Sara Paretsky Research Articles

“The Dark Path Back”: Investigating Holocaust Memory in Sara Paretsky’s Novel Total Recall

Abstract Women writers challenge the popular and critical entrenchment of male-authored literary detective fiction. A close reading of Sara Paretsky’s 2001 novel Total Recall demonstrates that the ongoing quest for social justice by her woman detective, V. I. Warshawski, is addressed through assertive women’s voices that have also transformed critical approaches to women’s crime fiction. In Paretsky’s novels, V.I. finds herself in a double bind reserved for women in both social and literary terms: having to prove her stability and effectiveness as a professional detective and as a reliable first-person narrator. Total Recall ’s investigations of contemporary corporate crime trace their origins to American slavery and the Holocaust: the novel transforms the generic mean streets of crime fiction into a transnational crimescape with a two-way trajectory between contemporary Chicago and Central Europe’s sites of mass murder. But instead of plotting a conclusion that declares triumph over such evil, the novel joins forces with historical accounts to investigate the staying power of legitimized oppression and the memory of its victims. Reading the Holocaust narratives embedded in Total Recall reveals a story of inhumanity so far reaching that it transforms Paretsky’s local Chicago crimescape into a global epic.

A Favourite Among Favourites: Sara Paretsky's Guardian Angel

A Favourite Among Favourites:Sara Paretsky's Guardian Angel Jane CoomberSewell (bio) To consider a favourite novel is to experience sweet pain. Trying on each choice feels a little like small betrayal of those who nearly made the grade. Choosing a favourite author, let alone a favourite novel is a bit like choosing a favourite student and one fears to admit in public that yes, you do have a favourite, you are human, and you are not perfect. To choose one's favourite novel is therefore a bitter indulgence and the journey to a choice is as full of twists, turns and analysis as the reflections on the novel itself. I choose a Sara Paretsky novel, and I considered cheating, by discussing the whole V.I. Warshawski series, but no, the challenge accepted was to choose and reflect on one novel, so one it must be. Rather like a petulant child who is made to choose only one chocolate bar in the shop window, I choose Guardian Angel.1 This just pipped the 1985 Killing Orders,2 but then I realised I have a soft spot for the latter because I won a signed copy of the 2017 reprint,3 which Ms Paretsky rather foolishly but endearingly mailed to me herself, with her home address on it. Luckily, I am a respecter of privacy and while I cherish the bubble wrapped envelope and make sure the address is always legible, I would never do anything about it. Guardian Angel was probably the first or second of the Paretsky novels I read. It is certainly not the first in the series, and much of its quality in my mind is probably linked to my circumstances when I bought it, second hand in a charity bookshop in Ashford, Kent, with my sister as we began the true journey into adulthood, having both of us recently bought our first homes. It is therefore perennially linked to learning to be a strong, independent woman who can make her own way in the world, just as the main character, V.I. Warshawski does. V.I. (Victoria Iphigenia; one of the worst kept secrets in Chicago) goes by her initials or Vic, as she is a female private detective in the very male world of Chicago industry. Her bread and butter is not divorce and death, though these play heavily in the series, but industrial espionage, fraud and the relationship between this and organised crime. Paretsky has played with time over the years; in the early Warshawski books, Vic was given the birth year of 1950, making her 42 by the publication [End Page 47] of Guardian Angel. Yet, in the latest offering (2020), she appears to be in her late fifties. Vic, therefore, while acknowledging that she has to use her talents in less physical ways, has only aged maybe 25 to thirty years in the last thirty-eight! This is perhaps part of the charm of the way the character is drawn, and not half as flagrant a disregard of the passage of time as Janet Evanovich takes towards the immortal hamster, Rex, in her Stephanie Plum novels. Paretsky has admitted moving Vic's birth year from 1950 to 1957, but even so, she has had to slow Warshawski's age a little in the last 20 years, as however fit the character may keep herself, the physical demands portrayed have had to be scaled back over the years. However, as the 70-something Paretsky has been known to tell her fans of her exploits breaking into closed Chicago parks by scaling the hoardings with her dog in tow,4 it is unsurprising that anything Sara can do, Vic can do better. It is perhaps this attitude to age that makes Guardian Angel my choice for favourite. With its underworld dealings, it has the feel of Film Noir, a real latter day Dashiel Hammett edge which is all about the main character quietly and doggedly going about her business, never to be underestimated and never to be counted out. While Hammett's main character appears to be a fish out of water for reasons of class, Vic is a woman in a man...

