On Friday August 30, 2024, the group discussed …..
Bitter Medicine by Sara Paretsky (1987)
BLURB: Private eye V.I. Warshawski finds herself up against rampant corruption in Chicago’s hospitals in the fourth of 23 novels in Sara Paretsky’s New York Times bestselling series.
Bitter Medicine features Chicago Private Investigator (PI) “Vic” Warshawski. Her name is Victoria, but she much prefers “Vic” or “V.I.” She has an office in downtown Chicago.
But as the book opens she’s in the suburbs hanging out with 16 year old Consuelo Alvarado. Consuelo is diabetic and pregnant and the daughter of a friend. Suddenly, Consuelo goes into premature labor. Vic and Consuelo are far from home, and Vic’s wild drive to get her to the hospital can’t save either Consuelo or her child. By the time Consuelo’s doctor, young Malcolm Tregiere, arrives, both she and her baby are dead at the local for profit hospital. V.I. assumes this is a tragic but unavoidable outcome, still, she is frustrated and starts investigating possible malpractice at the emergency room. However, when Dr. Tregiere is brutally murdered and V.I. begins to investigate in earnest, her work unleashes a trail of violence that leads her back to the hospital where Consuelo died. The trail of greed and violence the detective uncovers proves to be bitter medicine indeed.
Comments about Bitter Medicine
Bitter Medicine is a sweet read. Sara Paretsky keeps you guessing until the last minute.
— Rita Mae Brown
A dense, convincing, fast-moving plot, a dauntless but vulnerable heroine, a fine-tuned ear for real-life dialogue and a sharp eye for the Chicago scene. Superior stuff.
— The Kirkus Reviews
Paretsky, author of Indemnity Only, Deadlock, and Killing Orders (all featuring Warshawski), has established herself as a first-rate exponent of the hardboiled school of detective writing. She brings new meaning to the genre with her thoughtful work.
— Library Journal
This Book Fits Within These Types [Sub-Genres] of Crime Fiction:
Traditional Mystery; PI Novel
About the Author
Sara Paretsky revolutionized the mystery world in 1982 when she introduced V.I. Warshawski in Indemnity Only. By creating a detective with the grit and smarts to take on the mean streets, Paretsky challenged a genre in which women historically were vamps or victims. V.I. struck a chord with readers and critics; Indemnity Only was followed by twenty more V.I. novels. Her voice and her world remain vital to readers; the New York Times calls V.I., “a proper hero for these times,” adding, “to us, V.I. is perfect.”
While Paretsky’s fiction changed the narrative about women, her work also opened doors for other writers. In 1986 she created Sisters in Crime, a worldwide organization to advocate for women crime writers, which earned her Ms. Magazine’s 1987 Woman of the Year award. More accolades followed: the British Crime Writers awarded her the Cartier Diamond Dagger for lifetime achievement; Blacklist won the Gold Dagger from the British Crime Writers for best novel of 2004, and she has received the honorary degree of Doctor of Letters from a number of universities.
Called “passionate” and “electrifying,” V.I. reflects her creator’s own passion for social justice. After chairing the school’s first Commission on the Status of Women as a Kansas University undergraduate, Paretsky worked as a community organizer on Chicago’s South Side during the turbulent race riots of 1966. Since then, Paretsky’s volunteer work has included advocating for healthcare for the mentally ill homeless; mentoring teens in Chicago’s most troubled schools, and working for reproductive rights. Through her Sara & Two C-Dogs foundation, she also helps build STEM and arts programs for young people.
The actress Kathleen Turner played V.I. Warshawski in the movie of that name. Paretsky’s work is celebrated in Pamela Beere Briggs’s documentary, Women of Mystery. Today Sara Paretsky’s books are published in 30 countries.
