American author Sue Grafton passed away in Santa Barbara on 28 December 2017 after a two-year battle with cancer. On hearing the sad news, millions of readers, writers and fans must have screamed “Noooo” and fallen to the ground, arms raised to the sky, wailing “Why, Sue Grafton, why?” Well, at least I did, and that’s no lie.
Famous for her 25-book Alphabet crime series, Sue Grafton’s last Kinsey Millhone book Z will remain unwritten. To quote her family “The alphabet stops at Y” and this has been echoed around the world.
Sue Grafton single-handedly brought me back into reading and showed me the joys of a good detective novel. I was floundering in a bad ten years of my life where I’d lost my father and was struggling with the care of my ailing mother while battling my own ill-health when, quite out of the blue, I was given a second-hand paperback of Grafton’s book “K is for Killer”.
PI Kinsey Millhone walked into my life. Grafton’s detective series – “H is for Homicide”, “N is for Noose”, “V is for Vengeance” and so on – transported me into a place I understood, in an era I knew, yet detailed the life of a woman in a job which was so foreign, so far removed from my own experiences that I was immediately entranced. Or as my father would have said “Caught, hook, line and sinker.”
This fortunate state of affairs meant I had many books to read before I was up-to-date with the current publications. Here I would like to thank my cousin Laurie who willingly sent me several paperbacks to feed my addiction. So I read one and moved straight onto the next, graduating from that first battered paperback to hardcovers and finally e-book editions.
The major characters are unchanging; Kinsey is a private detective in California who joined the police force then left to acquire her detective licence; landlord Henry Pitts is now forever in his kitchen; gregarious Rosie; love interest Cheney Phillips and Robert Dietz. It was fascinating watching Kinsey evolve, if that’s the right word, because in all she only advanced a couple of years and is destined to remain immortalised in her thirties.
It seems Sue Grafton did not even draft a copy of her final book. The old adage “Leave them wanting more” is true but not the case. Her family is adamant that although Grafton had a working title (prophetically) “Zero”, there will be no final book, no ghost writer, no movie and no happy ending – just a blank space on the bookshelf.
The final chapter has ended for Sue Grafton and Kinsey Millhone RIP.
♥ Gretchen Bernet-Ward
Sue Grafton Alphabet Crime Series Featuring Kinsey Millhone