Words, Works & Ways of Knowing: The Breakdown of Moral Philosophy in New England before the Civil War. By Sara Paretsky. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016. xviii + 165 pp. $35.00 cloth.

Words, Works & Ways of Knowing: The Breakdown of Moral Philosophy in New England before the Civil War. By Sara Paretsky. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016. xviii + 165 pp. $35.00 cloth.

“Philip Marlowe in drag?” – The construct of the hard-boiled detective in feminist appropriation and translation

Abstract Hard-nosed female investigators Sara Lund and Saga Norén from the extraordinarily successful Scandinavian TV crime series The Killing and The Bridge are the latest examples of female hard-boiled detectives - dysfunctional loners who solve crimes where no one else succeeds. This article looks at the character construct of the hard-boiled male detective, maps these tropes against social expectations of gender norms and then considers how Sara Paretsky constructs an explicitly feminist “tough guy” private eye in V.I. Warshawski. It then analyses how Paretsky’s negotiation and partial subversion of the tropes of the hard-boiled genre are handled in translation, drawing on the German translation of Indemnity Only.

The Afterlife of Little Women by Beverly Lyon Clark (review)

Reviewed by: The Afterlife of Little Women by Beverly Lyon Clark Roberta Seelinger Trites (bio) The Afterlife of Little Women. By Beverly Lyon Clark. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014. This book is a comprehensive study of Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women (1868, 1869) in its function as a material, literary, and cultural influence. Clark’s goal is to “track the afterlife of Little Women” in many modes, including adaptations on stage, in film, and in print; she also examines the extensive material artifacts influenced by the novel, from dolls to scarves and from stamps to collectors’ plates (7). Moreover, she gives significant attention to the novel’s many illustrated versions. In addition, Clark explores Alcott’s former homes Orchard House and Wayside as sites of historical and material significance. Having examined reviews of the novel, the plays, the films, and the television shows, she provides a compendium of the story’s critical reception in every era since the first part of the novel was published in 1868. Clark organizes her examination of the physical and literary influence of Little Women by era. In the first chapter, she analyzes how a reputation came to be built around Alcott (herself childless) as “everyone’s aunt” with a growing renown for work that “was read and appreciated by adults as well as children, by males as well as females” (40). In the second chapter, she traces how popular response to Alcott waxed based on cultural desires that privileged nostalgia. Clark observes that the early plays and films emphasize the novel’s domesticity, and she performs a fine deconstruction of the tensions between sentiment and sentimentality that reside both within the text itself and in changing cultural values that led to a collapsing of the two terms and subsequent disdain for both. In chapter 3, Clark traces how Alcott’s academic and critical reputation reached its critical nadir between 1930 and 1960. Nevertheless, Little Women influenced a great number of women who “went on to have prominence in the arts and in politics,” such as “Joan Didion . . . Barbara Bush, Ursula Le Guin, Shirley Temple, Sonia Sanchez, Susan Sontag, Judith Krantz, Gloria Steinem, Jane Yolen, Bobbie Ann Mason, Laura Bush, Connie Chung, Patti Smith, Sara Paretsky, and Hillary Clinton” (107). Judith Martin, James Carville, and Juris Jurjevics also receive attention for being influenced by Alcott’s novel. An increasing number of Alcott biographies appeared during this era, perhaps inspired by the popularity of the two major film releases of Little Women in 1933 (RKO) and 1949 (MGM). Clark explores how both films were influenced by the 1912 Broadway play directed by [End Page 406] Jessie Bonstelle, especially in emphasizing the romance plots of the novel rather than those about careers, Jo’s internal struggles, or the family’s Transcendentalism-influenced values. Chapter 4 is a triumphant assessment of Alcott’s increasing academic reputation, which Clark notes may also correlate to her decreasing popularity among general readers. Nevertheless, Clark points to the work’s continued international regard by tracing its reception in Japan, England, the Netherlands, Germany, Italy, Hong Kong, Chile, and South Korea. She reviews the 2004 Broadway musical, the 1998 Mark Adamo opera, the 1994 movie (Columbia Pictures), various television shows, multiple spin-off novels (such as Kit Bakke’s Miss Alcott’s E-mail, 2006), and an AOL series that started in 2012: Little Women Big Cars. With each of these adaptations, Clark deftly demonstrates how the revision interacts with the original text as well as how it also comments on the contemporary zeitgeist. Clark speculates that perhaps the novel’s ability to endure with such widespread influence is a result of its failure to resolve many of its own internal tensions, particularly those involving gender. As she astutely observes, “A work becomes powerful if it captures key cultural conflicts and does not fully resolve them: a disjunction between overt and covert messages can be valued as a source of power” (147). Observing that “responses to Alcott often enact, even now, a central feminist tension between an ideal of autonomy and an ideal of connectedness,” she asks an intriguing series of questions: Does Jo provide a model of independence, even if...

