Sue Grafton, bestselling author, dies
The Santa Barbara mystery writer created the Kinsey Millhone private detective novels. She was 77.
Just a handful of books into her wildly popular Alphabet series of mystery novels, writer Sue Grafton was already fielding questions about the inevitable: What comes after ‘Z’?
“To think about ‘Z’ means skipping right over all the intervening years,” the beloved writer wrote in a Q&A on her website. “I’ll be 199 years old by then so I’ll be lucky if I don’t spend the day drooling on myself.”
Devoted readers of Grafton’s Kinsey Millhone detective novels, first published in 1982 with “A is for Alibi,” will never know.
The Santa Barbara writer who created in Millhone one of the first modern hardboiled female private eyes and topped bestseller lists for decades, inspiring loyal readers to name their daughters after the series’ heroine, died Thursday after a two-year battle with cancer, according to her daughter Jamie Clark. She was 77.
The latest installment in the series published earlier this year, “Y is for Yesterday,” will be the last, Clark wrote in a Facebook post. “The alphabet now ends at Y,” she wrote.
Grafton’s husband of four decades, Steven Humphrey, said the author wasn’t in pain and was surrounded by family who talked to her for two days after she fell unconscious. “Every day with her was a joy, she was the most amazing woman in the world,” said Humphrey, who lectures in philosophy at UC Santa Barbara and the University of Louisville.
Grafton created Millhone, a salty-mouthed, twice-divorced ex-cop with a penchant for Quarter Pounders with Cheese, at a time when mystery novels were almost exclusively writ-
ten by men, featuring male protagonists.
“Unlike so many female characters in the mysteries that preceded her appearance, she is not a loyal helpmate or willing employee or second banana. Now, how refreshing is that?” her longtime editor, Marian Wood, said of Millhone in a post on the Penguin Random House website.
Grafton’s novels “became so successful and so beloved, that it totally changed the genre,” said Otto Penzler, owner of New York’s Mysterious Bookshop and publisher and editor of mystery novels. “She did so much for women mystery writers.”
Grafton said she came up with the plot for “A is for Alibi,” involving a poisoning by oleander, while fuming with murderous rage during a bitter, drawn-out custody battle with her second husband.
“All of us have experienced rage and a sense of powerlessness — exactly what I was feeling when I fantasized murder. What comes up in all of us when we’re in such unjust situations is the same energy that drives killers,” she told The Times in 1990. “I write to understand who I am.”
Grafton liked to refer to Millhone, who investigates murders and disappearances in Santa Teresa — a fictionalized Santa Barbara — as the thinner, younger, braver version of herself, living a life she might have led had she not married and had children at a young age.
Grafton was born April 24, 1940, in Louisville, Ky., to parents who were alcoholics. She and her sister were left to spend much of their days on their own, reading. She read Mickey Spillane and Raymond Chandler, and was also influenced by her father, a municipal bond attorney who wrote mysteries in his spare time.
She married at 18 while attending Western Kentucky State Teachers College and had two children. She divorced within a few years and remarried, following her second husband’s job to Santa Barbara, where she had her third child, Clark.
She published her first novel at 27, and dabbled in television and screenwriting, including TV-movie adaptations of Agatha Christie novels. She met Humphrey while collaborating on a screenplay.
The Alphabet series quickly gained renown for Grafton and earned her a rarefied following, her books being translated into 26 languages.
In interviews as early as 1991, Grafton said the series would conclude with “Z is for Zero,” and end in 1990, when her protagonist turns 40.
In addition to her husband and Clark, she is survived by another daughter, Leslie Twine, and son Jay Schmidt. Grafton’s remains will be cremated and the family will hold a private memorial Sunday. Memorials also will be held in Louisville and New York.