Reading with Bill

Bill’s appetite for work was great. He adopted the motto of Robert Southey: ‘In Labore Quies’ – rest in labour, [see Bill’s fine biography of Southey: ‘Robert Southey – Entire Man of Letters,(2006),p.109]. And please note that Bill was working in the archive at Whitehaven on the day he died. But Bill was never po-faced about work; he enjoyed it, as he did his reading for ‘leisure’. One of life’s joys was sitting drinking an ale in a pub and reflecting on reading the detectives. Bill did listen and liked to read other people’s recommendations. Yet, as ever with Bill, the giving seems mostly to have been his. So, Bill liked to point to the books by Sara Paretsky and James Lee Burke and we followed.

Firstly, there’s Sara Paretsky.

As it happened, this interesting lady came to speak in Carlisle Central Library on Sunday 20 March 2011 to promote her latest book. Bill couldn’t be there, but I was very pleased to attend and make my scribbled notes.

‘Bodywork’

'Bodywork' is Sara Paretsky’s 14^th novel.

[Sara stands in front of a tall black microphone. She is elderly with grey hair but very slim and is wearing tailored broad black trousers with a faint pin-stripe and above this an expensive silk jacket of red and white and around her neck a similarly coloured,  flowing scarf. One hand is placed on her left hip and she stands in a pose fit for the catwalk. She has a sharp, long face and a large mouth, but she speaks well and in a pronounced but not unpleasant American accent….ICM]

“It is good of you to turn out on a grey day and perhaps when football is on your TV.  I must confess myself, despite being an avowed feminist, to loving male sports. I am a total sweatsox. But this is but one of the many contradictions we learn to live with.

               Though you know I live and write about Chicago it is from rural Kansas that I came. Our house was of the 1860s and had a dirt basement floor. ‘Bleeding Kansas’ is her novel about that area, with horror as the central character. And another contradiction, for though her V.I.Warshawski is a very physical investigator well up to hitting back at the boys as much as she gets, she herself, Sara,  was afraid of the many spiders that ran in her basement, (mostly not poisonous).

               Chicago became her adopted home in the 1960s. the city was at its worst for racial intolerance, yet also at its best in working intensely for good, (Sara was herself involved in social work). Chicago has beautiful lakefront architecture on Lake Michigan, whose many buildings are much visited. But behind the façade there is also the mob, which thrives on goods on the move like garbage, laundry and liquor. Her husband says that the city has got into her blood.  She has some grittiness of her own and tweeted the new mayor with the words: “remember if you break it, you mend it!” The city has 3 millions inside the city limits and 12 millions in the six counties around. This is the setting for the confrontational V.I.Warshawski. Incidentally 22 January 1981 saw the first of her books appear and thus we are at the 30^th anniversary of the “first of the independent detectives”.

               Rex Stout was where I started with Nero Wolf.

               But I worked as a marketing manager in insurance at a time when jobs for women were so limited. I recall a co-worker whose Mum phoned every morning to ask her if she’d met anyone yet? And we knew that if we answered this call to head her off then our co-worker would merely have to face the question later in the day.

               For about eight years I’d thought of writing about a detective like Philip Marlow, only a woman. I’d written lots but in small amounts. I was fantasising really. I have a linear mind. I begin then get to the middle and then the end. I find that the only way to write is write on the page. You do it on paper.  I never smoked but I tried a character who did, Minerva she was called. She drank rot-gut. You should never do this. I’d have been better writing about chocolate, which I do partake of.

               One day my boss who was horrible to men and women alike was addressing us. He did deals with companies behind our backs and without telling us. He blind-sided us regularly. Well Fred, I’ll call him, spoke to me and I answered in one way, but above my head was a bubble with my real thoughts about him in it. It was then that I thought of a writing about a woman who deals with ‘turkeys’ and can speak her mind. In other words I was having private thoughts on company time.

               Well I just jumped in with her. I hadn’t worked out her family or relations with anyone. But I was determined that she’d drink Black Label whisky not rot-gut. She loves single-malts and of course Johnnie Walker, the blend.

               Age sucks! I think you’ll agree that we cannot handle things as we did. I now  take a Johnnie Walker once a month. V.I.Warshawski’s indulgence in clothes is mine too. But though I like the look of them, high-heels are an exception.

