Sara Paretsky’s contemporary hard-boiled detective novels featuring female private investigator V. I. Warshawski have placed Chicago firmly on the crime fiction map. In a series of twenty detective novels, Paretsky has depicted the uncompromising and passionate Warshawski as she navigates multicultural, industrial Chicago, taking on capitalism, patriarchy, and blue- and white-collar crime. This chapter examines Paretsky’s use of the crime genre’s conventions to investigate and represent crime in Chicago, arguing that gender, race, and class are central to this creative and imaginative process. The crime genre focuses on the quest for truth and justice for victims, themes which are central to Paretsky’s feminist sensibility and social criticism. The analysis centres on Paretsky’s triangulation of feminism, blue- and white-collar crime, and politics in her representation of Chicago. Stylistically hard-boiled but with explicit demonstrations of anger, empathy, and emotional intelligence, Paretsky’s Warshawski embodies a feminist challenge to the traditional masculinist tough guy detective character in her ongoing creative exploration of the history and geography of Chicago crime.

According to many Vietnam veterans’ memoirs, John Wayne set the standard for what it meant to be a man. Yet for many young adults in Cold War America, there were other models for masculinity far from Hollywood, and among the most popular were men’s adventure magazines. Throughout the 1950s and into the mid 1960s, these magazines proved a popular cultural venue for war stories illustrating the exploits of courageous soldiers, fighting against the “savage” other in foreign lands, and defending democracy in a harsh world where the threat from evil actors always seemed lurking. Sex underscored nearly all of these tales, with pulp heroes rewarded with beautiful, seductive women as a kind of payoff for the combat victories. The magazines offered a masculine ideal to their readers, warrior heroes who were physically fit, mentally strong, and resolutely heterosexual. They also targeted a working-class white readership, the same communities that disproportionately sent their young men off to fight a long and bloody war in South Vietnam. Pulp Vietnam argues that men’s adventure magazines from the post-World War II era crafted a particular version of martial masculinity that helped establish and then normalize GIs’ expectations and perceptions of war in Vietnam.