Love and Other Crimes

I have a longstanding disappointment with short stories. Just occasionally they work for me but mostly they leave me wondering where the rest of my plot, the rest of my character development, the rest of the fun is. Not all of these stories feature VI Warshawski but quite a few of them do. Whatever it says on this page I’ve read all twenty-two of the full length novels featuring VI, the first ones back in the 1990s before I was keeping track. So you’d think that I couldn’t complain that I don’t get to know the characters well enough. But I’m still going to whinge a little. After all there are other characters than the recurring ones and I don’t get to know them very well. And whilst there are plenty of novels that could do with editing down the plot of a short story is never going to have the depth that a novel can.

A lot of the VI Warshawski books emerge from real world situations - real world culture and politics shape the stories. These short stories are no different but their origins felt very obvious at this scale. Paretsky also writes a quick explanation about each story after it and whilst these are sometimes illuminating, such as where she’d reused classic crime fiction characters I didn’t know, more often than not I found myself going “yes, I got the allegory!”.

There are definitely times where the stories are fun and add to the canon and wouldn’t work in a longer format but I’d rather have had a story about VI’s childhood, for example, as an extra in a longer book than a whole book of short stories. So it’s not that I think it’s a bad collection of stories, it’s more that I’m just a bad short story reader.