Victoria Iphigenia "Vic" "V. I." Warshawski is a fictional private investigator from Chicago who is the protagonist featured in a series of detective novels and short stories written by Chicago author Sara Paretsky.
With the exception of "The Pietro Andromache", Warshawski's adventures are written in the first person.
Biography
Victoria Iphigenia Warshawski, called "Vic" by her friends, is the daughter of Italian-born Gabriella Sestrieri, who was half-Jewish and fled the Mussolini regime in 1941. Trained as an opera singer, she was destitute when she arrived as a refugee immigrant. She met and married Anton "Tony" Warshawski, a Polish American police officer in Chicago. Gabriella spoke Italian and heavily accented English with her daughter, who became fluent in Italian. On the other hand, the American-born Tony spoke only English with her, and she picked up only a few words of Polish from her paternal grandmother.
Gabriella died of cancer when Vic was in high school; Tony died ten years later in 1976, suggesting that Vic was born about 1950. Blood Shot (published as "Toxic Shock" in the UK) refers to Vic having last been to her high school some 20 years previously, making the setting of this story 1988, the year of the book’s publication. In an interview, Sara Paretsky noted that she has portrayed Warshawski ageing in real time. However, in the 2010 "Hardball", Paretsky moved Warshawski's birth upwards to 1957, presumably since a 1950 birth would make her sixty years old in 2010, a bit too old for intensive physical activity. The change involved a considerably detailed retconning and re-writing many events of Warshawski's childhood to fit with the new chronology.
Vic grew up on the southeast side of Chicago, in the shadow of shuttered steel mills and factories. Together with her cousin Boom-Boom, she had many wild and dangerous adventures – becoming especially wild and reckless in the period of deep grief after her mother's death. She learned techniques of street-fighting that were useful in her later career. She was involved in the girls' basketball team in her school, called "The Lady Tigers", and entered the University of Chicago on a sports scholarship. During her university years, she became deeply involved in the counter-culture of the 1960s, taking part in the Freedom Rides to rural Louisiana, traveling hundreds of miles to attend rallies addressed by Martin Luther King Jr., demonstrating against the Vietnam War, and taking part in an underground abortion service. In the latter context, she first met Dr. Lotty Herschel, another major character, who becomes an important lifelong contact. However, as the daughter of a police officer whom she greatly loved and respected, Vic strongly objects to radicals calling the police "pigs".
After earning a law degree and working a short stint as a public defender, she became a private detective specializing in white-collar crime. She married fellow law student Dick Yarborough, but they divorced after two years. He became a corporate lawyer and their outlooks strongly differed. She has no children, but in many cases acts in a maternal manner towards teenagers neglected or abused by their parents.
Vic's clients fall into two distinct categories. There are the "bread and butter" clients who offer her fairly routine private detective jobs, which usually do not carry too much personal risk, and who pay promptly her full rates. It is these who provide her livelihood, but what she does for them is hardly ever described in any detail. The adventures in the books almost invariably concern the other kind of client - who can't afford to pay her full rates, or can't pay her at all, but she decides to take their cases anyway because of some intrinsic detail arousing her feeling of justice. She can persist in an investigation even when the client who originated it asks her to stop or is dead, and sometimes she starts an investigation on her own without a client at all. Sometimes at the end of such a case somebody who benefited from her efforts - not necessarily the original client - volunteers to pay her. But such luck cannot be relied on. At the end of several books Vic ends up - after having spent much time, effort, and money from her own pocket, risked her life and gotten battered and wounded - with no material benefits to show for it, nothing but the satisfaction of having done something good. This does not discourage her from later taking up another such case.