A short life of the author
Sue Grafton wrote one of the most ambitious sustained projects in the history of detective fiction: twenty-five novels, published over thirty-five years, each named for a letter of the alphabet, each featuring the same protagonist, and each set in the same fictional California city. The alphabet series, from A Is for Alibi (1982) to Y Is for Yesterday (2017), sold millions of copies, made Kinsey Millhone one of the most recognisable characters in American crime fiction, and established Grafton as one of the three women — with Sara Paretsky and Marcia Muller — who transformed the hard-boiled private eye novel from a male preserve into a genre in which women could be protagonists, not merely victims or love interests.
Early Career
Sue Taylor Grafton was born in Louisville, Kentucky, in 1940. Her father, C.W. Grafton, was a municipal bond attorney who also wrote mystery novels — his The Rat Began to Gnaw the Rope (1943) and The Rope Began to Hang the Butcher (1944) are remembered as clever puzzle novels. Grafton studied English at the University of Louisville, graduating in 1961.
She spent two decades writing literary novels and screenplays before finding her métier. Her first two novels — Keziah Dane (1967) and The Lolly-Madonna War (1969) — were published but made little impression. She moved to Hollywood and wrote television scripts, including adaptations of Agatha Christie’s A Caribbean Mystery and Sparkling Cyanide. The work paid well but she hated the collaborative process and the network interference, and later said that her bitterness about Hollywood was channelled into the anger that drove her early Kinsey Millhone novels. A vicious custody dispute during her second divorce gave her, she said, the emotional fuel: she fantasised about murdering her ex-husband and decided to write mysteries as therapy.
Kinsey Millhone
A Is for Alibi (1982) introduced Kinsey Millhone, a thirty-two-year-old private investigator working in “Santa Teresa,” a fictional city based on Santa Barbara. Kinsey was a new kind of female detective: not a genteel amateur in the Miss Marple tradition but a working professional — divorced twice, childless by choice, living alone in a converted garage, jogging for exercise, eating fast food, driving a battered Volkswagen Beetle, and doing her own legwork with the toughness and independence of the classic hard-boiled detective.
The characterisation was Grafton’s greatest achievement. Kinsey narrated her own cases in a first-person voice that was dry, observant, funny, and unsentimental — influenced by Ross Macdonald’s Lew Archer but distinctly her own. Over twenty-five novels, Grafton allowed Kinsey to age only about five years (the series was deliberately set in the 1980s, avoiding the complications of cell phones and internet), but deepened and complicated her in other ways, gradually revealing her family history and her emotional vulnerabilities beneath the tough-guy surface.
The Alphabet Structure
The alphabet structure was both a marketing stroke of genius and a creative constraint. Each title — B Is for Burglar, D Is for Deadbeat, G Is for Gumshoe, K Is for Killer, R Is for Ricochet, T Is for Trespass — was instantly recognisable, and collectors sought complete sets with a determination that delighted publishers. But the structure also imposed a discipline: Grafton could not abandon or restart the series, and she knew from the beginning that there would be exactly twenty-six novels. She treated each one as a self-contained case while developing ongoing storylines and character arcs across the series.
The later novels grew longer and more complex. Q Is for Quarry (2002) was based on a real unsolved murder in California — Grafton funded DNA testing that eventually identified the victim, a case she regarded as her proudest achievement. T Is for Trespass (2007), about elder abuse, was widely considered her finest novel. Y Is for Yesterday (2017) dealt with a cold case involving a sex tape and a high school murder, spanning from 1979 to 1989.
Death and the Missing Z
Grafton died of cancer on 28 December 2017, just weeks after the publication of Y Is for Yesterday. She had not yet begun Z Is for Zero. Her family announced that the series would remain unfinished — “as far as we in the family are concerned, the alphabet now ends at Y” — and that no ghostwriter or AI would ever complete it. The permanence of this decision, and the tantalising absence of the final letter, has given the series a quality of incompleteness that Grafton herself might have appreciated: a detective story without a final resolution.
Collecting Grafton
A Is for Alibi (Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1982) in first edition with dust jacket is the key collecting title — it was published in a small print run and is genuinely scarce in fine condition. Complete sets of all twenty-five alphabet novels in first edition, first printing, are the ultimate Grafton collecting achievement. Signed copies of any title are desirable, and Grafton was generous at signings. The early titles (A through F) are significantly scarcer than the later ones due to smaller initial printings.
