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Published on March 27, 2008

In Sara Paretsky's fantasies, she was raised as a child by adoring billionaires and showered with love and opportunity. In real life, she was raised in rural Kansas by parents who fought constantly, and put her to work as a drudge in a once-imposing home that sank into squalor.

The painful reality of that unhappy family might surprise Paretsky's millions of fans. In the 1980s, she practically invented the genre of the female detective: her heroine, VI Warshawski, was a feisty private eye much given to designer clothes.

Twelve crime novels later, Paretsky is a worldwide bestseller. But now she has changed direction, revisiting the geography of her troubled childhood.

For fans of the orphaned and rather solitary Warshawksi, who usually hunts killers against the gritty backdrop of Chicago, Bleeding Kansas might seem alien territory, full of god-fearing farm families working in sorghum fields and cowsheds.

In many ways, Warshawski is the personification of Paretsky's escape from rural Kansas for life in the big city. It took nearly 40 years before she felt strong enough to return home on a journey of the imagination.

"Not everything about living in Kansas was difficult, but it was a difficult part of my life. Chicago is where I came of age and became a person, made a reputation for myself, and I didn't really want to go back to that," she says.

Paretsky is 60 now, with large, pale-blue eyes and VI's fondness for fine clothes and cappuccinos. When we meet, she wears a well-cut, tweedy jacket and bright scarf.

Paretsky's childhood was dominated by the misery of her parents' marriage. "They just fought. They just fought about who-knows-what - about everything."

 Looking back, Paretsky does not remember whether she felt lonely. "I think I felt overwhelmed. My mother got drunk. She didn't cope with the house. I was in charge of cleaning the house, looking after the small children, I did the baking every Saturday for my father and my brothers."

 She adds: "I think I was just numb for a couple of decades."

 Consumed by their own misery, Paretsky's parents had little energy left over for the house. It was gradually buried beneath dust, mould and insect infestation that followed years of neglect. Eventually, the elder Paretskys became too frail for country life and moved into town. They died in Kansas and are buried there.

The first VI book appeared in 1982, and Paretsky has been turning out a new one every two or three years since then. But only 25 pages into her next VI story, she got writer's block. The book is already a year behind schedule. Confronting the ghosts of her childhood did not banish them; she is still consumed by Kansas. "That book was with me for about seven years and there is nothing else to come to fill its place," she says.

She pulls herself up again for being too serious, says she is usually funnier in interviews. Did that troubled childhood lead her to VI Warshawski and now back home to Kansas? "I wonder about this sometimes. How much dysfunctionality is just enough to make you a writer?" Perhaps, after all, it was the life Paretsky created for herself in Chicago that made her a writer. "Maybe you don't need dysfunctionality. Maybe you need total functionality."

SUZANNE GOLDENBERG

the guardian

Chicago, Illinois