Sue Grafton

• Born: April 24, 1940
• Birthplace: Louisville, Kentucky
• Died: December 28, 2017
• Place of death: Santa Barbara, California

Types of Plot: Private investigator; hard-boiled

Principal Series: Kinsey Millhone, 1982–2017

Contribution

When Sue Grafton created Kinsey Millhone, a wisecracking, tough private investigator in 1982, she successfully recast the hard-boiled detective character type made famous by Raymond Chandler and Ross Macdonald as a woman. Kinsey’s self-reliance, humor, and dedication to her job make her admirable, and her weakness for fast food, difficulty maintaining romantic relationships, and missteps as she investigates cases make her a sympathetic and believable character. Grafton’s success as a writer was due largely to the popularity of the Kinsey character, with whom many readers, especially women, identify.

Grafton’s novels have been translated into over twenty-five languages, and more than ten million copies of her books are in print. Her mystery and detective fiction has earned many awards, beginning with the Mysterious Stranger Award from the Cloak and Clue Society for "A" Is for Alibi (1982)."B" Is for Burglar (1985) received Shamus and Anthony awards; "C" Is for Corpse (1986) won an Anthony; "G" Is for Gumshoe (1990) earned Shamus and Anthony awards, and "K" Is for Killer (1994) won an Anthony. Grafton received the Maltese Falcon award for "F" Is for Fugitive (1989), the American Mystery Award for "H" Is for Homicide (1991) and "A Poem That Leaves No Time," and the Ridley Award for "O" Is for Outlaw (2001). Several of her Kinsey Millhone series novels won Doubleday Mystery Guild Awards. Her short story "The Parker Shotgun" received the Macavity and Anthony awards. Grafton also won the Ross Macdonald Literary Award in 2004, the British Crime Writers' Association Cartier Dagger in 2008, the Mystery Writers of America Grand Master Award in 2009, and the Bouchercon Lifetime Achievement Award in 2013.

Grafton served as president of the Mystery Writers of America (1994–1995) and of the Private Eye Writers of America (1989–1990), and was a member of the Writers Guild of America, West, and the Crime Writers’ Association.

Biography

Sue Taylor Grafton was born in Louisville, Kentucky, on April 24, 1940, to Cornelius Warren "Chip" Grafton, an attorney, and Vivian (Harnsberger) Grafton, a former high school teacher. Her father published several mystery novels, and both parents were avid readers. Although her parents were alcoholics and her family was dysfunctional, Grafton claimed her childhood was happy as her parents gave her a great deal of freedom and intellectual stimulation.

Grafton’s first attempts at writing were poems and articles for her high school newspaper. She began to write short stories at the age of eighteen and majored in English at the University of Louisville, graduating in 1961. While still in college, Grafton married, had a daughter, and was divorced while pregnant with a son. Her first daughter was raised by her father. Grafton studied creative writing through an extension course offered by the University of California at Los Angeles, and instructor Robert Kirsh, the book editor at the Los Angeles Times, encouraged her to try her hand at writing a novel. However, Grafton did not seriously consider a career as a writer. She married again, at the age of twenty-two, to Al Schmidt, with whom she would have another daughter. She worked at various jobs in the medical field: secretary, cashier, and admissions clerk.

The stability that Grafton sought through marriage did not make her happy, however, and she kept writing. She published several short stories; then her first novel, Keziah Dane, about a woman in Appalachia, was published in 1967. Her second novel, The Lolly-Madonna War, was published in 1969, and when she sold the film rights, Grafton left for Los Angeles with her son and younger daughter. She began writing screenplays and teleplays and doing secretarial work to support herself. She became involved in a bitter custody battle with her former husband, and in her anger, she began to imagine ways to kill him, including poisoning him with oleander. Rather than acting on these thoughts, she began writing "A" Is for Alibi (1982), the first novel in the Kinsey Millhone series.

During the five years it took to write her first mystery, Grafton met Stephen F. Humphrey, whom she married in 1978. She continued to write for television series and to adapt novels written by others for television films, sometimes collaborating with her husband. However, despite winning a Christopher Award for Walking Through the Fire (1979), Grafton became dissatisfied with Hollywood and the screenwriting process, which required her to work closely with others and be a team player.