Paretsky detailed her journey from Kansas farm-girl to New York Times bestseller in her 2007 memoir, Writing in an Age of Silence, which was a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist. In addition, Paretsky has written two stand-alone novels, Ghost Country, and Bleeding Kansas, set in the part of rural Kansas where Paretsky grew up. She has published several short story collections, most recently Love & Other Crimes, and has edited numerous other anthologies.
Like her fictional detective, Paretsky has an adored Golden Retriever. Like alto Warshawski, soprano Paretsky doesn’t work hard enough at her vocal exercises, but the two women share a love for espresso and rich Italian reds.
—– All of the above comes from the “About” page on Paretsky’s website.
That “one thing” takes up only two sentences in the brief bio she wrote on her own website (copied above), but it is huge!
Sara Paretsky was the organizing force that brought women together to create Sisters in Crime (SinC) in 1986. SinC is responsible for greatly improving the ability for women to “break in” to the publishing world and to become successful. It now includes more than 50 local chapters and at least 4,000 members.
In fact, Paretsky is referred to as the “mother” of SinC in their 30th anniversary history booklet (in 2017).
It was Paretsky that personally invited 26 women to meet at the 1986 Bouchercon World Mystery Convention in Baltimore to plot a path toward being treated as the equals of male writers. As Paretsky said, quoting a famous civil rights activist: “Don’t agonize; organize!”
They gathered again in May 1987 during the Edgar Awards Week in New York to formally establish the organization as Sisters in Crime. The group formed a steering committee and held the first membership meeting at Bouchercon in 1987, making Paretsky its first President, and establishing a tradition that continues.
From its inception, Sisters in Crime has sought equality for women who write crime fiction and the percentage of mysteries reviewed in the media by women authors is one indicator of how women writers are faring.
When the organizers met in the spring of 1987, the tiny number of women mystery writers getting reviews in the influential New York Times Book Review was a subject of discussion. At the 25th anniversary breakfast held at Bouchercon in St. Louis in September 2011, Paretsky recalled their finding that men were seven times more likely to be reviewed than women. She joked that male writers might have been twice as good as women writers, but surely not seven times better. The group drafted a letter and, though it was never acknowledged, the percentage of women writers reviewed in the New York Times rose.
Since then volunteer members of Sisters in Crime have tracked reviews in a variety of outlets, including local and national newspapers, magazines, prepublication book review sources, and magazines devoted to the mystery. Which books are chosen for review is only one metric for measuring equality, but it reflects the “buzz” around particular books and the amount of support publishers give their authors as they distribute review copies.
Learn more about Paretsky and SinC….
#1 By watching this interview with Paretsky done in 2017 (27 minutes)… but worth it!!
#2 By exploring the SinC website. ACCESS HERE.
#1 READ HER MEMOIR, WRITING IN THE AGE OF SILENCE (138 pp)
If you can make time, I very, VERY much recommend another book that Sara Paretsky published, Writing in an Age of Silence (2007). Especially if you have already finished her novel! It’s short, just 138 pages, (you can read most or all of it in one sitting!) – but does she pack a lot into it.
In Writing in an Age of Silence, Paretsky explores the traditions of political and literary dissent that have informed her life and work, against the unparalleled repression of free speech and thought in the USA today.
In tracing the writer’s difficult journey from silence to speech, Paretsky turns to her childhood youth in rural Kansas, and brilliantly evokes Chicago—the city with which she has become indelibly associated—from her arrival during the civil-rights struggle in the mid-1960s to her most extraordinary literary creation, the south-side detective V I Warshawski. Paretsky traces the emergence of V I Warshawski from the shadows of the loner detectives that stalk the mean streets of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler’s novels, and in the process explores American individualism, the failure of the American dream and the resulting dystopia.
Both memoir and meditation, Writing in an Age of Silence is a beautiful, compelling exploration of the writer’s art and daunting responsibility in the face of the assault on US civil liberties post-9/11.
