Book of a Lifetime: Indemnity Only by Sara Paretsky

From The Independent archive: Val McDermid on private eye VI Warshawski’s first outing

Paretsky’s detective is a courageous fighter for the weak against the strong (Susannah Ireland/The Independent)

Books have shaped my life in more ways than I can explain. There are some key milestones that will always stand proud of the rest: the moment, reading a Chalet School book, when I understood that being a writer was a proper job; falling in love with crime fiction when I read my first Miss Marple at the age of eight or nine; the perennial joy of Treasure Island, with its perfect blend of character, plot, setting and good writing, not to mention the ending that leaves space for the reader’s imagination; and plunging headlong into another way of looking at the world thanks to Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics.

But if I had to point to one book that had irrevocably changed my future, I would have to settle on Sara Paretsky’s Indemnity Only. It’s the novel that unleashes her Chicago private eye VI Warshawski and it was an epiphany for me. She wasn’t the first of the new wave of feminist detectives, but she was the one who stirred my imagination. When Indemnity Only was published in America in 1982, a friend sent it to me because she thought I’d enjoy it. She was right.