Bibliography
| Title | Year | Publisher | Language |
|---|---|---|---|
| A Is for Alibi The first Kinsey Millhone mystery and the beginning of Sue Grafton's alphabet series — a private investigator in fictional Santa Teresa, California reopens a poisoning case eight years cold, establishing the voice and method that would sustain twenty-five novels over thirty-five years. | 1982 | Holt, Rinehart and Winston | English |
| B Is for Burglar The second Kinsey Millhone mystery — Kinsey searches for a missing woman whose sister needs her signature on insurance documents, and the simple locate job spirals into murder, arson, and a confidence scheme spanning California and Florida. | 1985 | Holt, Rinehart and Winston | English |
| C Is for Corpse The third Kinsey Millhone mystery — Kinsey befriends a young man recovering from a near-fatal car accident who believes someone tried to kill him, and when he is murdered before Kinsey can identify the threat, she pursues justice driven by personal grief. | 1986 | Henry Holt | English |
| D Is for Deadbeat The fourth Kinsey Millhone mystery — a down-and-out alcoholic hires Kinsey to deliver a cashier's check, then turns up dead, and Kinsey discovers the check was stolen and the dead man's past contained a tragedy that multiple people had reason to avenge. | 1987 | Henry Holt | English |
| E Is for Evidence The fifth Kinsey Millhone mystery — Kinsey is framed for insurance fraud and must clear her name while investigating an arson case, the first novel in the series where Kinsey herself is the target and her professional reputation is at stake. | 1988 | Henry Holt | English |
| F Is for Fugitive The sixth Kinsey Millhone mystery — Kinsey takes a case in a small coastal town where a man convicted of murdering a teenage girl seventeen years earlier has been rearrested after jumping bail, and the town's secrets prove more dangerous than the original crime. | 1989 | Henry Holt | English |
| G Is for Gumshoe The seventh Kinsey Millhone mystery — Kinsey turns thirty-three and discovers that a contract killer has been hired to murder her, forcing her to accept a bodyguard while simultaneously investigating the disappearance of an elderly woman in the desert. | 1990 | Henry Holt | English |
| H Is for Homicide The eighth Kinsey Millhone mystery — Kinsey goes undercover to infiltrate an insurance fraud ring and finds herself trapped in a violent criminal household with no way to communicate with the outside world, the series' most suspenseful and claustrophobic entry. | 1991 | Henry Holt | English |
| K Is for Killer The eleventh Kinsey Millhone mystery — Kinsey investigates the unsolved murder of a young woman who led a double life, working nights and keeping secrets that led someone to kill her, a noir-inflected entry that takes place largely after dark. | 1994 | Henry Holt | English |
| N Is for Noose The fourteenth Kinsey Millhone mystery — Kinsey travels to a small Sierra Nevada town to investigate why a recently deceased detective was troubled before his death, and the town's hostility to her questions suggests a secret worth killing to protect. | 1998 | Henry Holt | English |
| O Is for Outlaw The fifteenth Kinsey Millhone mystery — a storage unit auction delivers a box of Kinsey's own belongings from her first marriage, and the contents lead her to reexamine her ex-husband's alleged crime and her own past, the series' most autobiographically resonant entry. | 1999 | Henry Holt | English |
| Q Is for Quarry The seventeenth Kinsey Millhone mystery — Kinsey joins two retired detectives in reopening the case of an unidentified murder victim found in a quarry in 1969, a cold case that Grafton researched using actual forensic techniques applied to a real unsolved homicide. | 2002 | G. P. Putnam's Sons | English |
| R Is for Ricochet The eighteenth Kinsey Millhone mystery — Kinsey is hired to help a young woman recently released from prison reintegrate into society, but her charge's charm conceals a manipulative intelligence that draws Kinsey into a money-laundering scheme. | 2004 | G. P. Putnam's Sons | English |
| S Is for Silence The nineteenth Kinsey Millhone mystery — a woman who vanished on July 4, 1953 is the subject of a cold-case investigation thirty-four years later, alternating between Kinsey's present-day inquiry and the night of the disappearance, the series' most structurally ambitious entry. | 2005 | G. P. Putnam's Sons | English |
| T Is for Trespass The twentieth Kinsey Millhone mystery — a con woman with stolen credentials becomes the caregiver for Kinsey's elderly neighbor and systematically exploits him, a thriller about elder abuse that is among the series' most disturbing and socially relevant entries. | 2007 | G. P. Putnam's Sons | English |
| Y Is for Yesterday The twenty-fifth and final Kinsey Millhone mystery — Grafton's last novel before her death in December 2017, investigating the release from prison of a man convicted of murder as a teenager and the resurfacing of a sex tape that connects multiple crimes across two decades. | 2017 | G. P. Putnam's Sons | English |