               Father’s father was an Eastern European and came to America in 1910 and ended up like many Jews in the garment trade. He proved to have a gift for couture and ‘cutting’ was his skill. At Ellis Island the spelling of PARECKI  became as it is because it is pronounced this way.

               Incidentally ‘Breakdown’ is the new book I’m currently struggling with, (only you will be among the few who know if this work makes it into print).

               So my grandfather gets written into a role. He makes frocks for V.I.. They’re of the best. That’s how she affords them.

               ‘Bodywork’ the novel I’m promoting today is about a performance artist in an edgy night-club Club Gouge, (pronounce Googe tho’ my husband, Courtney, insists on ‘goudge’). A young cousin of an Iraqui war vet.works as a waitress and falls foul of the Ukranian mob. Nadia dies on the first page!  The vet. gets the blame but is innocent and he wants V.I. to prove who the real criminals are. Surprisingly the Chicago Police don’t agree with V.I. Incidentally the only possible partner for V.I, was an Afro-American police-sergeant.

               Curiously V.I. is ageing but not quite as fast as me!  She was 30 in the first book and is now 50. At my age in real life there is a lot of loss and pain. I cannot take this in the novel so that there is no way that Lottie her friend can be less than 80, but she isn’t. The dog ought to be 26. But suspend your disbelief please.

V.I.’s mother is supposed to be a refugee from Fascist Italy. V.I. herself still gets in fights, but is not quite up for it as much as she used to be.

PUBLIC READING OF EXTRACT FROM BODYWORK

QUESTION AND ANSWERS:

1.Kathleen Turner played V.I. in the movie, but who would you like to play her?

Yes, it’s true that Kathleen is dark and I think that I prefer Jamie Lee Curtis, despite her size. Martha Burns who acts on the stage and is not so well known would fit. The trouble is that Disney has the rights to the character now.

2. Do you feel obliged to have more violence in your books?

No, there’s no pressure from my editors to write about brutal things.  It’s just that V.I. is a very physical person. She does the things I’m not strong enough to do. It is my need to feel better!

I’ve often thought that we are becoming de-sensitized to violence through the endless repetitions of the news, particularly on TV. Showing the Japanese Tsunami over 30 times in succession makes it no more real than someone blown up in a Matt Damon movie?

3.Are your stories based on real scenarios?

Yes, they are related to real-life events that I feel need more attention. Unless I feel strongly about something I cannot write about it. In my Hardball book I take real cases of tortures perpetrated by the Chicago Police. There was some tacit assent to this in the community. Boys will be boys after all. But one of my good friends is a Human Rights official, so trusted that, though a Jew, West Bank Jews and Palestinians recognise his merit. Interestingly he tells a story about being arrested by the authorities in Kenya for 36 hours and being relieved that they took from him his belt and shoelaces for that suggests that you’re not about to figure in a staged suicide. I am, of course, relieved that I write behind my own locked doors and am only pretending while he is often not.

               There were allegedly 300 cases of torture by the Chicago Police before a Cook County Examiner noticed that one victim had a burn mark around the ear. This was one of the places where an electrical terminal was attached and the other to the testicles. Whoever you are and whatever you are, you shouldn’t be treated this way. In the event most of the guilty in the force just got off and only one has served time, in fact four years for perjury. And I disapprove of torture being done in my name in detention centres around the world. I felt I had to write that book.

4. Have you any friends in the Chicago City Police?

Indeed some in the Department are friends because of my books. I did a ‘ride’ alongside a sergeant in a squad car and toured the clubs on a Saturday night, (South Side?). Because the bars are licensed until 5 a.m. many get drunk as 10 skunks. Oddly the incident that sticks was a ‘domestic’ in a cab. After being called to this fight it was decided that the man and woman should be sent home in separate cabs. The man involved demanded that the officer get him a cab:

“you’re a public servant!” In fact the police do have to put up with a lot and they aren’t given enough credit.

BOOK SIGNINGS & a statement:

“you may have noticed this tattoo I have, (she rolls up her sleeve). Well you can collect one free and affix it to yourself! No it’s not permanent and says ‘Bodywork’.

                                             See http://www.saraparetsky.com/