Sara Paretsky's Blog, page 3

Girl, Interrupting

Episode One: Genesis

 

Andromeda came into this world with a few impediments to the happy life most parents want for their daughters. She had a cleft lip and a wall eye. And her parents gave her a weird name. Who knows why?

These hindrances didn’t make Andromeda shy. She was vocal from birth, crying and gurgling with equal intensity. When she began to speak, and then to become aware of the world around her, she was passionate, and often loud in expressing herself.

She developed a natural left hook which she used when kids in her first grade class teased her over her name. The teacher actually called the cops, who handcuffed her and took her away in a squad car. (Yes, you guessed: this girl lived in the United States). Her mother was furious on her daughter’s behalf. But she encouraged young Andromeda to develop a hobby, an outside interest where she could put her passion and her energy.

Andromeda tried jump rope and baseball, but it wasn’t until the day she saw a public TV documentary on the mistreatment on honey bees that she found her passion.

“They don’t have enough flowers to eat,” Andromeda wailed. “They’re starving, and then they have to work as slaves in the California orchards and they’re dying.”

Her mother encouraged her to learn as much as she could about honeybees. Andromeda read as much as even a precocious six-year-old can and decided she needed to plant clover and thistles in her parents’ tiny backyard. She looked after her crops vigilantly, and by the second spring, when she was eight, her little garden was alive with bees. Triumph. Three hives were built. Triple triumph.

Andromeda raced home from school each day to check on her garden. She protected the hives from violent storms, she built triple-decker raised beds to grow more flowers. She got stung from time to time, but didn’t mind a few stings. “They know I’m trying to protect them,” she told her mother. “They don’t mean to hurt me.”

The neighbors weren’t nearly as understanding. Andromeda’s father built a screened-in enclosure around the hives, and moved them closer to the house.

Even with this outlet for her energy, Andromeda remained vocal and often loud. Her early history of arrest, and her passion for the plight of bees, also made her sensitive to injustice. Bullying, we call it in primary school.

One of her classmates was a very chubby girl named Sara. Kids in her class loved surrounding Sara as she walked home from school, chanting a verse which even later, at the age of 74, Sara could still recite with perfect accuracy.* One day Andromeda saw the bullying in action. She leapt into the middle of the group and started using her left hook. Unfortunately, she was not only outnumbered, but the group was a lot stronger. She and Sara were knocked to the pavement. The other kids were starting to kick them when suddenly, out of nowhere, a swarm of bees appeared. They didn’t sting the bullies, but they buzzed around their eyes and noses and made the bullies run screaming from the scene. As soon as the bullies took off, the bees disappeared as well.

Andromeda raced home, ignoring Sara’s shyly muttered thanks. Her hives were intact, the bees contentedly sipping nectar.

 

*Yes, this happened to me when I was in second grade. I was chubby until I was about 30, but I’ve never forgotten the crude and cruel rhyme. Sadly, I never met Andromeda.

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Remembrance of People Past

Over the weekend, I submitted what I hope will be the final version of my 23rd novel. The working title is Double Dirty, but I’ve struggled so much with this novel that I’ve been calling it Ugly Baby. My mother told me that I was such an ugly baby she couldn’t bear to have pictures taken of me; she didn’t want the reminder, so my earliest baby photo is from my first birthday. I was apparently a breech birth and my head was squeezed into a point. She showed me my baby bonnets, which had pointy tops because of where my head had misshapen them. As a small child, I kept thinking the point had sunk into my head and that it would pop out some night, and in bed at night I would keep feeling the spot, wondering if a mountain was about to emerge.

I sent a draft of Ugly Baby to my editors back in April. They were very thorough in their critique, and over the last 3 weeks I tore the ms apart and rewrote big chunks of it. As I read through it, I was dismayed by the incoherence of the April draft and wondered how I could possibly have read it through – not once, but 3 times, and with an outside reader going through it at least 3 times – and thought it was a finished novel.

