Announcer:
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Welcome to Modern Signed Books. If
you're interested in what makes your favorite authors tick, then you'll love
hearing what they have to say in our interviews. Learn how they got started
writing, the books and authors that inspired them, and much more. Meet
today's hottest authors, as they discuss their lives and writing with our
book specialist, Rodger Nichols. And don't forget to pick up a copy of your
favorite books at vjbooks.com.
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Here's Rodger.
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Rodger Nichols:
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Welcome to Blog Talk Radio. I'm
your host, Rodger Nichols.
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Our guest today is one of the
premier mystery writers in the world, Sara Paretsky. Creator of the amazing,
hard-boil female detective, V.I. Warshawski. She's one of only four living
writers, along with Sue Grafton, John le Carre, and Lawrence Block to receive
both the Grand Master Award from the Mystery Writers of America and the
Cartier Diamond Dagger from the Crime Writers Association of Great Britain.
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Her latest is Fallout, and takes
Vic and the irrepressible golden retriever Peppy out of their customary
Chicago scene into Lawrence, Kansas, on the trail of a film student and faded
movie star who appear to have vanished. But there's much more going on
involving an abandoned missile silo, a secretive agribusiness giant, U.S.
Army, a right-wing patriotic group, and a town with a lot of hidden secrets
that V.I. painfully unearths as the body count rises.
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We're very pleased to welcome, Sara
Paretsky. Good morning.
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Sara Paretsky:
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Good morning. It's good to be--
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Rodger Nichols:
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This may be some more personal book
than many of the others because it takes you back to where you grew up.
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Sara Paretsky:
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Yes, I grew up in eastern Kansas
and came to Chicago as a young adult. V.I. Warshawski, my detective, was born
and raised here and I send her back to my hometown. She's going in pursuit of
a missing actress, who also grew up in Lawrence and had wanted to go back to
film her origins story. She's disappeared and anxious friends and family hire
V.I. to try to find her. It ends up being sort of a journey into my own past,
into the history of my hometown and its connection to the anti-slavery
movement and then the turbulent racial history of the '70s. So it kind of
gave me a chance to explore my own origins.
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Rodger Nichols:
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There's a nice tribute to your
father, the microbiologist as well, and at one point in the book you list him
among a group of people that are famous from the University of Kansas. I
thought that was very nice touch.
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Sara Paretsky:
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Oh, thanks. I'm glad you noticed
that. Actually his photograph is a tiny one in the middle of a collage of
photos on the ground floor of the cell biology building, so I have V.I.
looking at him.
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Rodger Nichols:
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Yeah, it's really nice. And you
mentioned in, I think it's the introduction, that the story has its origin in
a conference your father attended in Bratislava. Did that make it easier or
harder to write the book?
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Sara Paretsky:
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He did something that has haunted
me over the years. He went to Bratislava for a conference on the organism he
worked on, the rickettsia, which causes things like typhus, Rocky Mountain
spotted fever, and so on. The Russians were trying to weaponize it, and he got
a Czech scientist to inject him with a strain they were working on, so that
he could bring it home to study it. He got off the plane in Kansas City with
a fever of 104, but he wouldn't start antibiotics until his lab tech came and
took a blood sample from him to culture.
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And I've never really known why he
did it. I don't know if he did it for the U.S. Army and wasn't allowed to
talk about it, if he did it because he was a kind of a guy who liked to flout
authority and he wanted to show that he could smuggle it past the Russians,
who hadn't wanted him to come in the first place.
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I just, I'll never know. But it
actually, I ended up not being able to write that story. So I guess going
back and trying to look at my real family history, or at least my dad's
history, was a higher hill to climb than I had anticipated.
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Rodger Nichols:
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You also of course are taking V.I.
out of her native Chicago and putting her in an unusual situation, and one of
the things about, when you're writing a series character, you develop a whole
cast of secondary characters that help fill in, they're familiar to the
readers and whatnot. And here though there are some aspect of them, most of
them are not present, except of course for Peppy.
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Sara Paretsky:
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Yes, that also proved very hard for
me as I had her down there in Kansas on her own, except for her loyal dog.
Peppy actually plays a couple of critical roles in the story, which would be
spoilers if I said what they were.
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Rodger Nichols:
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Right.
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Sara Paretsky:
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Just say that, I realized when I
sent her on the road with V.I., that old bromide of Chekhov's, that if
there's a gun in act one it has to be used in act three. I knew that the dog
had to do something, and she rose to the occasion with all the nobility of
the true golden retriever.
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It was very challenging for me as
the writer to fly blind as it were, so that there weren't the people, the
bartender, the doctor, the downstairs neighbor, and so on, for V.I. to turn
to.
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Rodger Nichols:
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There's this great line in here where
you write that, "Golden retrievers are so honest and trusting, you have
to tell them when you're being ironic." I love that line.
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Sara Paretsky:
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Thank you! It is true, that my dog
just looks at me and says, "No, that isn't right!"
