The Comforts of Murder

It's no mystery why Sue Grafton's (newly reissued) books are so tasty

Reissues of Sue Grafton’s books began in 2022.

I don’t know about you, but I tend to think of my book life as a kind of diet. There are books I regard as meat and potatoes, others that I think of as cuisines I sample outside my usual frame of reference, and those I think of as comfort food. Prominent among the latter are crime novels, a term I’ll use to encompass mysteries, police procedurals, and the like. I took them up in my twenties, beginning with Robert B. Parker’s Spenser novels. In the decades since I have had a stable that has included Walter Mosely, Tony Hillerman, Michael Connelly, and Scott Turow, among others (including greats like Raymond Chandler and Elmore Leonard). These are all writers who produce work that’s delicious. But the most effortlessly smooth ones are the “abecedarian” novels of Sue Grafton.

Grafton, whose first book in the series, A Is for Alibi, was published in 1982, produced about one a year until her death at age 77 shortly after completing Y Is for Yesterday in 2017. Excruciatingly, her executors have indicated there will never be a Z; she also insisted that her novels would never be adapted for television or movies, which is interesting in that she began her career writing screenplays for the small and big screen (her father wrote detective fiction). I started following Grafton around the time of G Is for Gumshoe in 1990, and read each novel faithfully upon its issuance in paperback (and then, as she grew more famous and I grew more affluent, in hardcover). After Y Is For Yesterday, I resolved to go back and read the first half-dozen books I missed, and did get to A is for Alibi a year or two ago. But I dropped that thread until Grafton’s publisher, St. Martins, began reissuing the novels in pairs. Right now I’m reading E is for Evidence and F is for Fugitive. At $10 a pop (less on Amazon), the books are a bona fide bargain.

Sue Grafton (1940-2017)

So what’s so great about these novels? As is always the case with this kind of genre fiction, it all begins with the protagonist, who not only has to be smart, but also has the winning personality of someone whose company you’re going to enjoy for hours at a time. In this case, we’re talking about Kinsey Millhone, a private investigator in the fictive southern California city of Santa Teresa (based on Santa Barbara, though Grafton was a native Kentuckian who spent part of every year there). We meet Kinsey in her early thirties, a still-young woman who’s been orphaned, raised by a flinty aunt, has gone through two divorces, served a stint on the Santa Teresa police department, and worked as an insurance company investigator before she decides to hang out her own shingle. Smart but unpretentious, tart but empathic, and feisty but unafraid to be afraid, she narrates each of her stories as a case history produced for our consideration, all of them ending with the salutation, “Respectfully submitted, Kinsey Millhone.” Some of these cases are about small-time crooks; others focus on corrupt authority figures. They’re generally light in tone, but some, like M is for Murder, are haunting in their loose ends, and indeed shadow Kinsey’s psyche in subsequent tales. She lives in a vest-pocket studio that’s a converted garage, and drives a beat-up VW Beetle which she stocks with assorted clutter, like an evergreen little black dress she keeps on hand on those rare occasions where she has to make herself presentable. You root for Kinsey, and you do wish she would find the durable companion she so richly deserves. But that never happens, and you kinda know it never will. Her self-protectiveness may be a flaw, but it’s who she is, and you accept her for that.

Another pleasure of these novels is the secondary characters who populate Kinsey’s Santa Teresa, who form her de facto family. There’s her landlord, the octogenarian Henry Pitts, a retired baker who Kinsey says she’s half-in love with. There’s Rosie, the ornery Hungarian who runs a nearby greasy spoon and tells what you’re having for dinner whether it sounds appetizing or not. A couple of love interests come and go, and a number of settings (the gym, her office, the beach on which she jogs most mornings) become characters in their own right. This is one of the ways in which Grafton’s television background seems evident—there’s a living-room familiarity to all of this that’s easy to step into midstream, like your favorite classic sitcom.

There’s also an interesting historical dimension to these stories that have only grown more resonant with the passage of time. Grafton wrote these books at a yearly pace, but they unfold on something more like a weekly pace, so that Kinsey’s life falls farther and farther behind these novels’ pub date. This was always something I regarded as a bug, but have come to think of as a feature: you slip into the warm bath of the mid-1980s. This is a world without cell phones or the Internet, instead one of telephone directories and answering machines. Missed connections, bank slips, newspapers, and microfilm figures in the plots. Grafton’s work has become a kind of de facto social history, and it seems she understood this from the outset.

Finally—and this may be something a reader of genre fiction should not admit, which is why I’m going to go ahead and do so—Grafton’s novels are not that hard to follow. There are times when I find “fun” books are hard work: I have trouble keeping track of characters, get confused by plot points, and miss cues I was supposed to catch. Frankly, if I’m reading a novel like this, it’s because I don’t want to have to work that hard. (Sometimes I’ll take on a John le Carré, but gird my loins before doing so.) Grafton’s novels are always compelling enough for me to go with the flow, but not so complicated that I get lost. I think this is more of an achievement than may be readily recognized, and again I think it reflects Grafton’s background in TV, where she honed her chops and was able to distill her storytelling into its core components. As with the best country music, it’s hard to be simple.

I’m sad that Grafton is no longer with us, and I find myself wishing that we could have a final novel or a Kinsey Millhone movie. But those of us who pined for a Beatles reunion knew in our hearts that never getting back together was probably for the best. Fortunately, Kinsey Millhone is still with us, alive as ever. I suggest you pay her a visit. Even though she refuses to cook, she still serves up a delicious experience.

Coming Soon: My forthcoming book 1980: America’s Pivotal Year. Pre-order now!