Grafton turned to writing mystery fiction, which she could do independently and which had been her father’s choice of genre. She decided to use letters of the alphabet to link her series and created the Kinsey Millhone series. Reviewers were favorably impressed with "A" Is for Alibi, which earned the Mysterious Stranger Award. Her second book, "B" Is for Burglar, published three years later, won two prestigious mystery awards. Grafton soon became a best-selling, award-winning author, producing installments in a popular series originally projected out to "Z" Is for Zero and possibly beyond. Grafton once half jokingly suggested that after reaching the letter Z, she could resume the series using numbers. Her sustained popularity attests to her ability to achieve her goal of keeping the series fresh by never telling the same story twice. The novel "X" (2015) became the first and only entry in the series to be titled with just a letter.

Ultimately, the alphabet series fell just short of the projected goal, concluding with "Y" Is for Yesterday (2017). Grafton died on December 28, 2017, at the age of seventy-seven after battling cancer for two years. Her husband and daughter confirmed that her mother had been too sick to complete the last volume in the series, and that her independent nature meant she would not want a ghostwriter to carry on her work. Grafton was also reportedly adamant that she never wanted her mysteries adapted to film or television.

Analysis

Sue Grafton’s Kinsey Millhone, along with Sara Paretsky’s V. I. Warshawski, is one of the first female private investigators created in the feminist version of the hard-boiled detective mold. These bold women are self-reliant loners who do not need to be rescued by men and do not simply stumble upon danger. They find it in the course of their work, which they diligently carry out in the pursuit of justice. Kinsey’s life is frequently endangered as she discovers the identity of killers and other criminals. She is chased, beaten, and shot, but her bravery is demonstrated in the climax of the first novel of the series, "A" Is for Alibi. She hides in a trash bin as the killer approaches, and when he opens the lid with a butcher knife in his hand, she shoots him.

The success of Grafton’s series is due to her ability to create a sympathetic character in Kinsey Millhone, who is admirable for her quest for justice and order in a chaotic world and yet remains an ordinary woman, flawed and complex. Kinsey is a private investigator in Santa Teresa, a fictional version of Santa Barbara, California, which plays an important role in every book, but she travels to a variety of settings throughout the series. These include the Eastern Sierras in "N" Is for Noose (1998) and to Louisville, Kentucky, in "L" Is for Lawless (1995).

Kinsey, twice married and divorced with no children, is a homebody of sorts, feeling best when she is home alone in her small apartment, a converted garage owned by Henry Pitts, her octogenarian landlord, a retired baker who still likes to cook. She has a fondness for wine and high-calorie junk food, which she counters by jogging three miles on the beach every morning except Sunday (a habit Grafton shared until she started walking instead). Kinsey hates to cook and often eats at the tavern run by Rosie, a gruff Hungarian woman in her sixties or seventies, who usually dictates to Kinsey what she will eat.

As the series progresses, Grafton develops her characters, adding to both their present lives and revealing their pasts. Henry has a romance with Lila Sams in "C" Is for Corpse, and his brother William falls in love with and marries Rosie. Kinsey develops romantic relationships with Jonah Robb, a police officer whose marriage is off-again, on-again; Robert Dietz, a private eye in Carson Lake, Nevada; and handsome police officer Cheney Phillips, but none develop into a full-blown, lasting relationship. After staying in Dietz’s condominium for a month in "N" Is for Noose, Kinsey says, "My general policy is to keep my distance, thus avoiding a lot of unruly emotion." Grafton gradually and sympathetically reveals the causes behind Kinsey’s isolation and her inability to trust people, even her friends. After Kinsey leaves Dietz’s condominium, she begins an investigation into an officer’s death in Nota Lake in the Sierras. Feeling lonely in her isolated cabin, she says:

Times like this, I longed for a husband or a dog, but I never could decide which would be more trouble in the long run. At least husbands don’t bark and tend to start off paper-trained.

Kinsey’s sense of humor and her direct way of speaking—using slang and the occasional swear word—make this loner both more human and more endearing.

Grafton gradually reveals Kinsey’s past: Her parents were killed in a car accident when she was five years old, and she was raised by her aunt Gin. The family disowned Kinsey’s mother at the time of her marriage, and Grafton reveals that Kinsey has cousins in Lompoc in "J" Is for Judgment (1993). In "O" Is for Outlaw, the reader learns about Kinsey’s first husband, Mickey Magrunder, a police officer to whom she was married for nine months. Betrayal, isolation, and troubled family relations—particularly events in a family’s history that create problems in the present—are themes that penetrate all the novels in the series.

