Sue Grafton
Author of the acclaimed ‘Alphabet’ crime novel series featuring the female sleuth Kinsey Millhone
SUE GRAFTON, the American novelist who has died aged 77, created one of crime fiction’s first female private eyes, Kinsey Millhone, who made her debut in A is for Alibi (1982) and proceeded through the alphabet from B is for Burglar and C is for Corpse to her final appearance in Y is for Yesterday, published last August.
Critics occasionally complained that the cutesy “Alphabet” device was not quite in keeping with one of the most impressive and sophisticated of modern crime series. But the alphabet motif proved to be a superb marketing gimmick, as critics and fans would speculate, in the run-up to publication of each novel, over what word would feature in the title – something the author often did not know herself until the book was nearing completion.
Such publicity was essential in alerting readers to her work, as the Kinsey Millhone novels were never adapted for film or television. Having spent much of her working life as a television dramatist, Sue Grafton came to loathe the entertainment industry and its “writing by committee”, refusing lucrative offers to film her books and telling her children that she would haunt them if they sold the film rights after her death.
The publication of A is for Alibi in
1982 coincided with the debut of another female private eye, Sara Paretsky’s VI Warshawski, in the novel Indemnity Only. Both characters became enormously influential, showing that women could hold their own in a genre dominated by taciturn tough guys.
Sue Grafton tackled topical and social issues in her novels, but they were much less tendentious than Sara Paretsky’s, and although she was hailed by feminists, she did not identify herself as one. “I don’t think the male/female question is that relevant,” she said. “I don’t see the world in that way. I think we all have a hard time getting what we want in the world and being good at our craft.”
The austere and authoritative British critic Julian Symons argued that Sue Grafton was one of the few modern writers whose private eye novels stood comparison with those of Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler and Ross Macdonald.
“Kinsey Millhone … is conspicuous for her India-rubber resilience rather than the exercise of remarkable intelligence,” he wrote in his history of crime fiction, Bloody Murder. “The puzzles are clever, but it is the generous impulsiveness of Kinsey that gives the books distinction.”
Sue Taylor Grafton was born in Louisville, Kentucky, on April 24 1940. Her father was CW Grafton, a lawyer and occasional crime novelist; her mother Vivian was a teacher.
Both parents were alcoholics, and when Sue was five she and her older sister Ann were virtually left to bring themselves up while her father concentrated on caring for her mother. “It’s no coincidence that Kinsey was orphaned at five years old, when her parents were killed in a car crash: I also felt that my childhood ended when I was five,” she said in 2013. When Sue was 20 her mother committed suicide, and she wrote about her family’s travails in a series of autobiographical stories that were eventually published in the volume Kinsey and Me (2013).
She took a degree in English Literature from the University of Louisiana before moving to California, where she worked as a medical secretary. With the encouragement of her father she wrote several mainstream novels, two of which were published: Keziah Dane (1967) and The Lolly-madonna War (1969). The latter, a tale of warring hillbilly families, was made into a film starring Rod Steiger and Jeff Bridges. Sue Grafton worked on the screenplay and then became a full-time writer for television.
She turned to crime fiction after her second divorce, which had entailed lengthy custody proceedings. “For months I lay in bed and plotted how to kill my ex-husband,” she said, “but I knew I’d bungle it and get caught, so I wrote it in a book instead.”
Having settled in Santa Barbara, she set her series in “Santa Teresa”, the lightly fictionalised version of the city in which Ross Macdonald, her primary influence, had set his novels.
Sue Grafton won numerous awards, and in Britain the Crime Writers’ Association awarded her its highest honour, the Diamond Dagger, for lifetime achievement, in 2008.
She continued to work on the Millhone series after being diagnosed with breast cancer, but was unable to write the final book, which she had long maintained would be called Z is for Zero. Announcing her death, her daughter said her mother would not have wanted a ghost writer to complete the series: “As far as we in the family are concerned, the alphabet now ends at Y.”
Sue Grafton is survived by her third husband Steven Humphrey, a philosophy professor whom she married in 1978, and by the son and daughter of her first marriage and the daughter of her second marriage.