If you’re thinking of dipping into the series, the obvious advice is to start with A. Her 25 Kinsey Millhone books can be read in order (a great pleasure), or as stand-alone novels Grafton was careful, in every book, to reintroduce Kinsey to those who didn’t know her. She was - along with Sara Paretsky, Marcia Muller and others - a pioneer in creating an American genre of female-centred detective fiction in the 1980s. And sometimes, we find ourselves missing people we’ve never met. Would she finally make peace with her family? Would she settle down with on-again, off-again beau Robert Dietz? Would her octogenarian landlord Henry, God forbid, die? But all of us who loved Kinsey - and, by extension, Grafton - are now faced with, well, real life. I’ll confess that I was looking forward to a tidy wrap-up of Kinsey’s adventures. “As far as we in the family are concerned,” wrote Grafton’s daughter in a Facebook post, “the alphabet now ends at Y.” Z was not yet written, and never will be. Just before New Year’s, however, came terribly sad news: Grafton, at 77, had died, of cancer diagnosed two years ago.
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(“It’s fun to get to live her life without penalty.”) She planned for Z Is For Zero to be “a book like the others - a good solid story and good detective work,” and spoke happily of what she might do once the alphabet series was done. Speaking in a lilting voice that instantly revealed her Kentucky roots, she was delightfully upbeat, and spoke of how Kinsey was her alter ego. Y Is For Yesterday came out last summer, and I had the great pleasure of interviewing Grafton over the telephone in August. Kinsey - funny, sarcastic, loyal, cheap, righteous, smart and utterly endearing - became a friend. Delighted with my find, I devoured the previous books and, once caught up, would eagerly await the next instalment.
I discovered her, I think, sometime in the 1990s, maybe at G or H. My favourite fictional gumshoe has long been Kinsey Millhone, who first sprang from the pages of Sue Grafton’s alphabet series in 1982, in A Is For Alibi. Life is rarely like this, but it’s nice to think that, somewhere, puzzle pieces are fitting together and loose ends are being tied up.īut there’s another reason: because we fall in love with a detective.
In a few hundred pages, a world is taken apart and neatly put back together again we know who’s good and who’s bad and what happened.
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Why do so many of us read detective novels, putting ourselves into the worn shoe leather of obsessive loners determined to crack a case? I think it’s because there’s something appealing about looking at life as a mystery that can be solved. The day before yesterday I killed someone and the fact weighs heavily on my mind.” I’m thirty-two years old, twice divorced, no kids. I’m a private investigator, licensed by the state of California.
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