posted on 24 Oct 2021

Indemnity Only by Sara Paretsky

Back in April 2021 I reviewed Sara Paretsky’s novel, Deadlock, which was the second outing for her now legendary female private eye, V. I. Warshawski. It was good enough to make me think that I’d like to read some more and I was prompted to get my hands on the first in the series, Indemnity Only because of a positively fulsome bit of praise from none other than a current star of the crime writing firmament, Val McDermid. In an article entitled The Book of a Lifetime written for The Independent in 2011, she nominates Paretsky’s first Warshawski novel as the book that forged her identity as a writer of crime:

“.. if I had to point to one book that had irrevocably changed my future, I would have to settle on Sara Paretsky's Indemnity Only.

It's the novel that unleashes her Chicago private eye V.I. Warshawski and it was an epiphany for me. She wasn't the first of the new wave of feminist detectives, but she was the one who stirred my imagination.”

I think that the qualities McDermid so admires – Warshawski’s fierce independence, her humour, her toughness and her refusal to compromise and not fall back on the clichéd feminine identities so beloved of the crime genre – are all here to see functioning at full throttle. It is, I think a more thrilling and sustained experience than in Deadlock which, in retrospect having now read the debut novel, feels like it loses some of the momentum created here.

Published in 1982, the book still feels very modern and its perhaps harder to see it now as the ground-breaking, genre-busting read it was back then. Paretsky doesn’t just transcribe the hard-boiled, urban thrillers of her male counterparts but creates a fully believable female protagonist of her own. Again McDermid puts it this way:

(Warshawski is) “..a woman with a brain and a sense of humour, a woman who was prepared to take a stand for the individual against the monoliths, a courageous fighter for the weak against the strong.”

What Paretsky does seem to like is a complex plot full of twists and turns – some of which you can anticipate and others that come from left field. She’s also not averse to some good dollops of violence that leave you mentally bruised and limping. At the heart of the story is an insurance swindle that puts both big corporations and corrupt union leaders in the frame. I’m not going to even try to uncoil the plot for you – there’s no point if you go off to read it yourself: the integrity of the plot is hugely important in novels like this and I don’t want to be the spoiler.

However, having said that, the complexity of the plot is in itself the biggest potential weakness here – terrible troubles seem to just keep mounting for Warshawski and the beatings and potential threat to life seem to test not just the detectives ability to keep going but also the likelihood of those around her remaining as sanguine as they seem to be despite mobster threats to rearrange not just their apartments but their faces too.

I know that detective novels are essentially escapist entertainment and are allowed to burst the boundaries of the credible but I am not necessarily sympathetic to plots that rely on the incredible and there are times when both goodies and baddies here behave in ways that stretch the possible right to the edge of the implausible.

But, in truth, these are minor quibbles and the book is a good, fast-moving read for any fan of the urban thriller/detectives genre. Paperback (and hardback) copies aren’t hard to find and they’re not expensive.

 

Terry Potter

October 2021