Suspense novel thrown off course

We're sitting in a courtyard cafe in Chicago's south side late one summer afternoon talking about her latest novel, Dead Land, which is already listed by her publisher as an April 2020 release. We didn't know it at the time, but not much more than seven months later - not an especially long time in publishing - this 20th novel featuring private investigator V.I. Warshawski would be attracting reviews every bit as positive as its 19 predecessors.

Dead Land features Paretsky's usual intricate plotting, vivid characterisation and understated humour. The scene setting is economical, the streets, bars and cafes of Chicago vigorously evoked, and once the action gets going it's a hard book to put down. This "political-rot thriller," says the Washington Post, "is the definition of perfection in the genre."

What makes the achievement all the more remarkable is that the book started with a different plot, was thrown off course by the death of Paretsky's husband of more than 40 years, the distinguished physicist Courtenay Wright, and could easily have been the mess she feared it was.

"I felt that if I didn't keep writing after Courtenay died I might never continue writing," she tells me. "But the writing was crap, so I wrote and wrote and wrote, but I was writing in circles. Finally, after about five months, I had the emotional strength to read what I had written and tear it apart, and try to restructure it and make it work."

By coincidence, we're just a block away from the University of Chicago's economics faculty, which turns out to be central to solving the mystery of the seemingly unconnected killings that dominate Dead Land. As in all Paretsky's novels, history matters - in this case, the faculty's controversial activities in Chile during the Allende and Pinochet eras. "Pay to play" politics feature too, as do unequal battles between southside residents and dodgy officials.

Paretsky's heroine, Victoria Iphigenia Warshawski - known as V.I. - grew up further south than the university, in a part of Chicago where vast steel mills once provided decades-long employment for thousands of locals. Her father was a police officer, her mother a refugee from Mussolini's Italy who aspired to be an opera singer but ended up teaching neighbourhood kids.

The area was "like an immigrant crossroads", says Paretsky. "It was a place where you could get a really good paying job without being fluent in the language." Its post-industrial landscape, stripped of steel-making activity, often plays a role in Paretsky's novels.

V.I. won a scholarship to the University of Chicago, studied law, and worked for several years in the public defender's office. She became a private investigator in 1982, not long after her author experienced an epiphany.

Paretsky was working for a big company at the time, and had been sitting silently while her boss delivered another of his long monologues. "He had a gift for endless repetition of the obvious," she wrote in the introduction to an anniversary edition of her first novel, Indemnity Only. "My attention wandered to the park thirty-six storeys below: the dead trees, the grey day, seemed as dreary as my own mood. It was at that moment that V.I. came to me."

In those days, women still featured relatively rarely as fictional private investigators. Paretsky, a fan of crime novels, was unsettled by how they were depicted as either virginal and helpless or sexually active and predatory. She imagined her own version of the hard-boiled detective - not Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe in drag, but a woman "like me and my friends, doing work that hadn't existed for women when we were growing up".

V.I. has mellowed a bit since then, though she's hung on to her sense of humour. In keeping with Peter Corris's rules of crime writing, she ages more slowly than the rest of us, which means that the past four decades haven't taken quite the toll they might have. She lives in north Chicago now, where she shares two dogs with her neighbour and sometime sidekick, Mr Contreras.

That garrulous retiree, who first appeared in the fourth book, Bitter Medicine, was inspired by a loquacious fellow employee of an insurance company Paretsky used to work for. "He always called me Cookie, which I wouldn't have tolerated from anyone else, but I didn't feel like it was sexist, it was just how he was." Mr Contreras was supposed to be a minor character "but this guy's voice started appearing". When she got sick of him, she tried to kill him off. "But my husband said, 'No, you can't do that. He's too wonderful.' So I backed up, and took the bullet out."

Over nearly four decades Paretsky's novels have grown longer and more complex, yet she professes not to map out the plot in advance.

"I'm not an outliner, because I'm not a chess player," she says. "I don't think ahead ... Last week, after I thought I really had finished my draft, I threw out sixty pages and rewrote them with a different ending."

That improvisational approach might reflect the fact that her novels form a chronicle of the city - and to an extent of the United States - since the early Reagan years. Thirty-eight years ago, Indemnity Only turned on overly close relations between union leaders and big business; two years ago Shell Game dealt with the impact of Donald Trump's immigration policies.

It was Shell Game that attracted the strongest reaction, with letter-writing Republican supporters accusing her of targeting their side of politics.

"I wrote back to one of them and said, 'At least three of my books have taken on the sins of the Democratic Party very explicitly - the sins of the Democratic Party in Chicago and environs. And he wrote back, 'Well, that's because whatever you say about the Democrats is true. But when you're writing about the administration, it's fake news.' I thought, 'Oh, okay. I get it, I get it.'"

While we're waiting for the Trump era to end, crime fiction will continue to exercise its allure. But exactly what is it about the fictional detective that appeals to so many?

"I once taught a short class in writing detective fiction for one of the small community colleges here in town," responds Paretsky. "One of them was a Chicago homicide detective. She wasn't trying to write a book, although there are police officers in Chicago and elsewhere who do write crime fiction, and some of them do a good job of it too. She just wanted to kind of be in there, because she loved it as a reader. 'You're with it all day long,' I said to her. 'Why do you want it at night?' And she said the murders that she deals with are so pointless, 'but in a novel, there's always a really big reason why people are being killed.'"