SOURCE: “A Question of Visibility,” in Women Times Three: Writers, Detectives, Readers, edited by Kathleen Gregory Klein, Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1995, pp. 15-27.

In the following essay, Kinsman discusses the relationship between the female writer, protagonist, and reader, focusing on Paretsky's character V. I. Warshawski.

Far away in London, where I have lived for more than twenty years—far away that is from Chicago, from a 1960s suburban Hinsdale adolescence, from my youth, from my American-ness—someone gave me a Sara Paretsky novel, with the off-hand view that I might like it, given my partiality for detective fiction and my American origins. What astonishes me now is that I can't remember which novel it was, who gave it to me, or indeed exactly when, six or seven years ago, it was. It seems as if I had never not read her, never not had access to...