With the 1982 publication of Indemnity Only, in which her tough-minded, big-hearted, fiercely self-reliant private investigator VI Warshawski strides on stage, she did just that five years later, she instigated the social change she had dreamed of by founding Sisters in Crime, an organisation committed to “helping women who write, review, buy or sell crime fiction”. that would turn the tables on the dominant views of women in fiction and in society”.
The year was 1971, and Paretsky was heavily involved in second-wave feminism so enraged was she by Chandler’s depiction of women that she vowed to “write a crime novel. Although she grew up reading mystery novels, Paretsky didn’t come across Raymond Chandler until her early 20s The Big Sleep marked her first encounter with that staple of noir fiction, the femme fatale in this case Carmen Sternwood, a woman who not only commits murder, but drives the men around her to do the same through the corruptive force of her sexuality.
In fact, as her memoir makes clear, her literary career was born out of the conviction that it ought to be possible to “create a woman who was a person, not an angel or a monster”. Here is an author who set out to change the face of contemporary crime fiction – and succeeded. “I call myself a writer,” she says, halfway through a paragraph discussing the difficulties of coming of age in a male-dominated literary landscape.
The whole thing comes together in an atmospheric jumble of personal testimony and polemic that swings along so engagingly it would be easy to miss the extraordinary confession she slips into the opening chapter. Along the way, she throws in a whistlestop tour of the civic crises of the American century ( McCarthyism, civil rights, Roe v Wade) and speaks frankly about the skeletons in her own family closet. Writing in an Age of Silence is brief but brilliant: a plea for the power of language, in which Paretsky sketches her passage from tyrannised child to acclaimed author, decries the then-incumbent Bush administration’s attacks on freedom of speech, and exhorts her readers to topple “those forces that seek to silence us, to rob us of our voices”. I n 2007, Sara Paretsky took time out from her day job as a crime writer to publish her memoir.
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