Criminal mastermind

BOOK EXTRACT

In the summer of 1966, Sara Paretsky moved to Chicago from rural Kansas where she grew up. In Chicago she joined Martin Luther King's civil rights movement.

Her memories of the period affected her as a person and writer; and it was in Chicago that she based her award-winning crime fiction starring the female detective V I Warshawski. In this memoir she reflects on the writing life and civil liberties.

When I was trying to think about how to discuss my novels and questions of social justice, I imagined myself with my hands pressed to my bosom, saying with a throbbing intensity, "These things sink into my heart." But I don't side with the underdog because I'm saintly like little Eva. I do so because I'm as needy as the most helpless.

I grew up in a tangled nest of outsideness. As the only girl in my family, I was constrained from the age of nine to give up my own childhood in becoming the caretaker of my young brothers.

My family was one of the few Jewish families in the town of Lawrence "" our arrival brought the number of Jewish men to ten so that the community could start holding services.

We were like giraffes, an oddity that invited staring. I knew that if I revealed any of the ugliness of our home life to the larger world, and it was ugly in ways that are still hard for me to think about, I would be bringing shame to the Jews, who were beleaguered enough without my adding to their woes.

The shadow of the Holocaust, in which my European family was obliterated down to the last infant cousin, lay heavy over my childhood: one did not make one's private woes a mocking point for gleeful Gentiles.

When my father gave my dolls and stuffed animals to my young brother, telling me that at nine I was too old for toys, my mother told me not to cry, because there were children in Harlem and Johannesburg, or dead children in the Vilna ghetto, who'd never even had toys.

My needs and desires were insignificant in the grand scheme of neediness "" it was my job to serve, to help undo bonds of wickedness, share my bread with the hungry, and in general, let the oppressed go free.

My life wasn't supposed to hold pleasure: my parents forbade art or music classes, any after-school groups, or outings with friends. Once, when I took part in a school play, my parents condemned my selfishness in language so scalding that they effectively kept me from any other leisure activities.

Even today, if I sit in my attic writing on my novels, I feel guilty for not being out on the streets, immolating myself on the altar of social neediness. I should be tutoring, working for abortion rights, saving Darfur, undoing the Patriot Act "" in short, saying yes to every appeal that crosses my desk. Only a selfish person would stay in her attic spinning stories.

I was a person raised to serve, who came of age in a time of passion for justice. My character dovetailed neatly with the times. My own sense of voicelessness also led me to see and feel the anguish of the powerless.

I had been writing since I was old enough to read, short stories that were, or at least tried to be, funny takes on the world around me, occasional mysteries, lots of fantasy. After my summer in Chicago, I started trying to write more naturalistic stories.

As a child, the worst thing about the Holocaust to me had been the thought of so many people dying nameless, without anyone remembering them. As a young adult, I had the same fear about the people I'd been working with. No one would remember their stories. It became my mission to do that.

Over the next decade, I kept trying to write little stories about the people, or the neighborhood, or the fears or the hatreds... A policeman on the L "" Chicago's name for our rapid transit trains "" who'd been on twenty-four-hour shifts for three days during one round of riots; he was nursing a single pink rosebud that he was taking home to his wife.

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WRITING IN AN AGE OF SILENCE

Author Sara Paretsky
Publisher Women Unlimited
PAGES xx + 138 Price Rs 250