About her sleuth, author Paretsky says: "V. I. [Warshawski] does what I fear I would not be able to do."

Sara Paretsky: I did not. Funnily enough, now that the book is out and people have seen it, I've hooked up with someone who will get me into prisons for guest appearances and some of the Illinois prison literacy programs. I tried several times to get in but wasn't very skillful in how I went about it. You can't go undercover. The prison officials take your social security number and perform a background check on you. These people are very leery about letting writers in because they're concerned how the story gets told.  

I met with women who had done time in Illinois prisons. They were definitely people who were not saying, "Oh, I was railroaded." They did the crime; they did the time. They described the day-to-day on living conditions.  

I also worked with a couple of attorneys who prepare pleadings for women in prison. They're not defense lawyers; they're not handling the defense, the crime was irrelevant. These attorneys help women bringing charges against corrections officers for rape, sexual assault, battery and sexual harassment. These [actions] are pervasive throughout America, throughout the state prison system. It is horrifying to know that in America the most voiceless and the most helpless members of society are being treated to a daily, hourly barrage of degradation. It's thoroughly documented in The Human Rights Watch Report I refer to in the acknowledgments. 

So, when V. I. goes behind bars in Hard Time, she goes to prison, she's arrested on a false charge -- 

Crescent Blues: Having to do with the "kidnapping of the son -- " 

Sara Paretsky: -- of the head of a big security firm. When she actually goes behind bars, she realizes that the answers to everything bedeviling her in this story are in the prison. At the novel's beginning, as she's driving back from a party celebrating her friend Murray's move into television, she swerves and totals her car (beloved Trans Am) to avoid hitting a woman lying in the road.  

To her bewilderment, her chance encounter with this woman catches her up in the security net Hollywood has thrown around one of its mega-stars. [This incident also] brings her into head-to-head confrontation with the owner of a large multinational provider of security services, including the building and running of private prisons and many other security functions. 

V. I. lands behind bars on this false arrest over a 4th of July weekend. She isn't able to post bail for 72 hours. She realizes during this 72 hours the answers to all these puzzling and really terrifying situations she's been involved in lie there in Coolis Prison for Women, a fictional prison. So V. I. foregoes bail and spends the toughest month of her life behind bars to sort out what's gone wrong. She experiences first-hand the powerlessness and the voicelessness of the prisoners.  

Those were the most difficult chapters I've ever written. They were painful to write. I kept putting it off; kept thinking, "Well, maybe I can weasel around this without having her go to prison." But I couldn't. Finally, I had to do it. They were hard to write, and they're very hard to read, still. 

Crescent Blues: Showing such inhumanity through literature leaves a very intense impression on people. 

For her next book, Paretsky says she's traveling around the country, reading the financial pages, looking for the perfect crime.

Sara Paretsky: Well, I think any time you tell a human story, whether it's fictional or true, we really respond, because we can identify with the humanness. In Hard Time, V. I. does what we want our heroes to do in the West. She makes a journey, really, to the heart of darkness. She suffers those things everyone I've ever talked to intimately has a deep-seated fear they cannot stand up to -- great physical and moral challenges.

V. I. does what I fear I would not be able to do. She does it for me. She achieves what we expect of our heroes. She makes that journey, she takes the risks, she takes the abuse, and she shows you can emerge from the other side of this kind of extreme situation with a way of becoming whole and being fully human. So I think of Hard Time as cast in [the mold of] the classical heroic quest novel of the West. 

Crescent Blues: Did you think of going to prison yourself? 

Sara Paretsky: No, I couldn't imagine how to arrange it, and I always think that kind of thing -- It doesn't sit well with me. When I wrote Ghost Country, set in the homeless world, I would never have pretended to be homeless, just to experience life on the streets. I would have been scared for one thing, but for another I think it's very insulting to people who actually are homeless to pretend to take on an experience. Even if you're there, how can you possibly know? You always know, even if you went through the sleep deprivation and the cold and all those experiences of the homeless, you still know that, at bottom, you have a place to go back to. I think it would be very insulting. 

Crescent Blues: V. I. had an affair with an African-American police officer. I had heard there was some outrage about this. Just how much was there? 

Sara Paretsky: There was a very modest amount of outrage. I got some hate letters. I was told that Reader's Digest would have bought the novel for serious money if I would change the interracial affair, so that really set me back on my heels.

Crescent Blues: You're like V. I. then, you stuck to your guns. What made you decide to have V. I. have an interracial affair? 

Sara Paretsky: Well, it wasn't [intentional]. A lot of times I don't plan my stories in advance, and that works well for me because the characters unfold and grow out of the needs that the story then presents -- the story comes instead of the story being imposed.  

Conrad Rawlings, the cop that you refer to, first appeared in my fourth book, Bitter Medicine. I felt this strong erotic charge between him and V. I. But I backed away from it because I felt that the black experience is something hard for a white person to understand or write about. I wasn't sure that I could do justice to a black character. But then he just seemed like a good guy for her, and he came back in the seventh book, Guardian Angel. They started their affair and I really thought he was the right guy for her. He had the right sense of humor; they both had blue-collar backgrounds.  

But as I began writing Tunnel Vision, the eighth book, I realized that for a cop and a P.I. to have an affair, at least in my world, didn't work. So it wasn't the inter-racialness of it; it was the inter-law-officerness of it. Either he's going to say, "Oh, honey, you're right. This is a really serious problem and I've got ten thousand men and women in blue who can jump on it" -- in which case there's no book. Or, there's going to be conflict over the police involvement or what V. I.'s doing and what the police think she ought to be doing. There's going to be conflict and, as you know, V. I. is a street fighter. When there's conflict with V. I., it's lethal. I wasn't planning for that relationship to be destroyed, but that's where the story took me. 

Crescent Blues: Do you have in mind your next V. I. novel and what white collar crime she'll be fighting? 

Sara Paretsky: The next book will focus much more on Lotty Herschel, V. I.'s long-time friend and mentor. Lotty's been carrying around a secret for many, many years and it's time it was told.  

There are two things I need for a book. One is a milieu, and one is a story. The story is for me the most important part, because that's the humanness of it. I can't write a book until I have characters who are alive, doing things that I care about. In Hard Time, the finished book was my fifth attempt to tell the story. It wasn't until I created young Robbie Baladine that I had a character who could both carry the story where it needed to go and whose well-being I cared enough about that I wanted to go on that journey with him. 

With the book I will be working on, I have the opposite problem. I have the characters and I know their stories really well. I keep thinking more and more about them, but I don't have the milieu and the crime. Usually it's the other way around, but in this case I'm really fishing. As I'm traveling around the country, I keep reading the financial pages, looking for that perfect crime. 

Crescent Blues: Do you think V. I. will ever take on Bill Gates, in the generic sense? Will V. I. take on the computer industry, which really does eat up people's lives? 

Sara Paretsky: It's a very alien world to me. It seems so incomprehensible to me that there isn't a way for me to think about it. Maybe some aspect of it will come more into focus for me, and I'll feel that I can grab hold of it and understand it, but right now that isn't on the cards because it's so opaque to me. 

Lynn I. Miller

Click here to learn more about Sara Paretsky.