Prairie home companion

HER HARD-FIGHTING, FAST-TALKING, Chicago-based private investigator, VI Warshawski, made her name, but Sara Paretsky has travelled as far away from the Windy City as you could imagine in her latest novel – to America's small-town Midwest.

VI (it stands for Victoria Iphigenia) has been left "to recuperate in a spa in Umbria" – quite right, too, given the beating meted out to the fortysomething tough cookie in her last adventure, Fire Sale.

Bleeding Kansas, meanwhile, is set in eastern Kansas, in the Kaw River Valley, where Paretsky grew up the only daughter in a family of five – "a family of dreary secrets about the dreary staples of alcohol and mental violation," she says.

The Paretsky family were outsiders – "clumsy, unathletic Jews in an all-Protestant world that worshipped football and prized baseball". She and her brothers are "fellow refugees from our own patch of bleeding Kansas".

It is 40 years since she left the state, but it is still in her bones. The novel takes place in the present, relating the story of three ordinary families who have farmed in the valley since their ancestors came as anti-slavery pioneers in the 1850s. "Some of America's bloodiest battles were fought in Kansas between pro and anti-slavery settlers," Paretsky tells me when we meet in London, where she and her retired physics professor husband, Courtenay Wright, are on holiday.

More than a thousand anti- slavery pioneers were murdered by slave forces but in the end, in 1861, Kansas came into the Union as a free state. "My home town of Lawrence was at the centre of the anti-slavery action," Paretsky says.

"A century later, some of the bloodiest battles over civil rights were also fought in Lawrence. For 15 months in 1970 and 1971, at least one bomb a day exploded on the University of Kansas campus or in the surrounding country. Women's rights, African-American rights, American Indian rights and protests against the Vietnam war divided the community."

The three families she writes about have a long, troubled, shared history. Two of the families, the Schapens and the Greliers, are divided on almost every important issue, from the brand of Christianity they practise to the war in Iraq (Paretsky is a passionate advocate for the anti-war movement). When the Greliers' only son, Chip, enlists in the army, is sent to Iraq and is killed, his family is devastated.

Gina Haring, a glamorous young New Yorker (who also happens to be a lesbian and a Wiccan) rents the Freemantle family's abandoned farmhouse close by, becoming the catalyst for upheaval in everyone's lives – especially after the fundamentalist Schapens, finding themselves with a perfect red heifer in their dairy herd, see it as a sign heralding Christ's second coming.

Gina's bonfires – for her coven of white witches – along with Chip's tragic death, the Schapens' "cash cow" and a bizarre exorcism, lead to an explosive climax at Halloween.

The sense of place in Bleeding Kansas is powerful. "The landscapes of my childhood are so familiar that it's hard for me to write about them," Paretsky says. Inevitably, she sees Chicago – her home since she was 19 and as much a character in her VI books as Warshawski herself – much more clearly than she does the prairies, where she and her brothers hiked, worked and played in their youth.

None the less, she grew up with an abiding sense of history, knowing that she shared a heritage of resistance to social injustice – something that explains where VI's acutely honed social conscience comes from. "I grew up proud of the role of pioneer women who sewed bullets into their crinolines to smuggle them past the slaves' guards," she says.

Her parents moved to Kansas from Ohio in 1958, when she was four. They bought a farmhouse east of Lawrence to escape the poisonous segregation of the era, which affected not only African-Americans but, to a lesser degree, Jews as well.

Their house had been owned by a family, the Gilmores, who at one time farmed 10,000 acres in the Kaw Valley. The Paretskys lived there for 40 years, but locals still refer to it as "the Gilmore house". In her novel, the Freemantles' home is treated the same way. "Like the Freemantle house, 'our' house had a Tiffany chandelier in the dining room, which was always missing a bit; a silver-backed water fountain in the upper hall that never worked; and many beautiful fireplaces."

There are few happy family snapshots, however, either inside or outside that fine house – although on her website you'll find a picture of her with a younger brother taken on the Jewish holiday of Rosh Hashanah, when she was 12 and he was ten: "We look like a couple of bowling balls with feet, chubby children in ill-fitting clothes – my dress is too small; he's in one of my father's sports jackets, which makes him look like an Edward G Robinson gangster."

