ONCE upon a time, Sara Paretsky was an insurance company manager who daydreamed about writing a novel. Not just any novel, either — but the kind of crime fiction she wanted to read.
“Michael Lewin’s Bernie Sampson was the first of the softer-boiled noir detectives who made me think there’s a place here not just for women, but for someone who isn’t as hard-edged as the Spensers and Sam Spades,” she tells The Post’s Barbara Hoffman.
So the Ames, Iowa, native sat down and created V.I, Warshawski, a hard-drinking, fast-driving detective from Chicago, Paretsky’s adopted city. Twenty-five rejection letters later, “Indemnity Only” bowed in 1982. A dozen more novels and a Kathleen Turner film later, “Hardball” — the 13th book in a series whose fans include Bill Clinton — rolls out Tuesday. Here’s what’s in Paretsky’s library.
The Thirteen Clocks, by James Thurber
My mother bought it for my ninth birthday because the heroine’s name was Sara (actually Saralinda). It’s a beautifully written fable, the language used with suppleness that speaks to adults as the storyline does to children. Especially wonderful: the Todal, sent by the devil to punish evildoers for not being sufficiently evil!
The Long Winter, by Laura Ingalls Wilder
Midwestern girls didn’t get too many books written about them. I loved the warmth of the family . . . you think about what that life was probably like in reality, the hardships and how isolated it was, but the way the family supported each other made you wish you had the chance to live through it, too.
Gilead, by Marilynne Robinson
As close to a perfect novel as I’ve ever read. It’s told by a Calvinist minister who’s thinking back on his life — this is the memoir for the son he has to leave behind. I was writing a novel also set in the prairie when I read [Robinson’s first chapter] in the New Yorker and felt, Why am I even bothering?
The Tiger in the Smoke, by Marjory Allingham
I love Marjory Allingham, one of the so-called Golden Age writers, who kept exploring the mystery while writing about a series character, Albert Campion. This book, set in post-war London, is pitch-perfect for place, London in the middle of one of its famous pea-soupers, with a psychopathic killer on the loose.