Murder For Love

sara paretsky

Whether it's wanted or not, or whether it's fair, or appropriate, or pleasing to the subjects, some authors cannot be mentioned without another coming to mind. Ham-mett and Chandler. Sayers and Christie. Paretsky and Grafton.

One of those odd confluences of timing and circumstance brought two books to the world in the same year-1982: Indemnity Only and "A" Is for Alibi. Only those few years ago, now seemingly another lifetime, and the strong, independent, female private eye awakened half the readers in America to want books about V. I. Warshawski and Kinsey Milhone and their literary progeny (and the other half to write them, it seems).

Yes, Marcia Muller created Sharon McCone nearly a decade earlier, and P. D. James demonstrated that Cordelia Gray was the equal (or more) of any male gumshoe, but it was the combination of Grafton and Paretsky that catapulted the female detective into the most popular and widely read character of the 1980s, an appetite that has not diminished to the present day.

This is not a V. I. Warshawski story, but one that reveals a hitherto unknown talent on the part of the much acclaimed mystery writer: had she set her sights in a different direction, she could have been a highly successful writer of Harlequin Romances. (This, in case you didn't get it, is a joke.)

– O. P.