That picture sums up Kansas and her childhood: "It is the place where I was fat, awkward, out of place." In Chicago she is confident, at ease, at home in her body and her life. "When I think of my childhood, I start to feel my inner core disintegrating," she says. "Yet I've revisited the past before in my essay-memoir, Writing in an Age of Silence, published last year."

Her highly educated parents made it clear to her that ambition and achievement were the province only of their sons. Despite being named a National Merit scholar, Paretsky was permitted to attend college only in Kansas and only at her own expense.

After she was admitted to graduate school at the University of Chicago in 1969, her father, a professor at the University of Kansas who was given to menacing, three-day sulks, told her not to be surprised if she failed, since it was a first-rate school and hers was a second-rate mind.

Her intellectual mother, a librarian who slid into alcoholism, also believed it was not her daughter's role to be educated: "I was supposed to be the caretaker – and my parents were both very needy; it was a hard way to grow up, forever being told, 'Sara, you are stupid'. It was very hurtful at the time."

It was a struggle, she says, to find a voice – in every sense. Indeed, she still speaks very softly.

"But I've always claimed that the most authentic writing is that which is personally honest. By that I don't mean the tell-all memoir. Rather, by mining their own emotions – those moments of murderous jealousy or passionate idealism, or anything else along the way – writers create characters of depth and plausibility.

"I think that the tiresome characters in my books are always the ones whose emotional landscapes I haven't explored. Any action can be credible if the underlying emotion is truthful."

Returning to Kansas, she found "the emotional swamp so frightening that the hardest work I've ever done was to slog through it to characters with credibility. In Bleeding Kansas I touched on my own past as briefly as possible, yet somehow I had to keep returning to it".

Has she written herself into the novel? "No," she replies, "although if any character has elements of me, it's Gina – the outsider in their midst, who is possibly a Jew. As a child, I was the outsider so far from the locals' inner circle that I wasn't even ridiculed, just ignored. Rather, I've written about the ultimate insiders in my childhood – farmers who have worked the land for a century and a half.

"They're Protestants, they're white and they aren't necessarily happy families. Gina causes them a lot of turmoil, but it's the insider's world that I wanted to explore – to see how it looked, how it felt and why someone like me had no place in it."

Paretsky's father grew up in Brooklyn and she explains that the defining book of his childhood was Thomas Wolfe's Look Homeward, Angel, which he thought the best thing he'd ever read. "Of course, you can look homeward, but you have to wear a bullet-proof vest – and definitely you need an angel to travel with," she says, looking across at her big, bluff, bearded husband of more than 30 years.

After finishing Bleeding Kansas she was afraid to write for a while, she says, but "for every possible reason I can't afford to sit around".

So the good news is that VI Warshawski – "my braver voice in every arena" – is herself looking homeward to Chicago from her Italian fastness, Paretsky having already embarked on her next investigation into the evil that men do.

"She'll clear the monsters of the marsh," Paretsky exclaims.

• Bleeding Kansas, by Sara Paretsky, is published by Hodder & Stoughton, priced £16.99.

Sara Paretsky on ...

Writing as escapism: "Even at the age of eight, I would happily sit there writing away for hours, forgetting everything else around me. It never occurred to me that it was something I could do as a career – I just found that it helped me to detach myself from all the horrible things in my life."

Crime fiction: "If I hadn't been a crime fiction reader, I might never have tried to write for publication. Women didn't do that. But I got this idea in my head that I wanted to have a woman detective, because I was so put off by the way women in crime fiction acted. Either they weren't there at all, or they would be total victims, or they'd be sexually active, so then you knew they were rotten to the core."

Writing a book without VI: "Bleeding Kansas was a book I'd been wanting to write for many years. Besides, I needed to take a break from VI so I could think about her stories in a fresh way. It's always challenging to write a book in the third person, told in multiple voices, but it's the challenges that help me grow in my craft. It's a bit like being Colonel Sanders. You don't always want to do fried chicken – sometimes you want pizza or hot dogs."