This experience reminded me of the melancholy events that surrounded another writer’s last novel. I won’t put her name here, just say that she was perhaps twenty-five years my senior, so I only knew her during the last decade of her life. Her agent and her editor were both good friends of mine. When she submitted her final novel, her agent was dismayed to find it was incomprehensible. He sent it back with some gentle comments, and she returned an even more incomprehensible draft. When he followed up with people close to her, he learned that she was suffering from significant cognitive impairment. He explained the situation to her editor, who was a wonderful woman. The editor rewrote the book from beginning to end, and it was duly published.

 

I find this story heartbreaking, not least because the agent and the editor both died long ago of cancer. However, now that I’m in my 70’s, when I turn in a manuscript that’s largely gibberish, I can’t help being scared. Is that demon that takes our wits starting to remove mine? I hope not, but how can I be certain?

 

 

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On Dead Land

So fierce, ambitious, and far-reaching that it makes most other mysteries seem like so many petit fours. — Kirkus

Best Thriller and Mystery Books of 2020 list — Washington Post

“Dead Land is the latest of Sara Paretsky’s swift and superb books starring V.I. Warshawski, her tough and deeply principled Chicago private eye. Always passionate about social issues, V.I. becomes enmeshed with a community action group. — Seattle Times

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On Love & Other Crimes

Issued as a paperback original, Love & Other Crimes is a perfect match for summer’s relaxing moments, whether they are long ones on vacation or short breathers between home-based neverending gig economy labors. Each story brings a change of pace, a clever crime, and a burning sense of what human justice demands. Which, of course, is exactly what one would expect from a Grand Master of Mystery. — New York Journal of Books

The well-wrought plots and densely imagined worlds make this the most distinguished mystery collection so far this year. — Kirkus ( starred review)

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Dead Land now in paperback

Dead Land is now available in paperback at your favorite bookstore. I’ll be signing copies at Women and Children First, so if you want a personalized edition, please contact them by April 6 at 5 pm.

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Preorder Overboard

V.I. is back in Overboard. On her way home from an all-night surveillance job, V.I. Warshawski is led by her dogs on a mad chase that ends when they discover a badly injured teen hiding in the rocks along Lake Michigan. The girl only regains consciousness long enough to utter one enigmatic word. V.I. helps bring her to a hospital, but not long after, she vanishes before anyone can discover her identity. As V.I. attempts to find her, the detective uncovers an ugly consortium of Chicago powerbrokers and mobsters who are prepared to kill the girl. And now V.I.’s own life is in jeopardy as well.

Overboard is available for pre-order now and for purchase everywhere on May 10th.

 

V.I. turns 40! Indemnity Only, the book that introduced V.I. Warshawski to the world, was published on January 22, 1982 and we’re celebrating.

Have you always wanted a first-edition of Indemnity Only? Instead of paying $3,000 to abebooks.com, write a short paragraph (no more than 150 words) on “What VI means to Me” and send it to vicontests@mindspring.com by January 8th for a chance to win the one extra copy I have in my library. I’ll announce the winner at the January 22nd event (below).

Mark your calendars for 3:00 p.m. Central Time on January 22, 2022. Women and Children First bookstore will host a virtual event. I’ll read from Indemnity Only and from Overboard, the newest VI novel. The first forty people to sign up for this event get a free copy of any book in the store, courtesy of VI (explore the Women and Children website to choose your title). Please note: registration is not available before January 8th. We will send out a reminder then.

 

Included by Kirkus Reviews on its list of best mysteries for 2020, Dead Land is now available in paperback at bookstores everywhere. If you’d like a personalized copy, you can order one from Women and Children First.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The post first appeared on Author Sara Paretsky.

Kirkus names Dead Land as among best for 2020

Kirkus Reviews has included Dead Land as one of the best mysteries for 2020. You can see the full list, here.

