It’s the birthday of mystery writer Sara Paretsky (b. 1947), who in 1982 revolutionized the genre by publishing Indemnity Only, a mystery featuring strong female detective V.I. Warshawski. (This was evidently an idea whose time had come: Sue Grafton published her first mystery featuring female detective Kinsey Millhone that same year.) Paretsky has written 19 V.I. Warshawski novels to date.

Paretsky was born in Ames, Iowa, but raised in Kansas, where her father was a microbiologist at the University of Kansas. Paretsky got her bachelor’s in political science from the U of Kansas but fell in love with Chicago doing community service work there in 1966. She went on to earn a PhD in history at the University of Chicago and an MBA from that university’s Graduate School of Business. She was working for an insurance company when she wrote Indemnity Only (the V.I. Warshawski books are set in Chicago) and quit working to write full time in 1985. Paretsky’s husband is a physicist at the University of Chicago, and they live on the south side.

Paretsky’s most recent V.I. Warshawski novel is Fallout (2017), in which Paretsky draws on her father’s experience in bioweapons research. In an interview with HuffPo (Mark Rubenstein, “‘Fallout,’ A Conversation with Sara Paretsky,” Huffington Post, April 18, 2017), Paretsky relates a freaky but true story about her dad that she evidently uses in the novel. (Are you sitting down? You might want to sit down for this.) Back in the 60s, her dad went to a conference in Czechoslovakia about the organism that causes typhus. Wanting to bring the organism home to study in his own lab, he talked a technician into injecting him with it. Paretsky claims that her father arrived home with a fever of a hundred and five and still refused antibiotics until his own lab tech got a blood sample from him. (How dedicated are you, really, to your own field of work? Would you take a potentially lethal injection if it would somehow further that thing you get paid to do all day? No? Does that make you sane, or milktoasty? Discuss.)

Paretsky has also written a memoir, Writing in an Age of Silence (2007), which was a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist.

For heaven’s sake don’t do anything foolish to imperil this fine Friday and as ever, stay scrupulously honest to the data.