A Is for Alibi was published by Holt, Rinehart and Winston in 1982, introducing Kinsey Millhone — a thirty-two-year-old private investigator in Santa Teresa, California (a fictional version of Santa Barbara). Nikki Fife, recently released from prison after serving time for the murder of her husband Laurence, hires Kinsey to find the real killer. The investigation reopens a case eight years cold and leads Kinsey through the dead man’s professional and personal connections.
Kinsey Millhone was a revolution in mystery fiction: a female private eye who was neither glamorous nor tough in the hard-boiled masculine tradition, but practical, observant, self-sufficient, and wryly funny. She lived alone in a converted garage apartment, drove a VW Bug, jogged for exercise, and had no desire for domestic partnership. Grafton wrote her as a woman whose independence was not a performance but a genuine preference — radical for 1982.
The novel established the first-person narration, the California coastal setting, and the procedural method (Kinsey’s meticulous legwork, her interviews, her physical files and index cards) that would define twenty-five novels over thirty-five years. The alphabet conceit — one letter per book — gave the series its identity and its natural endpoint (which Grafton did not live to reach; she died in 2017 after completing Y Is for Yesterday).
The Kinsey Millhone Method
Grafton’s detective works without a team, without a police badge, and (for most of the series) without a computer. Her method is shoe-leather investigation: knocking on doors, interviewing witnesses, checking public records, and maintaining handwritten case notes. This deliberate technological limitation (the series is set progressively through the 1980s, never reaching the digital age) gives the books a timeless quality and forces Kinsey into direct human interaction for every piece of information.
Collecting A Is for Alibi
First edition (Holt, Rinehart and Winston, New York, 1982): Boards with dust jacket.
Market values:
- Fine in dust jacket: $1,000–$3,000
- Very good: $400–$1,000
- Signed first edition: $2,000–$5,000
As the first appearance of one of mystery fiction’s most beloved characters, this is among the most valuable modern first editions in the genre.