Beloved writer Sue Grafton dies at 77
Just a handful of books into her wildly popular Alphabet series mystery novels, writer Sue Grafton was already fielding questions about the inevitable: What comes after Z?
“To think about ‘Z’ means skipping right over all the intervening years,” the beloved writer wrote in a Q&A on her web site. “I’ll be 199 years old by then so I’ll be lucky if I don’t spend the day drooling on myself.”
Devoted readers of Grafton’s Kinsey Millhone detective novels, first published in 1982 with “A is for Alibi,” will never know.
The Santa Barbara, Calif., writer who created in Millhone one of the first modern hard-boiled female private eyes and topped best-seller lists for decades, inspiring loyal readers to name their daughters after the series’ heroine, passed away Thursday after a two-year battle with cancer, according to her daughter, Jamie Clark. She was 77.
The latest installment in the series published earlier this year, “Y Is for Yesterday,” will be the last, Clark wrote in a Facebook post.
“The alphabet now ends at Y,” she wrote.
Her husband of 43 years, Steven Humphrey, said Grafton wasn’t in pain and surrounded by family who talked to her for two days after she fell unconscious. “Every day with her was a joy, she was the most amazing woman in the world,” said Humphrey, who lectures in philosophy at the University of California, Santa Barbara and University of Louisville.
Grafton first created Millhone, a saltymouthed, twice-divorced ex-cop with a penchant for Quarter Pounders with Cheese, at a time when mystery novels were almost exclusively written by men, featuring male protagonists.
Grafton’s novels “became so successful and so beloved, that it totally changed the genre,” said Otto Penzler, owner of New York’s Mysterious Bookshop and publisher and editor of mystery novels. “She did so much for women mystery writers.”
“A is for Alibi” was Grafton’s third published novel, after she’d written several television movies, including Agatha Christie adaptations. Grafton said she came up with the plot, involving a poisoning by oleander, while fuming amid a bitter, drawn-out custody battle with her second husband.
The writer liked to refer to Millhone, who investigates murders and disappearances in coastal Santa Teresa, as the thinner, younger, braver version of herself, living a life she may have led had she not married and had children at a young age.
Born April 24, 1940 in Louisville, Ky.,to parents who were alcoholics, Grafton and her sister were left to spend much of their days on their own, reading. She read Mickey Spillane and Raymond Chandler at a young age, and was also influenced by her father, who was a municipal bond attorney who wrote mysteries in his spare time.