Feminism and the Hard-Boiled Genre: Breakdown in Sara Paretsky’s Breakdown

As feminist re-writings of the genre of crime fiction (mostly the hard-boiled) from the 1980s onward, Sara Paretsky’s Warshawski novels provide a fertile field for critical and cultural studies. The aims of this paper are twofold: first, it traces the generic influences on her latest novel Breakdown (2012) beyond the obvious male precursors of the hard-boiled (Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler) of the interwar period to the Gothic vogue in the early 19th century; and second, drawing on Roland Barthes’s notion of readerly/writerly texts, Pierre Macherey’s critique of ideology in realist fiction, and Fredric Jameson’s dialectical view of genre, it teases out the symptomatic fissures and contradictions in Paretsky’s novel which betray the text’s inability to ultimately resist the ideology it intends to subvert.

“I don’t know a lot of rude words”: Herbst, Paretsky, and Grafton’s Struggle to Master the Tough Guy Voice

Abstract The proletarian literature of the 1930s and traditional 1930s era hard-boiled detective fiction are literary siblings. Both genres came of age in popular publications. Both genres deal with establishing order. Both genres use the “tough guy” voice. This voice was a no-nonsense powerful tool used to highlight the gritty realism of blue collar life. This style of writing quickly became a central component for both genres. Embedded in the term “tough guy voice” is masculine identity. This is the voice for the active underdog male hero. Writing in genres for women is an on-going challenge given the expectation of gender implied in the narrative voice. For the contemporary feminist hard-boiled detective and the 1930’s women proletarian protagonist to be taken seriously in their respective tough guy genres, they must show the same verbal acumen as the male characters who built the genres. At the core of each genre, the expectation that tough guys remain tough guys is an issue that stretches beyond the time frame of 1930s and 1940s to contemporary iterations of the genres. The gendered transition from male protagonist to female protagonist requires authors like Josephine Herbst, Sara Paretsky, and Sue Grafton to engage in a series of dynamic manipulations verbal and textual manipulations. Both sets of authors created protagonists that faced the threat of being dismissed due to their gender, traditional family roles, and conflicts with authority. The authors dealt with these threats using very similar strategies, to varying levels of success. Paretsky and Grafton’s heroines win verbal battles by showing mastery of the voice and the other voices in the texts. At the core of this struggle is the protagonists’ ability to maintain the power of professing.

