I’ve had a few brushes with greatness in my life, one being when I accepted a job that was previously held by novelist Sara Paretsky.
I discovered this fact one day when I was sorting through some old file folders in my new cubicle (which used to be hers, as was the desk, as was the chair, and omigod I was totally fan-girling) and I saw her name on a speech marked ‘draft’. By this time Paretsky had moved on from insurance and begun her career as a crime and mystery author with Indemnity Only, the first of the V.I. Warshawski detective novels.
A native Chicagoan, Paretsky has written nearly two dozen V.I. Warshawski novels, as well as nonfiction books and short-story collections. She’s active in Chicago politics and women’s issues, but her activism extends not just to politics.
Take Sisters in Crime, the organization she founded in 1986.
Sisters in Crime, or SinC, is a national organization of 4,000 authors, readers, publishers, librarians and booksellers whose work supports women crime and mystery writers. SinC was born out of the frustration that Paretsky and other women authors felt compared to the guys.
Turns out, Paretsky was right. At the time, women wrote 30 percent of all published crime novels, yet men received seven times the number of book reviews. Women authors were being shut out of prestigious industry awards, and graphic violence against women in crime and mystery novels was growing more prevalent, an important issue to Paretsky.
In its 30-plus years, SinC has spearheaded efforts to correct these imbalances. Its Review Monitoring Project surveys newspapers and magazines every year, literally counting the number of reviews they publish for books written by men versus those written by women. (It’s not a good statistic.)
Another project, Books in Print (BIP), listed the name of every female crime and mystery book author, along with the books they’d written and publication information. Updated annually, BIP was sent to bookstores and libraries to help publicize these books, and to SinC members, who found it a goldmine for networking and support.
Most recently, SinC is focused on expanding outreach to writers of color and LGBTQ writers, reflecting awareness of a lack of diversity among its members and its goal to increase representation of diverse communities.
Author Denise Swanson (who we profiled in SECRET) is a SinC member. In 2004, she updated Breaking and Entering: The Road to Success, SinC’s book on publishing.
“I took on the project because so many wonderful writers had helped me when I was first starting out, and I wanted to repay their kindness,” Denise says in SinC’s 2017 Publishing Report.
The report lays bare the ongoing challenges facing women writers, even as progress has been made.
“Respect may have eclipsed reviews as the key issue,” the report says. “As in the larger literary world, crime fiction focused on women’s lives … is too often dismissed as light, escapist or unrealistic.”
There is still work to do.