions this week. As I mainly read crime fiction series are a part of my reading life whether I like it or not though I’d love to find more standalone novels in my favourite genre (recommendations welcome).

What series do you read where you have had an issue with one of the books in the line-up?

I tend to call it quits once I reach a book (or two) that I don’t enjoy. There’s always another series.

However I have stuck it out with two long running series and both have, this year, rewarded my loyalty.

Sara Paretsky’s V I Warshawski novels and Sue Grafton’s Kinsey Milhone books (also known as the alphabet series) are both long running private detective series that I have been following from their respective beginnings. I haven’t missed a book in either series, despite having misgivings several times along the way. With the alphabet series my ‘issue’ was probably more one of familiarity leading to contempt as the books have tended towards a little repetitiveness over time while with Paretsky’s novels it was the increasingly overt politics that was driving me away. The novel Blacklist was one long diatribe against the evils of the Bush administration and the Patriot Act and which apart from being annoyingly US-centric made for a not very entertaining book. As I have said before it doesn’t matter if I agree or disagree with the politics, I really don’t want to be lectured at.

Happily though both series have recently issued new installments that are terrific reads. Sue Grafton’s U is for Undertow is something of a departure of format which refreshed the series for me and Paretsky’s Hardball incorporates the politics into the storytelling as it should always have been.

Do you cut the author loose after one miss, or do you have a limit of failed books in a series before you toss in the towel?

My answer to this question depends quite a bit on how long I’ve been reading the series and how badly the series fails me. With the two series mentioned above I kept going because I’d invested a lot of time with the characters and re-visiting them takes me back to various times in my life when I read earlier books so I used them to feed a largely dormant need for nostalgia along with my reading habit.

Another long running series that I’ve been following since the beginning is Elizabeth George’s Lynley and Havers novels. However I’ve felt increasingly let down by the last four novels in the series. I’ve moved away gradually though from buying each installment on release day to waiting for the paperback version to be on sale somewhere to, in the case of Careless in Red, not forking out a penny and borrowing it from the library. As I found it pretty dreadful I think three second chances is enough and I’m now done with this series and won’t be reading the latest one which was released last month.

I like to think I’m not so fickle that I’ll give up on someone after one bad book so most of the series that I’ve abandoned (for example Patricia Cornwell’s Kay Scarpetta novels, the Kathy Reichs books, Karin Slaughter’s Grant County series and James Patterson’s Alex Cross novels) have had at least one second chances before I consigned them to my personal scrap heap.

My exception to this rule would be if I’ve only read one book in a series and not liked it. In such cases it would take a fairly powerful recommendation for me to pick up another book in the series.

What’s your suggestion for that book that you struggle with in a series?

Don’t read it.

Seriously.

If you really want to read the book that comes after it seek out some spoiler-containing reviews of the book you’ve abandoned to get the gist of the main plot points and character developments and move on to the new title.

You do not owe anybody anything when it comes to your leisure time.

Anything else you’d like to say about series? (I added this question myself as I geared up for a mini rant)

Yes.

I would like to issue a plea to series authors not to assume I am going to have read every word you’ve ever written.  I know that is your ideal but sometimes reality falls short of our lofty expectations and if I pick up book 1+n in your series I should not be totally and utterly bamboozled by references to things that have happened in prior books. Either provide a bit of repetition between your books or don’t mention it at all.

There is nothing more guaranteed to get me to abandon an author forever than vague references to prior events that need to be understood to make sense of current events.

This practice has been known to lead to the sticking of pins in the eyes of author-shaped dolls.

You’ve been warned.

Review: Hardball by Sara Paretsky

Posted on by

While I don’t wait with quite the anticipation I used to have for a new V I Warshawski novel, I do still have a soft spot for the first female character I ever identified with in a work of crime fiction and so borrowed Hardball from the library recently.

In the thirteenth novel to feature Chicago private detective V.I. Warshawski she is hired by a pair of elderly sisters to find their son/nephew Lamont Gadsden who disappeared 40 years previously during a wild winter storm that brought the city to a halt. V.I. reluctantly agrees to take on the case despite her misgivings about the huge time gap since the Gadsden was last seen and his probable involvement with the Anacondas, one of the city’s roughest street gangs which remains active though its leader is in prison. Just as she embarks on the investigation which takes her back through the city’s history and that of her own family, V.I.’s young cousin Petra arrives in the city to work on the senate campaign of an old friend of her father’s and soon becomes embroiled in V.I.’s life.

As I mentioned in a post last year I was a huge fan of the early novels in this series but had grown a little weary of the unrelenting lecturing to be found in the later installments. Happily in Hardball though the politics is present it’s not nearly as strident as in novels like Blacklist and, more importantly, is woven into the tale as it should be: with deft characterisations and great storytelling rather than the repeated bludgeoning with Important Messages that occurred in a couple of the previous novels.  The novel does tackle tough subjects such as police corruption and institutional racism but these themes are woven into an intriguing tale that contains an unorthodox mix of characters and links the present day back to the late 1960′s when racial tensions were high. The book is all the more poignant because of  its very realistic portrayal of this part of history.

