Sara Paretsky: Collaring White Collar Crime

White collar crime can get dirtier than anything done in the heat of passion. Just ask V. I. Warshawski or her creator Sara Paretsky. In every book, greed and profiteering lead to murderous impulses every bit as lethal as those born of emotional trauma or congenital madness.

In Hard Time, Paretsky’s first V. I. Warshawski mystery in five years, V. I. finds herself imprisoned for a crime she didn’t commit so that a communications giant can safeguard one of its more valuable “properties.” The mystery turns a search light on several key Paretsky themes: the far-reaching tentacles of corporate crime, the condition of American prisons and the state of the nation’s media. Shortly before her October 13 reading at the Bailey’s Crossroads, Va., Borders Bookstore, Paretsky talked to Crescent Blues about how themes and book came together, and where Paretsky and V. I. will go from here.

Crescent Blues: Your first V. I. Warshawski book, Indemnity Only, dealt with a workers compensation fraud scheme between an insurance corporation and a union. Did you ever work in insurance?

Sara Paretsky: I spent almost ten years working for a large insurance company. I was always in marketing or marketing-related functions, but I’d also been providing support work for our claims department and the investigators. Whether they’re insurance investigators or police or fire investigators, they always seem to be people who, with a nudge in a different direction, could have become criminals themselves. They’re fascinated by the crimes they investigate.

Our claims guys would sit around talk about great frauds they would have perpetrated had they been masterminding instead of investigating them. They always had ideas about how they would commit fraud and never get caught. I believe thinking that way makes good investigators. I never knew anyone who did anything illegal in the company I worked for, but I certainly drew heavily on the claims guys’ stories when I was writing Indemnity Only.

All your subsequent books in the V. I. series have dealt with large corporations or organizations which V. I. confronts, solving murders and revealing criminal practices of these entities. Was this route intentional?

I wanted V. I. to specialize in white collar crime, partly because my long history in the business world — almost 15 years, most of them with CNA Insurance in Chicago. So, it was a milieu I knew something about. Also, white collar crime hardly ever appears as a backdrop in crime novels. [The genre] is very often [focused on] highly personal stories: missing persons, entanglements or the violent school with a lot of random shooting. White collar crime can be — It’s insidious, it’s widespread. If you have a hundred billion dollars at your disposal, you can inflict so much more damage than someone who’s shooting a Saturday night special on the street. So I chose to set the series against that backdrop.

You heavily research your subjects.

I try to do really careful research. I’ve always been a big reader of crime fiction. I did a Ph.D. in history at the University of Chicago a hundred years ago or so. The month before I took my doctor’s exams, I read 24 crime novels and I still managed to pass. I’m sure it’s because I read a lot of English crime novels, which included a lot of poetry, history and other subjects I needed to know [for my exams]. Now I feel an obligation to other students who ought to be reading their weighty tomes, but instead sneak one of my novels into the library. I think I might help the students pass their exams if I get the details right.

What period of history did you focus on for your Ph.D.?

Well, my Ph.D. was in American Intellectual History, but my minor fields were Tudor/Stuart Puritanism and Victorian Science.

Did you ever teach in these fields?

No. Actually, I taught for the first time last fall as a visiting professor of writing at Northwestern University in Evanston, outside Chicago. When I got my degree, the academic job market was really ferocious. That’s when I retooled myself and became a corporate person.

How did you feel as a corporate person, and how have you put your experience in the V. I. mysteries?

Corporate life, a large corporation, fills some need for people. I’m not sure what it is. Whether it’s a sense you belong to something bigger than you, a mortal, and you belong to something immortal, although corporations come and go.

I observed two characteristics at the company — there were many features I observed, but I didn’t take notes, which I bitterly regret, because I’ve forgotten a lot, being away so long. First, people have an enormous need to be close to the source of power, which in a corporation is the chief executive officer. You see a tremendous amount of vying, backstabbing and politicking for no other goal than to be close to the chairman. This objective seems to be a human need, but, ohhhhhh, is this behavior you really want to be doing?

The other aspect is the organization’s assuming an existence more important than its employees’ lives. Many — most if not all the corporate employees who work there take on this value. Also, I think one of the big changes in the last 15 or 10 years has been the enormous amount of conglomeration and the way that people’s jobs have been destroyed. It’s emotionally unsettling for people who were giving unconscious devotion and allegiance to this entity. It’s unnerving to have your job taken out from under you.

I’m not sure I’ve ever been able to use these circumstances as the backdrop of a novel, but in a way they underlie the crimes that V. I. ends up investigating. The crimes are always the actions taken to further the good of the company or the individual profit of a major officer of the company. [The crimes] are for the good of the company and the bad of the individual.

