Since her debut in 1982’s “Indemnity Only,” the sharp-tongued sleuth V.I. Warshawski has been serving notice to Chicago’s bad guys that they aren’t going to get away with it. In “Brush Back,” the latest in Sara Paretsky’s best-selling series, the brassy private investigator with sharp elbows and an even sharper tongue is still at it, hot on the scent of the mystery of who really killed a young woman back in the old neighborhood of South Chicago.
Along the way, she tangles with corrupt Chicago politicians, chases through the fetid underbelly of Wrigley Field and finds herself in mortal danger on one of the pet coke mountains that mar the landscape and pollute the air down south. If there’s trouble to be found, V.I. doesn’t even have to search. It always finds her.
Printers Row Journal recently caught up with Paretsky, 68, for an interview at the University of Chicago’s Quadrangle Club, in which we discussed the author’s early years as a community activist in the 1960s and, later, her way of speaking her mind through her famous character. Here’s an edited transcript of our chat.
Q: To an unusual degree for series characters, V.I. Warshawski is rooted in a specific place — in this case the city of Chicago. (Patricia Cornwell’s) Kay Scarpetta moves around, (Sue Grafton’s) Kinsey Millhone moves around to some extent. Warshawski stays right here.
A: Well, I grew up in rural Kansas, as you may know. I came here when I was 19 to do community service work on the South Side in 1966, the summer that King was here, trying to put pressure on City Hall in terms of open housing and employment. I was attached to a Presbyterian church that was then at 70th and Damen. Chicago just became the place I wanted to live.
Q: What was the nature of the community service work you were doing?
A: We ran a day camp for about 80 kids 6 to 11. Really it was meant to be soft propaganda. We took them all over town on public transportation. We took them to Wrigley Field, because the Cubs would give us free tickets every Thursday. The Sox, who were right next door to us, wouldn’t return our phone calls. Many of them had never been to Lake Michigan. You know, in those days, Ashland Avenue was the dividing line between black and white on the South Side. The east side of Ashland was black, the west side was white, and the kids would just line up on either side and throw rocks at each other whenever they felt like it. We were trying to give (the mostly white campers) a model of a different way of living with diversity, rather than throwing rocks. I don’t know how good a job we did. The narcissistic rage in the white communities was just extraordinary. The white race riots were almost a weekly feature that summer — mobs attacking civil rights marchers demonstrating for open housing. It was a violent, hate-filled atmosphere, and our job — like the boy with his finger in the dike — was to try and give the kids a different perspective.
Q: Some people reading this might wonder why you chose to settle in Chicago.
A: Well, we felt, despite all of this anger, that change was really in the air. There was a sense of possibility and change, and knowing we were part of it. It’s true that as a child reading The New Yorker, I always used to imagine I’d be in New York or Paris, living this glamorous life, and Chicago is not that. But I think because of how important the city became to me personally, it’s reflected in the way V.I. relates to it.
Q: She’s very comfortable here.
A: That’s right. And I think that I’ve always been very concerned with accuracy and detail. When I was young, I read a lot of the Robert B. Parker books, including one in which Spenser and Hawk go to London and shoot a lot of people in Hyde Park, and it was clear that Parker didn’t understand London or the English judicial system. It all felt very wrong. And it was a lesson to me: Don’t go to a foreign place, even if it’s an American place, where you don’t understand the power relationships and the judicial relationships and try to pretend that your character is going to function there in a way that he or she might on their home turf. The book I’m writing now actually sends V.I. out of town, to the little town in Kansas where I grew up.
Q: Lawrence.
A: Right. It’ll be an interesting dynamic in that book — how much a fish out of water she will be. Yeah, it’s a small town, but people close ranks, and how do you get inside a system where you don’t have the connections that you do on your home turf?
Q: How did it happen that you decided to make V.I. from South Chicago?
A: Well, I married a widower from here who had three teenage sons, and they were running pretty wild. They ran with a group from South Chicago, and I got pretty fascinated by that neighborhood through my stepsons’ friends. When I was creating V.I. some years later, I had her come from that neighborhood because the girls I was meeting from there were a tough bunch. There was one in particular, she had red hair down to her knees. She liked to go into bars and get guys to buy her drinks, and if they made a move on her that she didn’t like, she could beat up anybody twice her size and weight. She’d just grown up with her brothers, street fighting. I didn’t want V.I. to be that crazy a person — not a karate expert or whatever — but just somebody who’d grown up in a rough and tumble neighborhood.