Kinsey is thirty-two at the start of the series and ages only a few months with every book, so that much of the series takes place in the 1980s. This allows Kinsey to continue to live in a world without cell phones, computers, and Internet access, and her investigations use the telephone, face-to-face interviews, notebooks, surveillance, and index cards, which she uses to focus her thoughts. She types her reports on a manual Smith-Corona typewriter.

Grafton uses the first person for most of the series, speaking through Kinsey, although she alternates Kinsey’s voice with that of a third-person narrator in "S" Is for Silence (2005). Most of the novels open with Kinsey describing how she got the case and include a self-introduction very similar to the one that opens the first book in the series: "My name is Kinsey Millhone. I’m a private investigator, licensed by the state of California. I’m thirty-two years old, twice divorced, no kids."

Grafton then moves on to the meat of Kinsey’s investigation, in which Kinsey is sometimes assisted by Lieutenant Con Dolan of the Santa Teresa Police Department’s Homicide Division or Lieutenant Jonah Robb, with whom she had an affair. Often, however, she works alone, partly because her job as a private investigator does not require her to follow police procedure. Kinsey is an inveterate snoop who performs a quick search of any room in which she is left alone. Although generally law-abiding, she carries a set of lock picks that she uses to break into rooms, often misrepresents herself, and occasionally otherwise breaks the law, as in "L" Is for Lawless when she steals a maid’s uniform to gain access to a hotel room. Along with the story of the investigation, Grafton usually tells a side story, either a humorous one involving Henry and his siblings or tavern-owner Rosie, or one involving a separate investigation or another character, which she sometimes uses as a red herring. However, Grafton’s mysteries are enjoyable more for their characterization and dialogue rather than as puzzle mysteries to be deciphered by the reader. The killer’s identity is not revealed until Kinsey confronts the suspect, and sometimes she does not know who the murderer is until that person begins to pursue her. This leads to dramatic, violent climaxes that often feature a chase and end with a definitive act such as a shooting. Sometimes the killer ultimately faces justice in a court of law, as in "Q" Is for Quarry (2002), and sometimes the killer faces a swifter form of justice, as in "O" Is for Outlaw, in which the murderer is decapitated by the edge of a bucket of a tractor driven by the brother of one of the victims. Occasionally, as in "I" Is for Innocent, the killer gets away with murder.

Almost every novel ends with an epilogue, written as if Kinsey were submitting a final report, and signed "Respectfully submitted, Kinsey Millhone." In the epilogue, Grafton explains what happens after the final climactic scene, neatly tidying up any loose ends and bringing emotional closure, as in "O" Is for Outlaw, in which Kinsey describes bidding her former husband Mickey good-bye as he died in the hospital.

"A" Is for Alibi

"A" Is for Alibi, the first novel in the series, is dominated by the theme of betrayal through multiple infidelities and lies. Nikki Fife, who was convicted eight years earlier of poisoning her husband, Laurence, with oleander and has just been released from prison, comes to Kinsey to find out who really killed her husband. The police suspect Nikki of killing Libby Glass, an accountant, who also died by oleander poisoning. Suspects include Gwen, Laurence’s first wife; Charlotte Mercer, a judge’s wife with whom Laurence had an affair; and Libby’s former boyfriend, Lyle Abernathy. Kinsey becomes romantically involved with Charlie Scorsoni, Laurence’s partner, then realizes she has not ruled him out as a suspect. She solves the murders when she looks at them from a different perspective.

"M" Is for Malice

In "M" Is for Malice, the past demonstrates its power to reach out and hurt people. Tasha Howard, an estate lawyer and Kinsey’s cousin, asks Kinsey to find Guy Malek, one of the heirs to the fortune left by Bader Malek. Kinsey finds the former drug addict, who had been missing for eighteen years, living in poverty in a small rural town. Guy has found religion and returns to his ancestral home for what he hopes will be a happy reunion with his brothers Donovan, Bennet, and Jack. However, Guy is found murdered in his bed. The solution to the mystery centers on valuable letters that were stolen, presumably by Guy, and hidden secrets in the family.

