In rural Kansas where they ended up, and where the Paretskys' closest neighbour was 400m away, the family was completely alien.Īll the same, Paretsky has residual affection for Kansas, and fond memories of the two-room school house she attended, and the teachers who told her she was bright and could write. They were white, but still not white enough in a place where the most desirable residential areas were barred to African Americans and Jews.īut at least there were a few other Jewish families in Lawrence and an intellectual life that centred on the university. The Paretskys, Jewish but not particularly religious, were caught in the middle of what was then still a segregated town. It was not due to a hankering for open spaces. Her father was a microbiologist a native New Yorker who took up a position at the University of Kansas, in the city of Lawrence, when Paretsky was four.įive years later, the family moved out to the country, to a grand house five miles from Lawrence. Her husband, Courtenay Wright, now long-retired, was a physicist here. We're in a wood-panelled room hung with heavy curtains in the University of Chicago's faculty club. She admits, with some sadness, that she has given up on the high heels she loved because of age and a bad car accident last year. When we meet, she wears a well-cut, tweedy jacket and bright scarf. Paretsky is 60 now, with large, pale-blue eyes and VI's fondness for fine clothes and cappuccinos. Chicago is where I came of age and became a person, made a reputation for myself, and I didn't really want to go back to that," she says.
"Not everything about living in Kansas was difficult, but it was a difficult part of my life. It took nearly 40 years before she felt strong enough to return home on a journey of the imagination. In many ways, Warshawski is the personification of Paretsky's escape from rural Kansas for life in the big city. But now she has changed direction, revisiting the geography of her troubled childhood for the first time in Bleeding Kansas.įor fans of the orphaned, and rather solitary, Warshawksi, who usually hunts killers against the gritty backdrop of Chicago, Bleeding Kansas might seem alien territory, full of farm families working in sorghum fields, milking sheds and attending church. Twelve crime novels later, Paretsky is a worldwide bestseller.
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