For instance, in Hard Time two movements come together. One is the way in which the entertainment industry has gobbled up the news industry, turning news into entertainment. V. I.’s long-time friend and rival Murray Ryerson, an investigative reporter throughout the series, changes when his newspaper is bought by Global Entertainment, a big multimedia, Hollywood outfit. Global has no interest in investigative reporting. Murray’s not fired, but he can’t do investigative journalism. So he reinvents himself into a soft news person, hosting a television show for Global.

In fact, my first on-air interview for the book was with a friend who works for a news station. I was at the station watching her. This station always conducted hard-hitting investigative reporting, but they’re now part of a media conglomerate. So she’s reading movie star horoscopes on the air. It’s really, really hard, I think, for journalists now, and it’s hard for viewers because we don’t know whether we’re getting news or some multi-conglomerate’s idea of what it wants us to know. There are no really good ways an individual can get good news. It’s not on the Web because that’s just a nest of rumors and gossip and unsubstantiated stuff. So this theme is in Hard Time.

Our country incarcerating as many of our citizens as it can is the other thread and comes together [with the media conglomerate theme] through the prison industry. When researching the book, I read about a woman in Alabama. This woman, a bookkeeper, was arrested for possession of five grams of cocaine. She was a mother. She had a job. She had a family. Because of the mandatory minimum, she’s doing 30 years for her first offense, possession of five grams of cocaine. Thirty years minimum without parole. Beside the fact that I find this case outrageous, I think it’s a perversion of justice.

Additionally, there you’d be, behind bars, doing your 30 years — you’d go insane with boredom. I think boredom would be the biggest problem in prison next to the violence. So she’s gotten a job as a bookkeeper with a hospital supply company that runs all its production behind bars.

So, on the one hand I’m thinking, “OK, I see her point, this job is something to do during these 30 years.” At the same time, however, I’m thinking, it’s too easy to violate prisoner workers’ rights when you operate an industry behind bars. Right now, this practice amounts to approximately $9 billion — a drop in the corporate bucket, but the trend is growing rapidly. Also, you’re undermining and corrupting the job market for individuals outside the prison walls because you’re employing prisoners to whom you don’t even have to pay minimum wage.

You’re also creating competition for people who are trying to pay rent, mortgages, clothe children and [pay for] other necessities, who don’t have health care, and so on. I see both sides. If I was in prison, I’d absolutely want a job; yet at the same time I’m really uncomfortable with the way the prison industry operates.

You mentioned in the “Thanks” section of Hard Time that you talked to a professor about Illinois prisons and an attorney who described treatment of inmates. Did you actually go to any prisons?

I did not. Funnily enough, now that the book is out and people have seen it, I’ve hooked up with someone who will get me into prisons for guest appearances and some of the Illinois prison literacy programs. I tried several times to get in but wasn’t very skillful in how I went about it. You can’t go undercover. The prison officials take your social security number and perform a background check on you. These people are very leery about letting writers in because they’re concerned how the story gets told.

I met with women who had done time in Illinois prisons. They were definitely people who were not saying, “Oh, I was railroaded.” They did the crime; they did the time. They described the day-to-day on living conditions.

I also worked with a couple of attorneys who prepare pleadings for women in prison. They’re not defense lawyers; they’re not handling the defense, the crime was irrelevant. These attorneys help women bringing charges against corrections officers for rape, sexual assault, battery and sexual harassment. These [actions] are pervasive throughout America, throughout the state prison system. It is horrifying to know that in America the most voiceless and the most helpless members of society are being treated to a daily, hourly barrage of degradation. It’s thoroughly documented in The Human Rights Watch Report I refer to in the acknowledgments.

So, when V. I. goes behind bars in Hard Time, she goes to prison, she’s arrested on a false charge —

Having to do with the “kidnapping of the son — “

— of the head of a big security firm. When she actually goes behind bars, she realizes that the answers to everything bedeviling her in this story are in the prison. At the novel’s beginning, as she’s driving back from a party celebrating her friend Murray’s move into television, she swerves and totals her car (beloved Trans Am) to avoid hitting a woman lying in the road.

To her bewilderment, her chance encounter with this woman catches her up in the security net Hollywood has thrown around one of its mega-stars. [This incident also] brings her into head-to-head confrontation with the owner of a large multinational provider of security services, including the building and running of private prisons and many other security functions.

V. I. lands behind bars on this false arrest over a 4th of July weekend. She isn’t able to post bail for 72 hours. She realizes during this 72 hours the answers to all these puzzling and really terrifying situations she’s been involved in lie there in Coolis Prison for Women, a fictional prison. So V. I. foregoes bail and spends the toughest month of her life behind bars to sort out what’s gone wrong. She experiences first-hand the powerlessness and the voicelessness of the prisoners.

