Tough Chicago

V.I. Warshawski, the hard-boiled woman investigator and narrator in the mystery series by Sara Paretsky, sometimes seems to turn Spenser on his head. While her violence is much more graphic and pervasive than Parker's, Paretsky's food descriptions are aggressively unpretentious. Also throughout the stories, V.I.'s doctor friend Lotty, a stereotyped Eastern-European Jewish nurturer, often feeds her while helping her heal miraculously fast from her war wounds. Meals mark the passage of time in the stories as well, and point up that a human being with a human appetite is behind the super-womanly deeds of V.I.

V.I. is a terrible cook and housekeeper: "The refrigerator didn't have much of interest," she says at one point in Deadlock, so after her early morning 5-mile run, she reports: "I drank orange juice, showered, and had some fresh-ground coffee with a hard roll and cheese. It was seven-thirty." (p. 48) During this investigation V.I. is so absorbed in detecting that she sometimes skips breakfast altogether:

• It was three in the afternoon and I hadn't eaten. ... I went into the Sport, a little bar and grill . . . , for a turkey sandwich. In honor of the occasion I also had a plate of french fries and a Coke. My favorite soft drink, but I usually avoid it because of the calories. (p. 224)

V.I.'s refrigerator is often bare; it's one of the insistently repeated clues about her personality and her obsessive dedication to investigating. Sometimes she has to settle for a peanut butter sandwich; more often, for spaghetti. When she has the opportunity, though, V.I. does appreciate the finer things, and enjoys steaks, fine wine, or smoked salmon at a restaurant or good sherry in the home of an upscale investigative target. The overall function of food in these stories is to show how she rejects the excessive sophistication of others, and thus how her author recasts the excesses of other detective writers.

Check out Mae Sander’s blog: MAEFOOD.BLOGSPOT.COM

See what Sara Paretsky has to blog about at The Outfit.