Strange Birds: RewritingThe Maltese Falcon

Hammett's formative role in establishing the conventions of the hard-boiled detective formula is widely acknowledged, but the formative influence of his masterpiece,The Maltese Falcon, on specific texts by subsequent innovators has remained largely unexplored territory. Both Sara Paretsky and Chester Himes have paid tribute to Hammett's influence, with particular reference toThe Maltese Falcon. An examination ofIndemnity OnlyandFor the Love of Imabellein relation toThe Maltese Falconoffers a unique perspective on Paretsky's and Himes's stylistic choices and the social perspectives these articulated. It also helps to explain the critical reception of their work. Paretsky, writing within the grain of a type of social realism associated with both protest literature and hard-boiled detective fiction, achieved early recognition. Himes, writing against the grain, did not. Those of his detective novels most closely allied to his protest writing have received the most critical attention, but inFor the Love of Imabelle, Himes used techniques allied to surrealism. These effectively disrupted and destabilized important, socially privileged discourses – and discomforted audiences and wrong-footed critics.

So Who Has Time to Read? Social Class and Crime Writing, Part 1

September–October 2013 • 9 A piece of fiction is often said to “find its audience,” meaning that certain elements of the piece appeal to a particular set of readers that has some characteristic or set of characteristics in common. Sometimes the characteristics define a large audience that will sustain a regular production of books written and edited to appeal to this audience. These books share common elements that create guidelines for the genres and subgenres of commercial publishing . Many of the elements are general. “Cozy” mysteries are light on sex and violence, for example, without being too specific about what “light” means, but the readership knows it when it sees it. Some characteristics are very particular to a specific audience. Author Eve K. Sandstrom, who lives near Lawton, Oklahoma, has described how an editor demanded that Satanists in one of her novels not sacrifice a cat. Never mind the fact that Satanists often do such things, as her research proved. Readers who like “cozy” mysteries are generally cat fanciers. A novelist who murders the entire church choir is merely providing corpses, but one who murders a cat deserves an eternity of languishing unread on the ice of the ninth circle. Under the pseudonym Joanna Carl, Sandstrom has also written a successful “chocoholic mystery” series, initiated in 2006 by the title The Chocolate Cat Caper. The title not only panders to the appeal of cats to this audience but also evokes the old joke about a pandering publisher who creates the can’t-fail novel Lincoln’s Doctor’s Dog. Some people like shredded wheat; others religiously masticate their bran cereal. Still others like their corn flakes and can’t get enough of sugar and corn. For all its artistic qualities and pretensions, fiction is entertainment for the audience , which has no practical need to read it unless trying to understand a particular culture or pick up a literature degree. Like motion picture companies, brewers, automobile manufacturers, and everyone else in So Who Has Time to Read? Social Class and Crime Writing, Part 1 Crime&Mystery international j. madison davis photo : ronald grant archive / mary evans 10 worldliteraturetoday.org the business of selling consumer products, publishers (if not authors themselves) directly target defined audiences catering to their likes and dislikes and exploiting their interests. One of the clichés of publishing is that women read fiction and men don’t; however, surveys confirm the anecdotal truism. In an NPR interview, Carla Cohen, owner of the Politics & Prose bookstore in Washington, DC, said, “We see it every time in our store. Women head straight for the fiction section and men head for nonfiction.” Ian McEwan has said that without women, the novel would be extinct. The Harry Potter series is credited with having caused an uptick in boys reading, but many surveys show more women readers in every category of book except history and biography.* Even among the aging group of Western readers, there are more women than men. Naturally, then, publishers tend to seek novels that appeal to women in ways similar to the movie moguls who avoided scripts lacking female characters and romantic subplots. According to Hollywood legend, an executive once shouted out, “Where’s da goil?” at the end of an MGM prescreening , and a “goil” in love with the hero was spliced into the film. A novel manuscript perceived as having “goil” appeal is far more likely to get a contract. Some subgenres of the mystery (like the cozy) are pitched almost entirely to a female readership. But now even “tough guy” detective novels tend to have female sidekicks or other active female characters. Making the tough guy protagonist into a tough woman (in Sara Paretsky’s, Sue Grafton’s, and Marcia Muller’s novels, for example) has been said to have saved the hardboiled novel from its severe decline in the 1970s. Gender appeal is so commonly discussed as an aspect of different mystery genres’ marketability that it is almost taken for granted. Social class, however, is discussed much less often, although it is an obvious characteristic of the various subgenres of crime writing. Take the traditional, so-called “British” mystery. Who is more preoccupied with class issues than...

