At 75, Sara Paretsky, the pioneering Chicago crime writer, has changed — but she doesn’t plan to stop
CHICAGO — Sara Paretsky returned to the scene of the crime. It was early June and traffic in River North on a Saturday morning was slow and quiet. Pet owners, pooches, strollers and the smell of toast. Paretsky was walking her dog along the north branch of the Chicago River. She was also out of poop bags. She asked a stranger for a spare. The woman, tugging back at the reigns of her own dog, warned Paretsky not to come any closer. The woman’s dog punctuated this, straining and choking at its leash.
Paretsky stretched out a cautious arm to accept a fresh bag and the woman hustled away behind her restless Labrador. Then Paretsky turned and could not find the poop that her dog had just left. The poop was there one minute but then gone the next. I couldn’t find it, either. Though I was aware of it. The odor remained. It was a mystery.
“Hmmm,” Paretsky said. “Strange.”
We moved on, covering the waterfront.
Paretsky knows the waterfront.
In “Deadlock,” her second novel, a member of the Chicago Blackhawks is murdered on a local shipping dock, a crime that leads to much uglier, far-reaching offenses, and eventually the mansions of the North Shore. “Overboard,” her new novel, about yet another conspiracy just beneath the veil of everyday Chicago, is her 21st mystery featuring her beloved private detective V.I. Warshawski. Paretsky began publishing V.I.’s adventures 40 years ago, helping to spark a revolution in crime writing that transformed the genre. They also serve, by now, as a kind of ongoing mirror history of Illinois. Read them all and you would have a fairly decent understanding of the social upheavals and political machinations of the past four decades in Chicago. Or just GPS the locations in a V.I. Warshawski novel and tour the city. I doubt there is a block of greater Chicagoland V.I. hasn’t investigated. As I cracked “Overboard” last spring I had that moment no doubt many Chicagoans have had since 1982: You read a little Paretsky and think, . In this case, the story opens on lakefront rocks off Sheridan Road, where Rogers Park meets
