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By Jacqueline Carey

Oct. 29, 1999 | In the early '80s, when women began to refashion the hard-boiled detective novel using female private eyes, anticipated difficulties such as gender differences in strength and aggressiveness proved to be chimeras. To make their brawls more believable, these heroines were given workout schedules more appropriate to Olympic athletes (as if Philip Marlowe would have been caught dead in a gym); nowadays people seem to believe that given enough training, anyone can do anything.

Hard Time By Sara Paretsky Delacorte Press, 385 pages Fiction Buy Hard Time by Sara Paretsky "O" Is For Outlaw By Sue Grafton Henry Holt and Company, 318 pages Fiction Buy "O" Is For Outlaw by Sue Grafton Lost Daughters By J.M. Redmann W.W. Norton and Company, 319 pages Fiction Buy Lost Daughters by J.M. Redmann Detective Agency: Women Rewriting the Hard-Boiled Tradition Priscilla Walton and Manina Jones University or California Press, 315 pages Fiction Buy Detective Agency: Women Rewriting the Hard-Boiled Tradition by Priscilla Walton and Manina Jones

It was harder to deal with the femme fatale of the tradition -- you know, the blond with the diamonds in her eyes and the pearl-handled revolver in the top of her stocking. Chandler and Hammett believed in her absolutely. She usually turns out to be the murderer. Even if she doesn't, she is corrupt, vile … and enthralling. It is in her persona that the form's ambivalence toward evil is lodged, and this ambivalence still gives the form its unshakable power. Without it, the detective novel is just a lot of empty suits holding guns.

Sara Paretsky, one of the earliest and most successful of the refashioners, went looking for a substitute and found a similar inner tension in class anger. Class consciousness has always been a subliminal part of the male detective novel; the femme fatale, for instance, is often rich. But Paretsky makes politics the focus of her V.I. Warshawski novels, the latest of which, "Hard Time," has some of the most blood-boiling scenes of injustice I've ever read.

Driving home from a publicity event staged by one of those behemoth entertainment corporations, Warshawski nearly runs into a gravely injured woman lying in the middle of the street. The next morning, a cop named Lemour, a masterpiece of insinuation and bullying, wants to arrest her for manslaughter; the Breathalyzer test that previously absolved her doesn't seem to have made it into the police report.

Warshawski's smart mouth is equal to the situation at first, but Paretsky keeps upping the ante. When Lemour trashes Warshawski's office looking for (planted) drugs, we start to feel her humiliation. By the time we get to the highly charged jail scenes, Paretsky has moved beyond tough-guy repartee and into soul-destroying, Dostoevsky-like territory. (I notice that the most compelling scenes in Tom Wolfe's "A Man in Full" are also set in prison -- a fact that, I suspect, is more than coincidence and says something about how we feel in our '90s prosperity.)

Paretsky deftly cuts in and out from these raw scenes to subtler characters and situations, so the non-blood-boiling sections move along nicely as well. An entertainment lawyer (and ex-radical) tries to buy off Warshawski. An immigrant Arab woman tells of protecting a Filipino girl from possible INS agents by claiming to be her grandmother. A "pool mother," so horrifying that she is just this side of hilarious, forces her kids into competitive swimming. If the mystery itself turns out to have a bewildering number of facets, they only reflect the liveliness and vividness of the larger plot.

Despite the saintliness of some of the immigrant characters and the villainy of the pack of rich white males who are the real power behind Lemour and the prison guards, "Hard Time" is not an uncomplicated book. Warshawski feels the pull of the other side. She covets nice sports cars. She is jealous of the entertainment lawyer. She is afraid that all her friends are right when they tell her she is making trouble pointlessly. And if she herself tries to master every situation, then the reader can't help wondering how can power be inherently evil. Paretsky occasionally let politics get a stranglehold on her past books, but she doesn't in this one. "Hard Time" is exactly what suspense should be.

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