Sue Grafton

Sometimes, when I write this column, I do even the most cursory research into someone I’ve been familiar with for years—once or twice, as in this case, someone I’ve even met—and discover that there is so much more to them than I’d ever realized. For one thing, I went to Wikipedia, as I am wont to do, and discovered that Sue Grafton was, in fact, a second-generation detective novelist. Her father, Cornelius Warren “Chip” Grafton, had published four novels himself, two of them about a lawyer named Gilmore Henry. He had also been a military deception officer in the India-Burma theatre during World War II. So that’s interesting and more books I need to look into.

As for Sue Grafton herself, she got her start writing TV scripts. Well—her first script appears to be for a movie called Lolly-Madonna XXX that I am not going to rent from Apple TV, and searching for it other places mostly brings up Madonna videos. It is actually based on her own novel, one of her two published in those days. Still, she did a lot of TV. A couple of Agatha Christie TV movies from the ‘80s, for example, including a Miss Marple starring Helen Hayes. An episode of Rhoda. From what I can tell, she seems to have been show-runner for the deeply bizarre Seven Brides for Seven Brothers TV show from the ‘80s.

Honestly, Grafton’s career in TV only gets weirder the more you look into it. I might have seen A Caribbean Mystery; I’m the only person in my family who’s not a fan of Agatha Christie. But I doubt I’ve seen A Killer in the Family with Robert Mitchum, James Spader, Eric Stoltz, and Stuart Margolin. I can’t imagine I’ve seen the low-level erotica Tonight’s the Night. (It’s listed as made-for-TV, but I can’t work out who aired it, if anyone.) The cast on that one is nondescript, but the score is apparently by Tangerine Dream.

Now, none of that is what you’re here for, if you’re interested in Sue Grafton. That’s fine; I own every single novel in the Alphabet Series myself. The first book title my son ever read was one of them, though admittedly it’s because she gave up and just named the book X. I was standing in line for the signing for J Is For Judgment when we discussed how hard that one was going to be; I think we concluded it would probably be X-Ray, though I personally was holding out for Xenophobia. From what I’ve read, she decided the title as part of the process and it didn’t necessarily come first.

J was the first of the books I read when it came out, and from then on, it was a highlight of my reading when a new one was released. At some point, my mother started getting them for me for Christmas the year they came out, often signed when Grafton did a stop at Vroman’s in Pasadena (my favourite bookstore in the whole world; sorry, Powell’s). Since Grafton split her time between Santa Barbara and Louisville, a Vroman’s stop was pretty much a guarantee even leaving aside how a Vroman’s stop is standard on many book tours.

People who like her books tend to really like her books. She toured the cardiac care unit at the hospital in Santa Barbara—the model for her fictional Santa Teresa—and the nurses would only talk to her if she promised she wasn’t going to kill Henry, her main character’s elderly landlord. Her main character, Kinsey Millhone, is a feisty, stubborn woman who is extremely open about the fact that she’s never been taught a lot of the “traditional” aspects of femininity. And Kinsey’s great. But one of the best aspects of the books is the detailed way she populates the world with other recurring characters.

There have basically been no adaptations of her work. She apparently wasn’t interested in it. There are two Japanese movies about “Kumiko Katagiri” that are, according to IMDb, based on B Is For Burglar and D Is For Deadbeat, respectively. I haven’t seen them, and I’m not sure if it’s accessible in the US, or subtitled at all. But I can’t help wondering if that was why she never licensed Kinsey to a US company. Then again, there’s the V. I. Warshawsky movie that sank without a trace, so maybe she was better off.

When we talked that day in 1993 about the upcoming names, we did of course speculate about the letter Z—Zero? Zapped? Zombie? But, naturally, we speculated about what she would do afterward. It was an interesting question. After all, there are only twenty-six letters, and what follows that? It ended up not mattering. We never even got Z Is For Zip or Zodiac or Zone. She died after Y Is For Yesterday. It’s frustrating to me as a fan, goodness knows, but of course I try to think of how her family felt about the whole thing first. Even if I want to know what happens with Kinsey and her family issues.