V.I Warshawski book launch at the JPL cancelled

On Wednesday Nov. 11 at 7:30 p.m., Paretsky will be at the Jewish Public Library, 5151 Côte Ste-Catherine Road, to launch her latest book, Hardball, and to give a talk on the theme ‘Nancy Drew Comes of Age.’ Library executive director Eva Raby will be introducing Paretsky, who will be signing books and autographs. Tickets are $5 for JPL members and students and $10 for all others.

According to at least one voracious reader from the JPL, Paretsky has a wide fan base at the library, judging from how fast her books fly off the JPL’s shelves. “The Nancy Drew thing should resonate with a lot of us who grew up reading her (and re-reading her in our middle age),” the reader said. She also suggested that having Paretsky as a guest is somewhat of a departure for the JPL, whose past speakers have tended more towards the intellectual. “We have a membership base of people who read all kinds of themes,” but “it’s rare that we do mystery — that’s true,” acknowledged Leo Hubermann, the library’s director of marketing and communications. “We did it a bit in the past. We also get interesting and well-known Canadians who are non-Jewish for Canada Council readings, of which we host up to three per season.”

Paretsky’s bestselling V.I. Warshawski novels include the titles Blacklist and Fire Sale. A resident of Chicago, which features prominently in most of her work, she is the winner of many awards, including the Cartier Diamond Dagger for lifetime achievement from the British Crime Writers’ Association. In an e-mail exchange with The Monitor, Paretsky expanded on the connection between her work and Nancy Drew. “Nancy Drew spoke to a large number of American women who grew up in the thirties and forties,” she said. “Many of my readers are drawn to Nancy Drew because of their nostalgia for her sporty roadster and her independence of parental authority. Probably the idea of ‘the girl detective’ is in the back of the mind of every woman who writes and reads crime fiction, but Nancy’s life was too golden, too easy for me to identify with her when I was a child.”

Paretsky’s main character became the basis for the 1991 film, V.I. Warshawski, starring Kathleen Turner. “I have mixed feelings about the movie,” said Paretsky. “It brought my work to the attention of people around the world who had never heard of me. “I enjoyed the opportunity to meet Kathleen Turner, a dynamic and intelligent actor,” she added. “But the script was geared to a teenage boy sensibility and so the movie didn’t work as a vehicle for bringing a believable woman detective to the screen.” She said the movie “was a box office failure because the script didn’t appeal to adults, and the woman detective didn’t speak to teenage boys.”