Interview with Sara Paretsky - one of Bookman Beattie's favourite crime writers

Suzanne Goldberg interviews Paretsky - from The Guardian overnight

Author Sara Paretsky is best known for creating the feisty female detective VI Warshawski. But in her latest book, she finds the strength to tackle her troubled childhood in rural Kansas

In Sara Paretsky's fantasies, she was raised as a child by adoring billionaires and showered with love and opportunity. In real life, she was raised in rural Kansas by parents who fought constantly, and put her to work as a drudge in a once-imposing home that sank into squalor.
The painful reality of that unhappy family might surprise Paretsky's millions of fans. In the 1980s, she practically invented the genre of the female detective: her heroine, VI Warshawski, was a feisty private eye much given to designer clothes.

Twelve crime novels later, Paretsky is a worldwide bestseller. But now she has changed
direction, revisiting the geography of her troubled childhood for the first
time in Bleeding Kansas.

For fans of the orphaned, and rather solitary, Warshawksi, who usually hunts killers against the
gritty backdrop of Chicago, Bleeding Kansas might seem alien territory, full
of farm families working in sorghum fields, milking sheds and attending church.

In many ways, Warshawski is the personification of Paretsky's escape from rural Kansas for life in the big city. It took nearly 40 years before she felt strong enough to
return home on a journey of the imagination.
"Not everything about living in Kansas was difficult, but it was a difficult part of my life.
Chicago is where I came of age and became a person, made a reputation for
myself, and I didn't really want to go back to that," she says.

Paretsky is 60 now, with large, pale-blue eyes and VI's fondness for fine clothes and cappuccinos. When we meet, she wears a well-cut, tweedy jacket and bright scarf. She
admits, with some sadness, that she has given up on the high heels she loved
because of age and a bad car accident last year. She is wearing sensible
suede boots.

For the full, quite long, most interesting interview go here.

Bleeding Kansas by Sara Paretsky
is published by Hodder & Stoughton at £16.99. NZ$35.00