As always V.I. is far from perfect, being quick to let her anger show and one of the most stubborn women on earth, but far more believable because of her imperfections. To balance things out she’s fiercely loyal, smart and almost bursting with a social conscience that she translates into practical action in a way that I imagine many of us would envy. In Hardball her working class family’s history, a constant theme across the series, is further revealed as her now dead father’s early years on the police force are highlighted and, toughest of all for V.I., his integrity is questioned. Paretsky has always done a terrific job of showing snippets of V.I.’s past to reveal how it is she has grown into the woman she is and this book adds beautifully to that character development. None of the familiar people in V.I.’s life do much more than make appearances in Hardball which might be a little disappointing for die-hard fans. However young Petra, a new character to the series, is introduced nicely and without the older person’s disdain for the youth of today that populates many novels by ‘people of a certain age’. I imagine Petra might just have done enough of interest to make a return in future books.

This is a return to Paretsky’s finest form and was a thoroughly unexpected treat for me. It’s pure guesswork on my part but I suspect that Paretsky’s own anger at the world and its many injustices has diminished a smidgen since the changeover in the American presidency and it is perhaps this that has enabled her to return to the high standards of her original work. Whatever the reason I’d highly recommend Hardball to both fans of the early Warshawksi novels and those who’ve always been curious about the series but don’t have the energy to start with the first book as it can easily stand on its own. I could not put this down for the last 150 or so pages and am now eagerly anticipating the next book which according to Paretsky’s blog is to be called Body Works and is well under way (you can read chapter 1 here).

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

My rating 4.5/5

Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton [2009]; ISBN: 9780340839157; Length 446  pages; Setting: Chicago, USA, present-day.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Hardball has also been reviewed at Reviewing the Evidence

Crime Fiction Alphabet: D is for Deadlock

Posted on by

My entry this week in Kerrie’s Crime Fiction Alphabet meme is Sara Paretsky’s Deadlock. The second in what has recently become a 13-book series, Deadlock was published in 1984 and features one of the earliest hard-edged female private eyes in crime fiction: VI Warshawski. The plot displays many of the features the series is known for including the involvement of VI’s friends or family and lots of under cover work as VI investigates the murder of her cousin Boom Boom, an ex hockey player. Boom Boom is assumed to have drowned by accident in Lake Michigan but VI thinks differently and investigates his new employer, a large grain company, only to discover corruption on a grand scale. The book features blackmail, sabotage and men doing nasty things and there’s no one but VI to stop them. In this interview Paretsky says the novel was written for her husband Courtenay Wright who is an ex naval officer, which possibly explains how all the shipping details were so spot on.

The plotting is complex but tight which makes the book a genuine page turner. It is also one of those books where when you work out the clever double meaning of the title you smack your head Homer Simpson style.

This series was one of the first I started reading as a late teenager when I deliberately sought out books in which the women did more than either wait patiently for their men to come home or hop into bed with any bloke that asked. For that reason I really enjoyed VI who was starting out in her own business after a short-lived career in the public defender’s office and, although she had a healthy sex-life, didn’t behave as if a man was the answer to all her prayers. Other traits I enjoyed were that VI never responded appropriately to ‘authority’ (yes mum I particularly identified with that one) and drank Johnnie Walker black label scotch at the same time as being an opera buff and staunchly loyal to her friends. These contradictions in her personality made her seem very realistic to me and also led to unpredictable twists and turns in the books as she didn’t always behave as you might expect.

The other standout feature of Paretsky’s novels, including this one, is the depiction of Chicago. One Christmas I visited my brother and sister-in-law who’d been living in that city for a year and they were both astonished at how much of the city I could recognise or quickly get the hang of and I owe it all to my many re-readings of these books. Despite a windy, wintry cold the depth of which I’d never experienced before, I loved doing my very own VI tour and it’s still one of my favourite places to visit.

I used to wait with breathless anticipation for each new book in this series but I’ve become a bit disillusioned of late. Although it’s been four years since the last book in the series was published I haven’t rushed to get my hands on this year’s release: Hardball. The last several books have, for me, seen too much of Paretsky’s own politics bleed into the narrative and I got tired of being lectured at about the evils of big business, racism and whatever other rant Paretsky felt like making. VI had always had a social conscience but in the later books the social themes seem to have taken over the stories and, as always, this makes me cranky. I’ve no quibble with authors wearing their political hearts on their sleeves but only if they do it naturally, through their characters’ actions. Still, for old time’s sake I will be reading Hardball eventually.

My crime fiction alphabet so far

Sunday Salon 2009-03-15: Can no one else see the silver lining?