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Rodger Nichols:
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"You're messing with me
again!" Yeah, there you go.
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Sara Paretsky:
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Okay.
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Rodger Nichols:
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There's also a line that I wanted
to ask you about, because it's always danger, of course, in impute the
feelings of the character with the feelings of the author. But, at one point
you write that, "It seemed disconcerting to have my head in Chicago and
my body in a field, as if I were inhabiting two unconnected universes at the
same time." I'm wondering that's just a little bit of the author here
being a fish out of water, putting your character out of water a bit.
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Sara Paretsky:
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Yes, I suppose it's an experience
that I often feel myself. I often feel that I'm an outsider to other people's
experiences, and especially when I am transitioning between going back to see
friends and family [inaudible 00:07:12] hometown versus my life in Chicago. I
never feel that I belong wholly to one or the other.
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Rodger Nichols:
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V.I. questions herself a lot too.
She has doubts; she berates herself for things, so ... And I'm thinking that
makes her much more rounded a character than just, you know, the Sam Spade
tough character that just doesn't ever have to doubt.
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Sara Paretsky:
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I think that ... It's a tricky
thing because when you're writing a longstanding series, as I am, and Fallout
is the 18th book in the series, and it's in the first person, it's very hard
not to have your own kind of fears and anxieties bleed into the character.
I'm glad it makes her seem more rounded, but I've felt lately that I was
giving her way too many of my own fears and second-guessing and self-doubts.
And I don't really know how to pull her back from that, but I think I should.
I think I should be getting more intrepid and reckless, instead of her
getting more anxious and self-doubting.
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Rodger Nichols:
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Oh, the interaction between a
longstanding character and the author yourself is a really strong one, isn't
it?
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Sara Paretsky:
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You know, V.I. is ... It's a voice
that I love picking up when I have been away from writing about her. And I do
other writing; I have sometimes written books that, I have written two novels
not in this series, but I'll do short stories that aren't in this series or I
write essays or op-ed pieces. And, when I come back to her, that voice is a
very welcome voice to pick up and take on.
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Rodger Nichols:
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I can see that. It feels
comfortable. And, as a reader, it feels like you're very comfortable with
her. And I don't always see through to you, but I see her, and I see her as a
very standalone and wonderfully complex and intriguing character so, you have
done well.
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Sara Paretsky:
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I'm glad that she comes across that
way; that's really wonderful to hear. Thank you.
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Rodger Nichols:
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I have to just, in the few minutes
remaining to us, I want to go behind the scenes a little bit and find out, if
you don't mind, what you're working on now. Because I know that the lag time
between when you finish it and when you have to go on tour to promote it is
quite some time.
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Sara Paretsky:
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Right! I'm in the beginning phases
of a new book. I had gotten to page 100, saw that the story was not working
the way I wanted it to, and threw it all out right before I went on tour. But
I had wanted the Oriental Institute, the Middle Eastern history museum on the
University of Chicago campus is one of the museums that the Department of
Defense shares satellite imagery with so that they can help track when
archeological sites in the Middle East are being looted, and I kind of want
to tell a story about a billionaire hedge-fund manager, perhaps he rubs Cheetos
into his hair to color it, I don't know, but who is spending money as
billionaires like to do on stolen artifacts so that he has bragging rights
among his fellow billionaires about what he's got. But that money actually
goes to fund ISIS.
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I kinda want to write around that,
in that vein, but I can't quite figure out how to do it, since I don't know
anything about archeology. That is my challenge, to learn enough to write in
18 months what people spend 80 years trying to master.
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Rodger Nichols:
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I think you probably have some good
friends or connections that would be delighted to share their experience with
you. Somehow that seems-- [crosstalk 00:11:07]
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Sara Paretsky:
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Well I am stealing everything they
know, you better believe that!
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Rodger Nichols:
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Well, that is absolutely
fascinating and fantastic. Is there anything that you always wanted an
interviewer to ask you that they never have?
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Sara Paretsky:
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Oh my goodness. Boy, I'm sure there
is; I can't think of it off the top of my head. I always wanted to be a
ballerina, but I don't have the body or the grace to do it. I took dancing
lessons as a child, and it broke my heart when the teacher used to make fun
of me for being chubby and unable to move like the other girls.
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Rodger Nichols:
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Oh.
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Sara Paretsky:
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So I had to turn to writing fiction
instead.
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Rodger Nichols:
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And that loss in the world of
ballet is a great achievement for the rest of us in the world. We thank you
so much for being so cool.
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Sara Paretsky:
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Thank you very much. Thank you for
reading the book so carefully; I am very honored by that.
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Rodger Nichols:
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Oh, how can you respect the author
if you don't do that?
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Our guest this morning has been
Sara Paretsky. She is a delightful person. Her latest is Fallout, highly
recommended. Thanks so much for giving us so much time this morning.
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Sara Paretsky:
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Thank you so much!
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