Q: One of the themes of “Brush Back” is the class consciousness that comes from having grown up in a neighborhood like that, then moving uptown, as it were. When you go back to the old neighborhood, people feel like you’re snooty, that you’ve betrayed them somehow. I associate that with Dennis Lehane in his Boston novels —
A: Right, right, right. I think that’s a great parallel, because parts of Boston and Chicago are very similar in some ways. There’s that same clannishness that you don’t find in a lot of other places. In South Chicago, it’s different than it was 30 years ago, when I was starting to write about it. The steel mills were still there, although they were beginning to die. Now there’s so much open land where they’ve taken down old buildings; if you didn’t know what was really happening — 40 percent unemployment, seven or eight different gangs fighting it out — it looks kind of bucolic because of all the green spaces.
There was a particular house on Houston Avenue, between 91st and 92nd, that I’d picked out as having been V.I.’s home — it’s on my website — and I used to take people down there to see it. Up until about 2000, you’d show up with a reporter or a camera crew and kids would flock to you, they wanted to be part of the story, have their pictures taken and so on. But the last time I went down there, in 2004 or 2005, I had a French television crew with me and they wanted to stop to film. We barely escaped with our lives. About six kids were surrounding us, converging on us, and fortunately a social worker who happened to come by recognized me and talked the kids down. As Cabrini (and other public housing developments) came down, and they started moving people down there, it really destroyed the balance of power among the gangs, so there’s a lot of gang warfare now that wasn’t there before.
Q: The new book is maybe even more “Chicago” than most. You have the Blackhawks, who are very much in the news right now. You have the Cubs and Wrigley Field, including an object that is hidden there under the bleachers.
A: I met a guy who gives tours at Wrigley Field, and he was telling me about the disgusting plumbing underneath Wrigley that you never see, the dripping pipes and so on — including a toilet that supposedly hadn’t been flushed since 1925. I thought, what a place for a chase scene! He said he’d get me in, but he never did. I kept calling the Cubs, and Jonathan Eig tried to make some connections for me, but they never would return my phone calls. And so I thought, “OK, I’m a writer, I’ll just use my imagination, and you guys will just have to take your lumps, because I tried and you didn’t respond.”
Q: You also deal with Chicago’s famously corrupt politics.
A: You know, when I think of corruption in New York, I think they take it to another level that we don’t. It just seems much scarier there, maybe because there’s so much more money and power there, and you can’t even see who the players are or how to penetrate the system. Here, you can kind of sort out who’s doing what to whom. And maybe you’re fairly helpless in the machinery, but at least you can kind of see what’s going on.
Q: There’s sort of a street-level quality to the corruption here.
A: (Laughs.) Right. It’s good old boys — or girls — doing things. It may be nasty and it may be true, but at least you can follow the dots and figure out what to do. It’s real, though. When I was first starting to research South Chicago, I knew a woman who lived down there and was trying to bring new industry into the neighborhood. She wanted to stop illegal dumping in the swamps down there, the last bit of marshland in the city, and started taking photographs of who was dumping and filing injunctions or whatever. They were Mob-connected and Machine-connected both, and she started getting death threats and people stalking her. She went to the state’s attorney and reported this, and they said, “Well, unless you’re actually murdered, there’s nothing we can do.” So she and her partner left and found jobs elsewhere. So that kind of thing is very real, and I would be terrified to go near it. But V.I. has the skills and the smarts and the recklessness to march in where the rest of us say, “Oh, I don’t think I want my dead body to be what sparks an investigation.”
Q: We’ve established that you are not V.I. Warshawski —
A: Sad but true.
Q: You grew up in Kansas —
A: And I have no fighting skills, except for my barbed tongue.
Q: But in other ways, you are her. Yes?
A: Well, I’m not a skillful-enough writer to create a long-running character who did not reflect my own values. I could do it for a single book, but not for a character that I have to be together with for decades, as V.I. and I have been. I think the real way V.I. mirrors me is in speaking, not in acting. So she’s going to demand that she be listened to. After my first book, “Indemnity Only,” came out, I got a very disturbing letter from a woman who wanted to know why the men around V.I. didn’t beat her up for talking back to them. Everything in the letter suggested to me that this was a woman who’d been subjected to a lot of domestic abuse, and who didn’t see any other way to be in the world. It was that that sort of crystallized for me the fact that speech is much more threatening than action. Although I don’t set out each book thinking this, it’s really what V.I. says, questions she’s willing to ask, that spark a physical response in the people she’s up against. She’s opening closed boxes that people want to keep shut and put away. And in that sense, her presence on the page is really my presence in the world.
Q: Also like you, V.I. has some expensive tastes.
A: That she has a hard time paying for, yes. Poor V.I.! She buys me my clothes, but can barely pay her own bills! (Laughs.) I do like my creature comforts. (Laughs.) My fantasy is to live in a cave in the Umbrian hills that has running water and electricity and a beautiful boy to bring me a cappuccino every morning.
Kevin Nance is a Chicago-based freelance writer and photographer whose work has appeared in the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, Poets & Writers Magazine and elsewhere.
“Brush Back”
By Sara Paretsky, Putnam, 459 pages, $27.95