Posted on by

This week I was quite chuffed to see crime fiction author Sara Paretsky posing some intelligent thoughts and questions about how the book business can move forward in this web 2.0 world. In response to a Wall Street Journal article that noted the dangers of clinging to the past Paretsky, acknowledging her own preference for some aspects of the existing book business, asked for some creative suggestions as to how books and readers might come together in our brave new world and, no less importantly, how anyone will make money out of it all.

Alas, several of the commentors on Paretsky’s post talked about the changes facing the industry only in terms of the problems posed and there was a fair amount of ’look at all the things we’ve lost’ nostalgia. I, as a passionate reader, can see more silver lining than clouds and I have some real world examples to account for my optimism.

Back in 2005 an independent musician by the name of Jonathan Coulton started something he called the Thing a Week project. Every week for the next year he released a song on the Internet using Creative Commons licensing which, essentially, meant he gave his music away. Being a former computer programmer Coulton was clearly at home in the tech world and promoted his songs heavily on the Net especially to the geek community who were the early producers of and listeners to podcasts. In a February 2008 interview on technology podcast This Week in Tech Coulton talked at length about the success he had made out of creating a niche for himself and interacting directly with the people he wanted to be his audience. He also reported that, despite the fact he continues to give virtually all of his music away, about 40% of his income is derived from the sales of digital downloads of his music (the rest comes from touring, merchandising and using his talent in unexpected ways like writing music for computer games).

Just like the geek community embraced Jonathan Coulton they have also taken several authors into their hearts including horror/sci-fi writer Scott Siegler whose books have all been released on free podcasts. In 2007 his printed book Ancestor, published by an independent publishing house, reached #7 on the Amazon.com best-seller list despite having been available for free in both audio and e-book format prior to its release.

Of course some of the changes we face are scary. And we may lose some things that we’ve loved. But is no one else prepared to admit that the traditional publishing business has its problems too? In the same blog post I mentioned earlier Paretsky stated that she didn’t become a national best seller until she had written her sixth book yet to hear authors talk you’d swear it’s only the new ways that will engender this kind of problem. At least now if you can’t get publishers interested in your work you have options that don’t rely on them. You too could podcast your writing like Scott Siegler and build up your fan base to the point where the publishers are coming to you or you don’t need one at all. Was something like that possible 10 years ago? Maybe there won’t be as many big name authors whose works are everywhere in the future, but maybe there will be more authors who provide to niche, international audiences and they’ll still be able to put food on their tables as Siegler and others are doing.

And from a reader’s perspective, especially one who doesn’t live in the USA, the opportunities offered by the Net are pretty sweet. Now, instead of relying on what the big publishing houses choose to flog in the two bookstore chains in my small city at the bottom of Australia I, literally, have the world at my feet. Since discovering the wide variety of online outlets for discussing books and reading a wide variety of reviews and opinions from genuine, knowledgeable fans my reading habits have changed dramatically. I’ve gone from reading multiple works by the same few American and English authors that seem to churn out product factory-style to devouring authors from places as diverse as Sweden, France, South Africa, Canada, Italy and, most shockingly of all, Australia. If it weren’t for the Internet, and the capacity it has to bring people with similar interests together, I wouldn’t have heard of (let alone read) two thirds of the books I read last year. I’ve used reading groups like 4 Mystery Addicts and blog aggregators like the Crime and Mystery Room on Friend Feed to get information about books and authors, including debut authors, that’s never been available to me via traditional mechanisms. I know there are some badly written blogs and others online with opinions for sale but the traditional book business hasn’t been free of that stuff in my lifetime and it doesn’t take any longer to spot the geniune from the fake online.

Another of the ways the Internet wins out is that it can offer an immediate and direct connection between artist and consumer. The geeks didn’t embrace Coulton or Siegler solely because their product is good (although in both cases it is) but also because both engage with their community. They blog and podcast and host forums and interact in a dozen other ways with their audience who are scattered across the globe. That audience repays that engagement by becoming ardent promoters, fans and collectors of the artists’ work and I see the same thing in the crime fiction universe.  On the Cozy Armchair reading group, which is devoted to the sub-genre known as ‘cosy mysteries’, many of the participants are authors and the other members obviously enjoy interacting directly with the people who provide the books they love to read and so support and promote those works in a way they would never do if they simply stumbled across the books in a store. Oz Mystery Readers is yet another online discussion group, this time focusing on readers or authors from Australia, and there too I’ve found many authors hanging out and discussing their craft and their love of books. I know I’m not alone in having that kind of thing make a direct impact on my decision making when I go to a bookstore (which these days is usually online too).

I’m not naive enough to think the future is all bright but I am heartily sick of hearing the book business’ future discussed only as a problem. I see loads of opportunities for readers and authors alike and am genuinely excited by what the next few years will bring to my reading experience.