It takes a lot to shock private detective V.I. Warshawski. But when she's arrested - wrongly, of course - for murder, and held in a privately-run US prison/detention centre, what she sees going on inside the jail is both profoundly shocking and - for the reader - profoundly plausible. It takes a lot to shock the readers of crime fiction, too; but even the most hardboiled will find that Sara Paretsky's new novel, Hard Time, packs some pretty devastating punches.
For a start, Paretsky's bad guys are not the stylish serial killers or demented drug dealers who frequent so many crime novels these days, but the US prison authorities, the moguls of the global entertainment industry, and the immigration system - any immigration system. Pow! "There were several pregnancies inside the prison, I noticed, among women who had been inside for over a year - in one case six years." Biff! "I turned on the television, looking for news . . . it was the usual tabloid stew of sex and violence: an overturned truck on the tollway with flames and car wreckage. Mrs Muffet and Mr Tuffet exclaiming that they heard the explosion, they thought: My God it's World War III." Wham! "America no good place. Baby sick, mother no money, go jail. Why? Why peoples no help?" Yes, sir; Paretsky hits the target every time - without sacrificing the page-turning momentum which has kept the series featuring the feisty female detective on the best-seller lists for over two decades.
In person Paretsky is pale, frail and thoughtful. She speaks slowly and, you feel, carefully. She pauses often, sometimes long enough to make you sweat a little. Often, too, she puts herself down. At first glance she's far enough removed from her tough-talkin', ball-breakin' heroine to make you wonder if she didn't so much create V.I. Warshawski as escape into her; an impression reinforced by the way she talks about her family and her younger self. "I grew up in Kansas, went to a two-roomed country school and played baseball in the rural league. I was a terrible athlete - my brothers and I were all fat, unco-ordinated children - but everyone had to play if they were gonna have enough people to make up a team. I grew up at a time and in a place which was very conservative - and though my parents were very progressive on some things, like civil rights, they were very regressive on other things, like women's roles.
"I had four brothers, and they wanted me to stay home and look after the house. They sent me to secretarial school so that if I didn't marry I'd be able to work and look after myself." She pauses. So far, so obedient. A million miles from the rebellious Warshawski. But hang on a second; a wicked glint has come into her eye. "And now, I'm such a fast typist - well, I write my books slowly 'coz I have trouble figuring out what I'm saying - but once I know what I'm saying I can really rattle it out." The self-deprecating sarcasm, the insouciant emphasis - it's Warshawski to a T. And she has something else in common with her sparky heroine: they're both closely associated with the city of Chicago. A million miles from rural Kansas, surely?
"The summer I was 19 - 1966 - I went to Chicago to do community service," says Paretsky. "We all thought we were going to change the world. We thought the only reason there were poverty, racism and injustice was that nobody had ever noticed these problems. Now that we were on the scene, we were going to fix it all! It was a very exciting time to be in Chicago; Martin Luther King was there, organising for equal pay and open housing, and although he didn't achieve either of those goals it was a time of great opportunity and energy. The city really got in my blood that summer."
She has lived in Chicago ever since, and the city straddles her books like a mad, moody Colossus. As for Warshawski as alter ego, she says that if she had known the character was destined to last for 20 years, she might have sculpted her rather differently. "I was so unsure of myself. I'd sit down with all these detective books open next to me as I was writing, and I'd say OK, at this point she should be in a fight. . .I'm not sure I would have killed off her parents, for one thing, if I hadn't been so tied to the conventions of the form."
Yet it was those very conventions which attracted her to crime writing in the first place. "Frankly, it was what I read. I started with the English classics. I grew up in a turbulent, chaotic home environment and they presented a lovely, orderly, mannered world - it was very appealing. But it was when I read Raymond Chandler for the first time, in my early twenties, that I got bit by the bug of wanting to create a female detective."
Paretsky is aware that a series character such as Warshawski can become a casualty of her own celebrity. V.I. (short for Victoria Iphigenia - you can call her Vic, but don't try Vicki unless you're wearing a bulletproof vest) was 30 when the series began in 1983. Some 18 years later, she's weighing in at 44; a rate of ageing most fortysomethings would gladly settle for. "There's been a little bit of slippage," Paretsky admits. "But who she is, is very determined by the fact that her mother fled Fascist Italy and was a refugee in Chicago; she herself came of age during the civil rights movement; if I didn't age her it would all start seeming very artificial." The challenge, though, is how she can age naturally - without turning into Miss Marple.
Speaking of Miss Marple, there was the V.I. movie. It was a dud. Kathleen Turner might have made a reasonable fist of the leading role - if she had had a decent script and a bit of direction. Paretsky sighs. "Ah, yes. The V.I. movie. You know, when they were filming the movie, to be honest with you, I stopped being able to write. I was working on my seventh book, Guardian Angel, and they were so invasive and so arrogantly not trying to make a movie about my character that I got panic-stricken and I didn't write for six months.
`Of course, things are always grinding me to a halt - I feel like a somewhat inadequate professional writer - but the movie, in particular. . ." She shakes her head in a way that suggests that no matter how many times she tells the movie story, it still ends badly. "It was good that I sold the rights. It enabled me to quit my day job. And then when the movie came out and I went to see it, it was so bad, and so unlike what I do, that it was like an amazing coincidence - hey, there's a detective on screen with the same name as mine! I went home and finished the book pretty fast. So although it was a bad movie, and I wish they'd made a good movie, it was also a relief that they didn't make any more movies because I had the character back."
Nevertheless, she took a break from V.I. and wrote a novel about the emergence of a messianic figure among homeless women, Ghost Country. "I had this other story, a very different kind of story, that I wanted to tell and it wasn't. . .well. . .things never end up what you hope they will be when you start writing. You have this vision. It's like being on a mountaintop and you see the valley so clearly and you think, `oh, I'll get there'. And then you start down and it's all trees and clouds, or there's bog, you know; and finally you get there and you're muddy and dishevelled and it wasn't a good journey.
"I don't know. Ghost Country: oh, if only I could have written the book that was in my head, it would have been such a fabulous book. But I'm not sorry that I did it. It's good to take risks - and it also let me come back to V.I. with a much sharper focus."
Sharper? If V.I. Warshawski gets any sharper, she'll have to be classed as a dangerous weapon.
Hard Time by Sara Paretsky is published by Penguin (£5.99 in UK)