"O" Is for Outlaw

"O" Is for Outlaw is the story of multiple betrayals, first of Kinsey by her first husband, Mickey Magruder, a police officer who asks her to lie and has an affair with another woman, and then of Mickey by Kinsey, who does not trust him when he says he did not beat a man and cause his death. A storage space scavenger sells Kinsey a box of personal items that she left with her first husband, and she decides to find out what has happened to him. When Mickey is shot and close to death, Kinsey investigates and finds that Mickey had discovered links between three men in Louisville and Vietnam that may have led to his shooting and comes perilously close to being killed herself.

"S" Is for Silence

In "S" Is for Silence, Kinsey undertakes a cold case when Daisy Sullivan asks her to look into the disappearance thirty-four years earlier of her mother, Violet, then a beautiful, sexy, young woman. It had long been rumored that Violet had run off with a lover or been killed by her husband. Key to the solution of this mystery is Violet’s brand-new Chevrolet Bel Air, which disappeared along with her and which Kinsey helps locate. In this novel, the theme of betrayal is joined by one of abandonment, in particular of seven-year-old Daisy by her mother. Grafton departs from her usual first-person narrative style to alternate sections told by Kinsey with a third-person narrative describing events from a long-gone Fourth of July in the small California town of Serena Station.

Principal Series Characters:

• Kinsey Millhone is a private investigator and former police officer in her thirties who lives in Santa Teresa, a fictionalized version of Santa Barbara, California. Twice married and divorced, she is a self-reliant woman with no children and no pets, but she has many friends and the occasional man in her life.
• Henry Pitts is Kinsey’s landlord, an attractive retired baker in his eighties who writes crossword puzzles. His numerous brothers and sisters, all in their eighties and nineties, also appear in the series.
• Rosie is a Hungarian woman in her sixties or seventies who runs a neighborhood restaurant-bar, where she serves bread made by Henry and Hungarian food. An opinionated but caring woman, she marries William, Henry’s brother, in the course of the series.

Bibliography

DuBose, Martha Hailey, with Margaret Caldwell Thomas. Women of Mystery: The Lives and Works of Notable Women Crime Novelists. New York: St. Martin’s Minotaur, 2000. Contains an essay on Sue Grafton that looks at her life and how it influenced her writing. It describes the exhaustive research that Grafton puts into her work and notes her primary influences, Raymond Chandler and Ross Macdonald, and her favorite contemporary writer, Elmore Leonard.

Genzlinger, Neil. "Sue Grafton, Whose Detective Novels Spanned the Alphabet, Dies at 77." The New York Times, 29 Dec. 2017, www.nytimes.com/2017/12/29/obituaries/sue-grafton-dies-best-selling-mystery-author.html. Accessed 2 Feb. 2018.

Grafton, Sue. "Sue Grafton: Death and the Maiden." Interview by Jonathan Bing. Publishers Weekly 245, no. 16 (April 20, 1998): 40-41. Grafton discusses her childhood, her motivation to write the Kinsey Millhone series, and how she came to choose the alphabetized titles.

Grafton, Sue, ed. Writing Mysteries: A Handbook. Cincinnati, Ohio: Writer’s Digest Books, 1992. A collection of essays on how to write a mystery, from start to finish, with an introduction by Grafton that provides insights into her own writing.

Herbert, Rosemary. The Fatal Art of Entertainment: Interviews with Mystery Writers. New York: G. K. Hall, 1996. In her interview, Grafton states that what interests her is the "psychology of homicide." However, she prefers to examine the killer from the outside, rather than writing from the murderer’s point of view.

Kaufman, Natalie Hevener, and Carol McGinnis Kay. "G" Is for Grafton: The World of Kinsey Millhone. Rev. ed. New York: Owl Books, 2000. This book about the character Kinsey Millhone contains chapters on her biography, her personality, her relationships, her work history, the settings in which she finds herself, and her moral code as well as chapters on Grafton’s writing style and her place in the genre.

Nicholls, Jane, and Bonnie Bell. "Banishing Old Ghosts." People Weekly 44, no. 18 (October 30, 1995): 115-116. Profile of Grafton looks at her childhood in Kentucky and her relationship with her parents and her attitude toward her home state.

"Sue Grafton." Sue Grafton, 2018, www.suegrafton.com/sue-grafton.php. Accessed 2 Feb. 2018.

Waxman, Sharon. "Mystery Writer in the Mirror: ’A’ Is for Alter Ego—Like Her Heroine, Sue Grafton Values Her Freedom." Washington Post, November 1, 2001, p. C01. This feature article provides an examination of Grafton’s personal history and of how she came to write the Kinsey Millhone series.