Sara Paretsky.

• Author: Rothschild, Matthew
• Position: THE PROGRESSIVE INTERVIEW - Interview

I'm not a voracious reader of detective novels, but I wanted to meet Sara Paretsky. She's the feminist crime novelist, based in Chicago, who is famous for her V. I. Warshawski series.

What impresses me about Paretsky's work is how engaged she is politically. Bleeding Kansas has a subplot about opposing the Iraq War. Blacklist , which came out in 2003, deals not only with McCarthyism but also with the assault on our civil liberties in Bush's post-9/11 America. "We were living in paranoid times," her alter ego writes in Blacklist .

She is even more explicit in her recent memoir, Writing in an Age of Silence. "It is hard not to feel despair," she declares, adding a little later: "I am tired. V. I. is tired, but we both need to get back on our horses."

This tall, thin woman in a gray plaid suit with a grayish white scarf to match her hair overflowed with real-life stories she's yet to put into print. She talked about a driver her publisher had once assigned to her, and what a nice man he was, though his entire family was in the mob. And she regaled me with stories about Bill Clinton, who has taken to sending her lengthy handwritten letters.

The weekend I talked with her, Paretsky received word that Writing in an Age of Silence was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.

Q: You mention being an organizer in Chicago in 1966 when Martin Luther King Jr. was there. What was that like?

Sara Paretsky: Organizer is kind of a grand term for what I was doing. I answered an ad that the Presbyterian Church of Chicago put up on college campuses. I was at the University of Kansas, and it's somewhat relevant to my life and work that I'm a Jew. But they weren't doing a religious litmus test. They wanted energetic, civil-rights-committed college students to come help them run some summer programs. This was a very progressive group of clergy who foresaw the race riots that were going to take place when Dr. King started helping the local civil rights community push for open housing. They were sort of hoping against hope that we could educate kids in a way that could counter some of the racist messages they were imbibing at home. I don't know whether we did any good, but it changed my life in every single way.

Q: How?

Paretsky: I had a fantasy as a child that I might be a writer someday. I always thought that meant you went to New York or Paris. But after that intense summer, I never thought that I wanted to live any place but Chicago. It also made...