She was born in 1947, and for most of her childhood, lived with her family in a rural town outside Lawrence, Kansas. Her father had moved the family there from New York when he obtained a position at the University of Kansas in the Bacteriology Department. She had four brothers. She describes being raised in an age when male superiority was everywhere and little girls were expected to grow up and be good mothers and wives, and little else. All of this was multiplied in the mid-west. An excerpt from pg. 11:
My family was not unique in seeing my future as limited. What was unusual was the isolation and constraint in which I grew up. My parents were highly educated, and highly literate. Education and devotion to the written word were perhaps their highest values. My father, who was a research scientist, could read Greek as well as German and Yiddish, and my mother was deeply and widely read in fiction and history.
But while they borrowed money to send my brothers to expensive schools far from home, they told me that if I wanted a college education, it would be at my own expense, and, further that they would not permit me to leave Kansas. I was a National Merit scholar, but they had so inculcated in me my low self-valuation that I acquiesced in both strictures. [Elsewhere she says that he wanted to choose the courses she took at the University of Kansas!! I believe she rebuffed that.]
When I finally started graduate work at the University of Chicago in 1968, my father told me not to be surprised if I failed, since it was a first-rate school and mine was a second rate mind. There are still days when that criticism starts to sink me, and I lack the energy to rise above it.
I cannot recommend this book enough! I learned so much about publishing developments in the last 30 years, valuable insights on the women’s rights movement, libraries and the Patriot Act, hurdles faced by women authors, and …. what really makes V. I. Warshawski tick.
Borrow free from the library: there are 3 copies in the MVLC catalog, but many more available through the Commonwealth catalog. Or purchase (I bought a Kindle copy for $7.99.)
#2 WATCH A DOCUMENTARY, WOMEN OF MYSTERY: THREE WRITERS WHO FOREVER CHANGED DETECTIVE FICTION (53 minutes)
First we read Nancy Drew, girl detective. Then what? Women of Mystery explores the writing lives of three authors (Sara Paretsky, Sue Grafton, and Marcia Muller) who started a literary revolution and, in the process, captured readers’ imaginations around the world. With V.I. Warshawski, Kinsey Millhone, and Sharon McCone, the female private eye entered the scene of detective fiction. Diving into the wilderness of the unknown, she saw what no one else had seen and told a new story.
Women of Mystery includes dramatizations that capture familiar characters and themes from the novels, engaging scenes with each author exploring her heroine’s home turf, and intimate interviews that reveal the complex relationship between author and heroine.
Two Paretsky quotes from the film:
“What those of us who are writing about women detectives are doing is extremely revolutionary. We’re providing speech for those who have long been silent.”
“I would say one of the signatures of my books is that the resolution of the crime very rarely brings a true sense of justice or punishment, if you will, for the offenders because the offenders are people with power, with money, with influence.”
Watch this documentary on the Kanopy web site free, simply by typing in your library card number: ACCESS THE FILM HERE.
#3 AUDIO INTERVIEW WITH SARA PARETSKY from CNN, The Axe Files with David Axelrod (57 minutes)
Although author Sara Paretsky grew up in Kansas, she said it was her summer in Chicago volunteering during the civil rights movement in 1966 that marked the “defining experience” on her life. Second wave feminism similarly influenced Sara, culminating in the creation of V.I. Warshawski, a stereotype-smashing, hardboiled, female private eye, who leads 22 of Sara’s crime novels. Sara joined David to talk about her family history, the recent rise in antisemitism, using her writing to give voice to the marginalized, the creation of V.I. Warshawski, and Sara’s work on abortion and women’s rights.
Axelrod is best known for being the chief strategist for Barack Obama’s presidential campaigns, and serving as Senior Advisor to the President during Obama’s first term. Axelrod wrote for the Chicago Tribune, and joined CNN as Senior Political Commentator in 2015. Until recently, Axelrod served as the director of the non-partisan University of Chicago Institute of Politics.
Listen to this podcast on the CNN web site free. Episode 561 — Sara Paretsky ACCESS THE AUDIO HERE.