The post first appeared on Author Sara Paretsky.

Interview on Love & Other Crimes

On Sept. 14, Brian Vakulskas interviewed Sara for radio KSCJ about her new collection of short stories, Love & Other Crimes. You can listen to this 16 min. interview here.

The post Interview on Love & Other Crimes first appeared on Author Sara Paretsky.

Love & Other Crimes Launch Events

On Wednesday, July 29 at 7 pm Women and Children First is hosting a virtual launch of Love & Other Crimes on my Face Book page. I will read from Love & Other Crimes and will answer questions about that or anything else. Note: questions will have to be posted on my Face Book page 24 hours in advance.

On August 1 at 6 pm, I join my own editor, Emily Krump, in Book Passage’s Conversations with Authors, virtual live sessions with the authors and thinkers most committed to independent bookstores. Once you register, for free, there’s an opportunity to ask questions in advance of the session.

Whitney Terrell and Sugi Ganeshananthan are writers and readers who run an insightful blog about books, Fiction/NonFiction. I was privileged to talk to them last week about Love & Other Crimes.

Love And Other Crimes

In June, I’ll be publishing 14 of my short stories, under the title Love and Other Crimes. Some of these stories are new, some have already been published. Some feature VI, some are standalone. Two – “Wildcat” and “Death on the Edge” – were published only as ebooks and so now will be available in print for the first time. Thanks to Erin Mitchell for recovering “Murder at the Century of Progress” – somehow in the migration from a Hewlett Packard to Windows to Apple I lost the file.

I write short stories for a lot of different reasons, often to entertain myself. I loved writing the title story for this collection – a chance to create a Mr. Micawber kind of family. But they sure do love each other.

Jacket cover

 

“They’re trying to frame Gregory,” she announced baldly.

“Who are ‘they,’ who is Gregory, and what are ‘they’ saying he did?” I asked.

“Fucking Warshawski snob,” she said. “I might have known. Like your mother, too good to walk around the planet with the ordinary mortals.”

“Anyone who compares me to my mother is paying me the highest possible compliment. But I still don’t – oh, Gregory? Baby Gregory? Are you Sonia Litvak?” She’d given her name as Sonia Geary when she made the appointment.

“I got married. Did you think that was impossible?” she jeered.

She saw my inadvertent glance at her bare left hand. “It didn’t last. Neither did yours, what I heard, but you had to keep your own name, didn’t you? No one else could be as good as a Warshawski.”

“Do you want to tell me who framed Gregory for what?” I asked. “Or just needle me about my family?”

“I want you to understand I don’t need any Warshawski pity or handouts. I came here for help and I plan to pay your bill.”

“That assumes I agree to help you,” I snapped.

“But – you have to!” She was astonished. “You’re from South Houston, same as me. And I need a private cop to go up against the city, although come to think of it, your father was a Chicago cop and –“

“If you insult my father on top of my mother, you’ll have to leave.”

“Oh, don’t get your undies in a bundle,” she grumbled. “I never went to finishing school.”

It was as close as she would come to an apology. I turned away to type Gregory Litvak’s name into a legal database and he popped right up: charged with second-degree homicide along with criminal destruction of property. Someone – allegedly Gregory Litvak – had gone through the Roccamena Warehouse and smashed about twenty-five million dollars worth of wine and booze.

Sonia was reading over my shoulder. “See, I told you – they framed him for this.”

“Sonia – this doesn’t prove anything about anyone.”

I scrolled down the screen. Roccamena had fired Gregory a week or so before the destruction. The state – and the liquor distributor – claimed he sought revenge by rampaging through the warehouse.

He might still have made bail, but the crime held a second, more serious offense: when the clean-up crew started hauling out the debris, they’d found the body of Eugene Horvath mixed in with the broken bottles in aisle eleven. Horvath was Roccamena’s accountant; the state’s theory was that Gregory blamed him for losing his job.