Those were the most difficult chapters I’ve ever written. They were painful to write. I kept putting it off; kept thinking, “Well, maybe I can weasel around this without having her go to prison.” But I couldn’t. Finally, I had to do it. They were hard to write, and they’re very hard to read, still.

Showing such inhumanity through literature leaves a very intense impression on people.

Well, I think any time you tell a human story, whether it’s fictional or true, we really respond, because we can identify with the humanness. In Hard Time, V. I. does what we want our heroes to do in the West. She makes a journey, really, to the heart of darkness. She suffers those things everyone I’ve ever talked to intimately has a deep-seated fear they cannot stand up to — great physical and moral challenges.

V. I. does what I fear I would not be able to do. She does it for me. She achieves what we expect of our heroes. She makes that journey, she takes the risks, she takes the abuse, and she shows you can emerge from the other side of this kind of extreme situation with a way of becoming whole and being fully human. So I think of Hard Time as cast in [the mold of] the classical heroic quest novel of the West.

Did you think of going to prison yourself?

No, I couldn’t imagine how to arrange it, and I always think that kind of thing — It doesn’t sit well with me. When I wrote Ghost Country, set in the homeless world, I would never have pretended to be homeless, just to experience life on the streets. I would have been scared for one thing, but for another I think it’s very insulting to people who actually are homeless to pretend to take on an experience. Even if you’re there, how can you possibly know? You always know, even if you went through the sleep deprivation and the cold and all those experiences of the homeless, you still know that, at bottom, you have a place to go back to. I think it would be very insulting.

V. I. had an affair with an African-American police officer. I had heard there was some outrage about this. Just how much was there?

There was a very modest amount of outrage. I got some hate letters. I was told that Reader’s Digest would have bought the novel for serious money if I would change the interracial affair, so that really set me back on my heels.

You’re like V. I. then, you stuck to your guns. What made you decide to have V. I. have an interracial affair?

Well, it wasn’t [intentional]. A lot of times I don’t plan my stories in advance, and that works well for me because the characters unfold and grow out of the needs that the story then presents — the story comes instead of the story being imposed.

Conrad Rawlings, the cop that you refer to, first appeared in my fourth book, Bitter Medicine. I felt this strong erotic charge between him and V. I. But I backed away from it because I felt that the black experience is something hard for a white person to understand or write about. I wasn’t sure that I could do justice to a black character. But then he just seemed like a good guy for her, and he came back in the seventh book, Guardian Angel. They started their affair and I really thought he was the right guy for her. He had the right sense of humor; they both had blue-collar backgrounds.

But as I began writing Tunnel Vision, the eighth book, I realized that for a cop and a P.I. to have an affair, at least in my world, didn’t work. So it wasn’t the inter-racialness of it; it was the inter-law-officerness of it. Either he’s going to say, “Oh, honey, you’re right. This is a really serious problem and I’ve got ten thousand men and women in blue who can jump on it” — in which case there’s no book. Or, there’s going to be conflict over the police involvement or what V. I.’s doing and what the police think she ought to be doing. There’s going to be conflict and, as you know, V. I. is a street fighter. When there’s conflict with V. I., it’s lethal. I wasn’t planning for that relationship to be destroyed, but that’s where the story took me.

Do you have in mind your next V. I. novel and what white collar crime she’ll be fighting?

The next book will focus much more on Lotty Herschel, V. I.’s long-time friend and mentor. Lotty’s been carrying around a secret for many, many years and it’s time it was told.

There are two things I need for a book. One is a milieu, and one is a story. The story is for me the most important part, because that’s the humanness of it. I can’t write a book until I have characters who are alive, doing things that I care about. In Hard Time, the finished book was my fifth attempt to tell the story. It wasn’t until I created young Robbie Baladine that I had a character who could both carry the story where it needed to go and whose well-being I cared enough about that I wanted to go on that journey with him.

With the book I will be working on, I have the opposite problem. I have the characters and I know their stories really well. I keep thinking more and more about them, but I don’t have the milieu and the crime. Usually it’s the other way around, but in this case I’m really fishing. As I’m traveling around the country, I keep reading the financial pages, looking for that perfect crime.

Do you think V. I. will ever take on Bill Gates, in the generic sense? Will V. I. take on the computer industry, which really does eat up people’s lives?

It’s a very alien world to me. It seems so incomprehensible to me that there isn’t a way for me to think about it. Maybe some aspect of it will come more into focus for me, and I’ll feel that I can grab hold of it and understand it, but right now that isn’t on the cards because it’s so opaque to me.

Lynn I. Miller

When not practicing public interest law in Washington, D.C., Lynn I. Miller reviews books and movies for Crescent Blues. She lives with her husband and two cats, “Q” and Gracie, and enjoys a symbiotic relationship with her donor heart.

Click here to learn more about Sara Paretsky.

Sara Paretsky: Collaring White Collar Crime

Selected Works