732 The American Century: Literature since 1945narrates her experiences just as the traditional, hardboiled hero does. As this and
the other Warshawski books, such as Deadlock (1984), Killing Orders (1985),
Blacklist (2003), and Fire Sale (2005) show, though, Paretsky entered the hardboiled
tradition in order to revise it. Her protagonist may be as sharply observant and
harshly reflective as the traditional private eye; the prose may crackle with the same
urgency; the same cool eye is cast on the grainy textures of everyday life and vital
revelations of character and motive. But this is a private eye, and private eye fiction,
with a difference. For one thing, Warshawski wryly distances herself from earlier
textbook heroes: “I’m no Philip Marlowe,” she observes in Tunnel Vision (1994),
“forever pulling guns out of armpits or glove compartments.” For another, she is
constantly concerned about her own toughness, worrying that her job diminishes
human connection. And she seeks, and finds, that connection not so much with men
of her own age – her sexual relations, even her brief, past marriage seem relatively
peripheral to her – but with an older male neighbor and, even more, with other
women. Her closest relation is with another older woman, Lotte Herschel. That,
perhaps, is one measure of Warshawski’s own sense of female solidarity. Very much a
child of the 1960s, she is constantly reflecting on the raw deal women still have
despite the women’s liberation movement in which she participated. She is also
constantly trying to help other women, in her capacity as private eye and through her
involvement in various causes and groups, such as a women’s shelter. The feminism
Paretsky embodies and expresses through her central character is neither narrow nor
shrill. Warshawski is an unsentimental, unself-pitying, acerbically intelligent
character with an ironic sense of humor as well as a keen eye for injustice. And the
wrongs to women Warshawski may uncover are always seen to be irrevocably tied to
a wider web of corruption. The specific crimes she investigates and solves are usually
committed to preserve or consolidate power and always relate to wider social
problems. The power may involve men but it is never definitively male; the problems
may involve women but they are never exclusively female.
What has been described as the first African-American detective story, The
Conjure-Man by Randolph Fisher, appeared in 1925. Thirty years later, Chester
Himes (1909–1984) published For Love of Imabelle (1957, reissued as A Rage in
Harlem (1965)), the first in a series of urban thrillers, resembling the police
procedural in form, whose main characters grew to be two African-American police
detectives, Coffin Ed Johnson and Grave Digger Jones. Himes had himself been in
prison for armed robbery. It was there that he became an apprentice writer. Once he
was released, he began writing novels that reflected his preoccupation with the
destructive power of racism (If He Hollers Let Him Go (1945)), his experiences in
prison (Cast the First Stone (1952)), and his own problems as an intelligent, sensitive
black man living in a world dominated by whites (The Primitive (1955)). “The
American black man is the most neurotic, complicated, schizophrenic, unanalyzed,
anthropologically advanced specimen of mankind in the history of the world,”
Himes wrote in the first volume of his autobiography, The Quality of Hurt (1972).
It was partly to escape the pain, the predicament outlined here, that he became an
expatriate. Leaving for Europe in 1953, he made only occasional trips back to theGGray_c05.indd 732ray_c 05 .indd 732 8 8/1/2011 7:31:42 PM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 31 : 42 PM