The third city: Chicago and American urbanism

Our traditional image of Chicago - as a gritty metropolis carved into ethnically defined enclaves where the game of machine politics overshadows its ends - is such a powerful shaper of the city's identity that many of its closest observers fail to notice that a new Chicago has emerged over the past two decades. Larry Bennett here tackles some of our more commonly held ideas about the Windy - inherited from such icons as Theodore Dreiser, Carl Sandburg, Daniel Burnham, Robert Park, Sara Paretsky, and Mike Royko - with the goal of better understanding Chicago as it is now: the third city. Bennett calls contemporary Chicago the third city to distinguish it from its two predecessors: the first city, a sprawling industrial center whose historical arc ran from the Civil War to the Great Depression; and the second city, the rustbelt exemplar of the period from around 1950 to 1990. third city features a dramatically revitalized urban core, a shifting population mix that includes new immigrant streams, and a growing number of middle-class professionals working in new economy sectors. It is also a city utterly transformed by the top-to-bottom reconstruction of public housing developments and the ambitious provision of public works like Millennium Park. It is, according to Bennett, a work in progress spearheaded by Richard M. Daley, a self-consciously innovative mayor whose strategy of neighborhood revitalization and urban renewal is a prototype of city governance for the twenty-first century. The Third City ultimately contends that to understand Chicago under Daley's charge is to understand what metropolitan life across North America may well look like in the coming decades.

The Sharpest Knives in the Drawer

Cooking is a gender marker. Just as the best chefs in the world are traditionally men, post-hard-boiled literary detectives such as Vazquez Montalban’s Carvalho, or Robert B. Parker’s Spenser are gourmet cooks, while George Pelecanos’s sleuthing protagonists were as often as not brought up in short order Greek diners and know their way around a kitchen. Walter Mosley’s Easy Rawlins is quite capable of putting together a nutritious meal for his family, as is James Lee Burke’s Dave Robicheaux. Sadly, in confirmation of the gender divide, the same cannot be said for women detectives. While Sara Paretsky’s V.I. Warshawski will reluctantly and with much griping put a simple meal on the table if absolutely forced to, Sue Grafton’s Kinsey Millhone and Linda Barnes’s Carlotta Carlyle would not be seen dead slaving over a hot stove and subsist mainly on takeaway pizzas and hamburgers. Indeed, Kinsey Millhone would probably have died of malnutrition halfway through the alphabet if it were not for her neighbour, Henry, a retired baker, who regularly supplies her with decent home-cooked meals. Authors such as Vazquez Montalban and Robert B. Parker delight in providing recipes for their readers which are lovingly put together by their protagonists (especially in Spenser’s case whose culinary prowess is consistently contrasted to his girlfriend’s utter inability even to slice an onion), or by their male friends. In 1999 Vazquez Montalban published Las recetas de Carvalho which achieved such popularity it was reissued in 2004 by Planeta. It is not known whether any women detectives or their authors might claim as much. Clearly something is afoot. The sharpest knives in the detectives’ kitchen drawers are wielded by men, their traditional solitary nature ensuring the broth remains unspoiled and the villains well grilled. Overcompensation for gender stereotyping by both sides would seem an easy, half-baked explanation. Is it really that simple?

