PEORIA -- Sara Paretsky, the internationally-known, award-winning mystery author and creator of V.I. Warshawski, the female 'Sam Spade,' delighted a Peoria audience on March 14 as she wove the history of the American detective novel with her own feminist detective fiction and real life adventures.
Paretsky spoke as an admirer and champion of Dashiell Hammett, whose 1930 novel The Maltese Falcoln is the Peoria Reads selection this year in the program sponsored by the Peoria Public Library. Her talk, to an audience of more than 100, was riveting and brilliant.
The elegant yet tough Paretsky, 62, author of 14 novels and other works, speaks up for free speech, and praised the librarians who have taken stands against the Bush administration's attempt to penetrate reader privacy.
"They have taken a strong stand for free speech and the lst Amendment. In Connecticut, librarians have gone to prison to protect the privacy of readers," she said.
"We owe them an enormous debt of gratitude."
Paretsky said she has loved Hammett's Maltese Falcon since she first read it 40 years ago, in a college course on popular culture. Sam Spade was a "hard and shifty fellow able to get the best of anybody."
He was straight from the tradition of the 'loner hero' in American fiction that began with Natty Bumpo in Cooper's Leatherstocking Tales, she said, and continues today in novels, film and television.
"All face their devils alone. They take justice into their own hands." Wives and children get in the way of heroism.
Hammett worked for a time as a detective before becoming a writer. He wrote The Maltese Falcon when he was 35 years old, became famous, served in both World War I and World War II then went to prison for six months rather than name names for the House UnAmerican Activities Committee. The FBI tried to ban his burial in Arlington National Cemetery, she said.
Paretsky's female detective heroine V.I. Warshawski "operates like Hammett in a world of passionate engagement," Paretsky said.
Like Sam Spade, she uses her understanding of human motivation to solve crimes.
She also stands in contrast to the typical female character in detective fiction, "the sexually alluring woman" who uses men to further her own aims then destroys them.
Or the other type of female, Hammett's Effie or 'Angel' Sam Spade's secretary who is described as "boyish" and not a "sexy or predatory female," and instead is naive, Paretsky said.
The character V.I. Warshawski came to her in 1978, Paretsky said, as she worked for a boss who bet other men in an insurance office that he could make a woman cry in a meeting.
She created V.I. Warshawski as a compete human being, she said, with a sex life who drinks whiskey, not white wine.
"She's a woman of action but her primary role is to speak. Her success is the willingness to put into words things most people want to remain unspoken," Paretsky said.
That takes courage, she said, as she learned when confronting audiences who didn't want to hear criticism of government.
Speaking to an Ohio audience who preferred noncontroversial fare from an author, "I thought of librarians who were on the front line of fighting for our civil liberties," Paretsky said. "It was a hard night."
-- Elaine Hopkins
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