“They fired Gregory for no reason,” Sonia burst out. “And then, because they feel guilty, they have to frame him for destroying the warehouse and killing Horvath. The Roccamenas probably did it themselves to collect insurance.”

“What made the police pick up Gregory?” I asked.

“His prints were on the forklift. Well, of course his prints were on the forklift. He drove it for them, loading and unloading crap for them all day. Eighteen years he worked there, and then, bingo, he’s getting close to being a hundred percent vested, out the door with him. I need you to prove he didn’t do it.”

She glared fiercely. When she’d been young, carting baby Gregory around, her hair grew in lopsided clumps around her head, as though she got her brother Donny to cut it for her. Today the thick curls, dyed bright orange, were symmetrically shaped. Her face was covered with the armor of heavy makeup, but beneath that, she was still the ungainly, needy girl of fifteen.

Sonia didn’t want Warshawski pity, and I didn’t want to give her any, so it annoyed me to find myself stirred by it.

“He has a lawyer, right? Or is he in the system?”

“The public defender. We’re trying to put the money together for a real lawyer, but we can’t even make bail right now. They set it for two million. Who can come up with that kind of money? Reggie could help, but he won’t. Taking his brats to Disney World instead of taking care of his own flesh and blood.”

I didn’t think suggesting that his children were also Reggie’s flesh and blood would help. Instead, I laboriously pried details from her. Reggie had moved to Elgin, with his own little company. Sonia was vague about what they did, but it had something to do with computers. She seemed to think Reggie had become another Gates or Jobs, and that he wouldn’t help Gregory out of spite.

Donny worked for Klondike insurance. This was an agency that had the inside track on a lot of city and county business, which somehow, inevitably, also seemed to mean some of their clients were Mob fronts. It sounded as though he was the agency’s handyman, repairing broken machines, changing light bulbs, ordering supplies. I could picture him siphoning off supplies and selling them on Craig’s List, but not engineering the big deals that make a successful Mobster.

“So it’s not like Donny’s got a lot of money,” Sonia was continuing to whine, “and then his ex is sucking the marrow out of his bones. He doesn’t even get to see the kid except weekends and then the kid doesn’t want to hang around Donny because Donny doesn’t have a play station or any of that crap.”

“Stanley can’t help?” I asked.

“He dropped all the way out,” Sonia snorted. “First he was in business with Reggie, but he said late-stage capitalism was draining his life blood, whatever the fuck that means. He lives in a cabin in the hills somewhere near the Grand Canyon and thinks great thoughts. Or maybe it’s no thoughts.”

That left baby Gregory.

“Gregory is super smart,” Sonia said. “Like, he had really high ACT scores, so Daddy wanted him to go to college. He even got a scholarship to go to the University of Illinois, but then he never went. So Daddy threw him out of the house, which was when I was married, and he lived with me, then Ken threw him out, which led to me beating Ken up and him getting an order of protection and then a divorce. Anyway, that’s when Donny found Gregory a job at Roccamena’s, and he’s been there ever since. Until they fired him for no reason at all.”

“They must have told him something.”

She tossed her head, but the orange curls didn’t move. She must have sprayed some kind of epoxy on them.

“Ask him yourself. Maybe you can turn on some Warshawski charm and he’ll tell you stuff he won’t talk to me about.”

The chin beneath the thick makeup wobbled; she fished in her handbag and blew her nose, a good loud honk. “You going to help me or not?”

Not, I chanted silently. Not, not, not.

So why did I find myself printing out a copy of my standard contract for Sonia? I thought when she saw my fees and the non-refundable deposit she’d walk out, but she signed it with every appearance of nonchalance, counted out five hundred dollars in twenties, and swept from the office. Sort of. She was wearing a sweatshirt that proclaimed her attachment to Liggett Bar and Grill’s Slow Pitch team; the sleeve snagged on the lock tongue on her way out and she had to stop to pull it free.