Breaking the Silence: Sara Paretsky's Seizure of Ideology and Discourse in Blacklist

This article utilizes Althusser's theories on Ideological State Apparatuses [ISAs] and State Apparatuses [SAs] to examine Paretsky's novel Blacklist and identifies the author's social protest, tied specifically to post-9/11 federal-government incursions on civil liberties. Two plot lines, a contemporary, post-Patriot-Act murder and an historical, McCarthy-era crime, are linked by a shared ideological dominance of culture and politics. Paretsky's detective Warshawski is challenged by and defiant of both SAs, in the form of local and federal law enforcement agencies, and the ISAs of communications, culture, and politics. Warshawski resists both SAs and ISAs by seizing the discourse in interrogations by law-enforcement officials and by exposing the ideological corruption of American culture. In Blacklist , the cultural discourse drives and is driven by the ideology, and in both plots interpellation is used to compel the public to acquiesce to State and Ideological dominance. By these means both governmental and cultural hegemony are maintained, at the cost of truth and justice. Although the hardboiled-detective formula has a history of resistance to corruption in state and cultural mechanisms, we find in Paretsky's Blacklist a shift in the paradigm. Here, Warshawski opposes State Apparatuses whose corruption of the Constitution has been codified. Although Paretsky's detective does not find justice in America's post-9/11 world, the novel itself stands as the author's assertion that America's citizens must speak up against all convergences of State Apparatuses and Ideological State Apparatuses that eat at the core of democracy.

Masquerade, crime and fiction: criminal deceptions

Preface Acknowledgements Mocking Modernity Gender and Performance in the Criminal Masquerade The Cadaver as Criminalised Text Where does that Criminality Come From? Women in a Criminalising Modernity Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers and Sara Paretsky: The New Woman Masquerade, Criminality and Desire in Toni Morrison's Fiction Writing the Serial and Callous Killer into (Post) Modernity Conclusion Notes Index

V. I. Talks Back: Sara Paretsky's Unlikable Characters as Foes and Foils

V. I. Talks Back: Sara Paretsky's Unlikable Characters as Foes and Foils

Ruined Landscapes, Flooding Tunnels, Dark Paths: Sara Paretsky's Gothic Vision

Ruined Landscapes, Flooding Tunnels, Dark Paths: Sara Paretsky's Gothic Vision

Homeless Women and Social Justice in Sara Paretsky's <i>Tunnel Vision</i>

Homeless Women and Social Justice in Sara Paretsky's <i>Tunnel Vision</i>

Mythical Musical Connections: The Mother-Daughter Bond in the Work of Sara Paretsky

Mythical Musical Connections: The Mother-Daughter Bond in the Work of Sara Paretsky

Libraries and Sisters in Crime

Founded in 1986 by mystery author Sara Paretsky, Sisters in Crime (SinC) is devoted to promoting mysteries written by women. In 1991, in order to spread the word about SinC and its authors to libraries and librarians, SinC staged its first presence at the annual American Library Association. A SinC Library Liaison position was established to coordinate this effort. SinC also established Speakers' Bureaus to coordinate and encourage requests for SinC author appearances in libraries. At the same time, libraries have been important to the writing life of SinC authors and for the promotion of their books. From the beginning, SinC produced Books in Print of SinC authors' work to distribute to libraries, bookstores, and the general reading public, and this article discusses the relationship between libraries and bookstores in promoting and acquiring mysteries. It concludes with recommendations for stocking and developing a comprehensive mystery collection in libraries and promoting mysteries through readers' advisory work with all age groups.

Crime Fiction 1800-2000: Detection, Death, Diversity by Stephen Knight (review)

