SOURCE: “Watching Warshawski,” in It's a Print!: Detective Fiction from Page to Screen, edited by William Reynolds and Elizabeth Trembley, Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1994, pp. 145-56.

In the following essay, Klein asserts that the commercialization of Paretsky's character V. I. Warshawski in the film of the same name is the main reason the film fails to live up to the novels.

Hollywood Pictures’ V. I. Warshawski (1991) transforms plots in which Sarah Paretsky carefully weaves professional and personal stories, and where detection is a metaphor for living life, into a simplistic—and essentially unresolved—linear narrative. In the process, Paretsky's detective, V. I. Warshawski, is objectivized and fetishized from an independent, complex woman into a passive object of male desire.

Hollywood Pictures’ release of V. I. Warshawski starring Kathleen Turner did not prove to be one of the hot-weather blockbusters of the summer of 1991. In my neighborhood...