Unlike sensible people, I came to the pleasures of detective fiction rather late. Once, when I was in a fallow state which made work impossible, a friend sent me some “crime fiction”. This was slightly better than “thriller”, a word that had kept me from the genre all my life. I dipped into a couple of the books and remembered why I disliked self-consciously thrilling crime fiction. The hero was a lone ranger who would be much improved by relocating to a city where he cannot get away from people. Worse, I felt tested from page 20 onwards — or even earlier if the book began with a dead body. Who is the perpetrator (or “perp”)? Either it was too easy, which made me impatient; or it was too hard, which made me feel the author was playing a malicious cat-and-mouse game with me.

Somewhere in that pile of borrowed books I discovered that this silly guessing game as well as the lone ranger could be bypassed. Detective fiction, like its literary relatives, can offer more complex pleasures. I made this discovery with the help of a book called Tunnel Vision by Sara Paretsky, the award-winning creator of the V.I. Warshawski detective novels. Tunnel Vision is complex — it takes on much more than one or two individual crimes. The ongoing crimes of our lives — homelessness, domestic abuse, financial frauds that involve powerful corporations and political institutions — are very much part of this novel, and not just as background either. They are an intrinsic part of the “criminal world” Paretsky’s investigator confronts; and while she uses “both wits and fists” against this world, her physical and mental derring-do is never more important than the palpable sense of justice that drives her.

Most of all, the female investigator, “V I”, is reassuringly human. When Paretsky introduced V I in Indemnity Only in 1982, she challenged the traditional tendency of mystery novels to allow females within their pages only if they were vamps or victims. V I is neither. V I knows her way around town; she can use her picklocks to get past a door, she can use her gun if she needs to. But she bruises when she is hit, she is afraid when she is in danger, and she definitely ages from book to book. She is fiercely independent, to the point of being prickly — especially when confronted with authority. But her memories and dreams limit her independence; she still misses her dead mother. She feels the same ambivalence most of us feel towards relatives, protective neighbours, demanding friends, even the much desired lover. It’s impossible to take them for granted, it’s impossible not to be exasperated by them.

To get to know Warshawski, her Chicago, her America, is to be aware of a person with a specific local history. The place she grew up in — the streets of Chicago’s southeast side, in the shadow of the old steel mills — has made her what she is, a survivor with a gut-level sense of right and wrong. The immigrant parents who brought her up, a Polish policeman father and an Italian mother whose musical ambitions were thwarted by dislocation and poverty, define who V I is, without taking away her individuality. Most important, the vision V I has — of an America that was supposed to be, that could be, permeates all her adventures. Her sense of justice, which could so easily become another instance of vigilantism, is rooted in her day-to-day involvement with real-life issues. These range from abused women to the relentless grabbing of all economic space by big conglomerates, to the paranoia and hatred fostered by the “war on terror”. V I’s feminism, or her strong sense of ideology, is accessible because it belongs to a practitioner, not a theoretician.

I have always suspected that it’s difficult to create such a sympathetic character without sharing something fundamental with her. And this was recently confirmed when I read Paretsky’s new collection of essays, Writing in an Age of Silence. The fundamental link is the earthbound passion for social justice that Paretsky and her detective share.

The essays trace what made Paretsky a writer, and how V I was born. Paretsky describes a childhood that was isolated despite four brothers and parents; she examines the constraints placed on a girl turning into a woman by the family and society she grew up in. Her parents are difficult and unbearably needy; and growing up in Kansas in the Fifties meant accepting that “everyone had a defined place… a world where white, Republican, Protestant male decision makers were so much the norm that any questioning of this standard produced an aggressive reaction”. Paretsky places personal details — without self-pity or prurience — firmly within this context. Her personal wealth consists of the love of language and literature she and her brothers learnt from their parents, as well as the importance of service for the public good.

Paretsky first came to Chicago in 1966 to do community service work in the neighbourhood where Martin Luther King was organizing. It was a time of fierce passions — fighting for racial justice, questioning the rights and wrongs of the war in Vietnam, debating women’s rights. The summer was a turning point in Paretsky’s life. She would come back to live in Chicago, and she had also found the pegs on which she could hang her life to move “from silence to speech”.

In retrospective, she writes, “I feel a fierce nostalgia for the sixties, a nostalgia like an insatiable hunger. Out on the streets, these were some of the ugliest times in American history, racism made naked for the whole country, indeed the whole world, to see. In the courts and the White House, these were some of the noblest moments.” (One of these moments refers to LBJ speaking to the nation about the centuries of harm inflicted by racism.) Having explored this history, as well as the traditions of political and literary dissent that have informed her life and work, Paretsky moves on, with anger and sadness, to “the unparalleled repression of free speech and thought in the US today”.

These essays never separate the personal and the political, just as life doesn’t. They are never faddish or shrill; Paretsky never poses as activist or intellectual. Together, they make up an honest, compelling look at a writer’s growth, her fears that “the community has been taken over by the unjust”, and what this means for the writer’s voice. Paretsky asks herself: If a writer’s journey is a “movement from silence to speech”, how is she to take her work to a world where the market, or public outrage, or government censorship can destroy her voice? Her answer voices the struggling liberal American position today: “I can’t stand idly by... I hate feeling powerless. I hate my detective to be powerless… She won’t die for her beliefs, she won’t be silenced, she won’t sell out her friends. That is the best I can offer her and my readers in the world of today.” V I, the detective with a mind and a heart, would understand this answer.