1076 Reviews Although forthe more general reader it is perhaps the two concluding sections that will be of most interest, given their emphasis on aspects of Orientalist critique that continue to attract sustained interest, the opening sets ofessays are remarkable in their attention to a rich body of Persian art (the book is well illustrated, with twenty-seven striking plates) and Arabie literature (ranging from the poetry of Hafez to contempo? rary chanson), both of which often tend to be ignored in studies of Western-generated 'Orientalist discourse'. As such, Nadia Ali's consideration of European influences on the aesthetics of the nude, Eloise Brac de la Perriere's exploration of recurrent androgyny in Persian art, and Laurent Bury's study of the impact of Western erotic images on the representation of indigenous women in the Arab world all operate in a contrapuntal relationship to the later essays on Western travellers and novelists. Se? veral of these contributions addressing travel writing, gender, and Orientalism adopt an ethnographic approach to their subject matter,acknowledging their primary focus on aristocratic perceptions of elsewhere. Marie-Elise Palmier-Chatelain accordingly provides a useful contrast to these in her study of women tourists in later nineteenthcentury Egypt, drawing on unpublished diaries to recover often muted travel stories. It is the finalsection in particular that contains a number ofconceptually sophisticated pieces?such as JenniferYee on Myriam Harry and Pierre Loti's use of stereotypes, Ai'da Balvannanadhan on shifting understandings of purdah, and Rita El Khayat's Foucauldian engagement with the seraglio and despotism?with a potentially wider applicability to Orientalist debates. With contributions from scholars operating in a range of fields?principally arthis? tory,literarystudies, sociology?the volume is genuinely interdisciplinary, suggesting that the study of Orientalism stretches beyond Said's own primarily literary cor? pus. In a concise yet convincing preface, the editors manage the divergence between their contributors' various approaches, describing an 'approche pluri-disciplinaire et "pointilleuse"' (p. 8). The fragmentary structure and disparate corpus mean that the book remains a sum of its parts, but these parts are still a welcome intervention in the field of Orientalist scholarship and a reminder that, with such a profusion of images and refigurings of the 'Other', any attempt at reduction of representations of elsewhere to a single model?what the editors dub 'une enieme theorie orientaliste (p. 8)?is itself bound to be flawed. University of Liverpool Charles Forsdick Crime Fiction 1800-2000: Detection, Death, Diversity. By Stephen Knight. Ba? singstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan. 2004. xv + 272 pp. ?14.99. ISBN 0-333-79179-7. Students and scholars of modern crime fiction seeking a comprehensive map find in Stephen Knight's Crime Fiction 1800-2000 a double bonus. For the work does more than survey the growth and diversifying of crime fiction. It also closely matches the up-to-date scholarship with the relevant texts or period. So those seeking analysis of Sara Paretsky, for example, will also find directions to the published criticism amidst the lucid contextualizing of her importance. Knight's paradigm for understanding the development of the genres is contained in his explanatory subtitle. The period up to around 1920 sees the establishment of the detective as the legendary figure empowered to stave offthe threat of disorder . This stage is followed by the widespread concentration of crime into murder, as the one act metonymically able to stand for ultimate transgression. The period after the Second World War sees the advent of diversity, in responding to the increasing political complexity of the postcolonial, post-feminist West. Now in the twenty-first MLR, 100.4, 2005 1077 century, Knight advances an intriguing thesis that postmodern crime writing, with all its ambivalence about truth and justice, may have worked itself back to the condition of the pre-'great detective' eighteenth century. Prior to the rise of the trusted figure, popular stories could not pretend that the rough justice enacted always corresponded with truth. Perhaps the fate of crime fiction constitutes another point of resemblance between the Romantic and postmodern eras. Crime Fiction 1800-2000 offers a 'disciplinary' perspective on the nature of the work by using Foucault's notion ofthe emergence of internalized...

From Chicago to Hollywood: the Metamorphosis of V.I. Warshawski

The passage from novel to film is often a difficult one. When it comes to feminist fiction, the problem becomes acute because the ideology of Hollywood combined with that of a male director find it hard to accommodate such a vision. Taking as an example Sara Paretsky’s crime fiction series, with its private detective heroine V.I. Warshawski, and Jeff Kanew’s adaptation for the Disney studios, the article attempts to show how the subversive elements of the novels are weakened in the film and the unconventional heroine finds herself in the eternal roles of seductress and mother, which she is not in the fiction. The body becomes object (for the male gazer), the woman is minimized in her enterprises through ridicule or cheap, sometimes gross, comedy. Fortunately, the film turned out to be a commercial failure.