Sue Grafton

Along with fellow crime novelist Sara Paretsky, Sue Grafton is credited with establishing female detectives into the hard-boiled genre. The two authors introduced their characters--Paretsky is the creator of the "V. I. Warshawski" books--within a few months of each other in 1982.

Her Life:

Grafton inherited her parents' love for reading; but not a deep love for school. "As a child, I was a very earnest and dutiful student who had constant stomachaches," she told AAYA. "I remember being very frightened of school (and I give a lot of that to Kinsey (her woman detective alter-ego), so that when Kinsey (in the books) talks about her early school days, you can trust that it's my biography. By the time I got out of high school, I was one of those students whose report cards always read `Does not live up to her potential.'. . . I always made B's--I just didn't work very hard at school. I was more interested in escaping criticism."

Grafton attended the University of Louisville. She married for the first time while still a student, and had a baby girl and then a baby boy. Shortly after the birth of her first child, Grafton's mother, suffering from cancer, committed suicide. Meanwhile, around age eighteen, Grafton started writing short stories and drafting book-length ideas. Eventually, she took a creative writing extension course at the University of California--Los Angeles. "It was taught by Robert Kirsh, who was then the book editor for the Los Angeles Times. He encouraged me to write my first novel,"

She divorced and remarried in 1962 and moved to California with her new husband, eventually settling in Santa Barbara and working as a medical secretary. "From the age of twenty-two on, I wrote at night, every night, while I was working full time and raising a family," she once commented. "I wrote because I couldn't help it, because the writing interested, amused, and satisfied me. I wrote in the face of rejection, frustration, hardship, weariness, and stress. The very act of doing what I loved gave me energy."

Grafton wrote four book-length manuscripts before publishing her first novel, Keziah Dane. The book revolves around the efforts of a family matriarch to keep her clan together despite natural disasters and a greedy interloper. Despite some flaws, Keziah Dane is an "impressive first novel. . . . The talent here is certainly original, but not yet organized."

Grafton followed Keziah Dane with The Lolly-Madonna War, a novel about two feuding mountain families. Even with the publication of this second work, however, the author felt something was missing. She said at that time, "I think I understood then that it was not going to be my place in life to do mainstream fiction."

Divorced from her second husband in 1973 after a bitter custody battle, Grafton began a career writing television scripts and screenplays in Los Angeles, including the adaptation of her own The Lolly-Madonna War. Meeting Stephen Humphrey in 1974, she and her children ultimately went with him to Ohio State University, where he was earning a doctorate in philosophy. The couple was married in 1978. Grafton continued writing screenplays during the 1970s with a degree of success, but increasingly she railed against the team-player aspect of such writing. By 1977 she decided she wanted to focus on solo literary efforts, and with her husband's graduation in 1981 the family returned to California, settling in Santa Barbara, where Grafton began work on what became the first "Kinsey Millhone" novel.

Her Books:

Laurence Fife was a slick divorce lawyer and slippery ladies' man. Until someone killed him. The jury believed that it was his pretty young wife Nikki, so they sent her to prison for eight years. Now, Nikki's out on parole and Kinsey Miihone's in for trouble. Nikki hires Kinsey to discover who really killed her husband. But the trail is eight years cold, and at the end is a chilling twist even Kinsey doesn't suspect -- a second eight-year-old murder and a brand new corpse.

Finding wealthy Elaine Boldt seems like a quickie case to Kinsey Millhone. The flashy widow was last seen wearing a $12,000 lynx coat, leaving her condo in Santa Teresa for her condo in Boca Raton. But somewhere in between, she vanished. Kinsey's case goes from puzzling to sinister when a house is torched, an apartment is burgled of worthless papers, the lynx coat comes back without Elaine, and her bridge partner is found dead. Soon Kinsey's clues begin to form a capital M -- not for missing, but for murder: And plenty of it.

Winner Of The 1985 Private Eye Writers Of America Shamus Award And The 1985 Anthony Award For Best Novel.

Bobby Callahan was only 20 when an accident left him disfigured for life. The doctors patched up his body but they couldn't fix his mind. Huge chunks of his memory were lost but he knew someone had tried to kill him and that the "accident" was deliberate. He knew he had the key to something that made him dangerous to the murderer but he didn't know what. No one believed him. . .so he hired Kinsey Millhone. Three days later Bobby was dead. But Kinsey never welshed on a deal. She'd been hired to stop a killing, now she'd find the killer instead.

"D" is for Detective Kinsey Millhone, given $25,000 of stolen drug money by a drunkard named Daggett who then dies in a drowning. When she decides to deliver the money to Daggett's designee, a young man who was the sole survivor of an auto accident perpetrated by Daggett, Kinsey finds herself in a dilemma: too many "D's" are after the loot. There are two Mrs. Daggetts, a daughter, the drug dealers and a determined killer who soon claims a second life. At this point, Grafton's lively, well-written adventure develops a deadly flaw. Kinsey comes upon the second victim shortly after he's been shot. Though dying, he is conscious and coherent. Why, then, doesn't she ask who did it? When asked the same thing by the police, she says, "I didn't want the last minutes of his life taken up with that stuff"a humane but unlikely rejoiner from any private eye. Even so, the pleasure of this story comes through. Let's give it a "D" for Dandy.

'E' is for evidence: evidence planted, evidence lost. 'E' is for ex-lovers and evasions, enemies and endings. For Kinsey, 'E' is for everything she stands to lose if she can't exonerate herself: her license, her livelihood, her good name. And so she takes on a new client: namely, Kinsey Millhone, thirty-two and twice divorced, ex-cop and wisecracking loner, a California private investigator with a penchant for lost causes--one of which, it is to be hoped, is not herself.

Everyone knew the kind of girl Jean Timberlake was -- ask anybody in the sleepy surf town of Floral Beach and they'd say Jean was wild, looking for trouble. But she certainly wasn't looking for murder. She was found dead on the beach seventeen years ago, and a rowdy ex-boyfriend named Bailey Fowler was convicted of her murder and imprisoned -- and then Bailey escaped. Now private eye Kinsey Millhone steps into a case that should have never been closed, in a town where there's no such thing as a private investigation.

Good and bad things seem to be coming in threes for Kinsey Millhone: on her thirty-third birthday she moves back into her renovated apartment, gets hired to find an elderly lady supposedly living in the Mojave Desert by herself, and makes the top of ex-con Tyrone Patty's hit list. It's the last that convinces Kinsey even she can't handle whoever's been hired to whack her, and she gets herself a bodyguard: Robert Dietz, a Porsche-driving P.I. who takes guarding Kinsey's body very seriously. With Dietz watching her for the merest sign of her usual recklessness, Kinsey plunges into her case. And before it's over, she'll unearth the gruesome truth about a long-buried betrayal and, in the process, come fact-to-face with her own mortality. . . .

H' is for Homicide continues to show the author in strong storytelling form. . . . [It] finds Kinsey Millhone working on a case involving the death of a claims adjuster for a California insurance company. The story takes her into the Los Angeles barrio in pursuit of a violent criminal, into jails and hospitals, and into a grungy bar named the Meat Locker. . . . Count on Millhone not only to corner the murderer but also to make a statement against the foibles of the insurance game."

Fired by the insurance agency for whom she investigates, Kinsey is forced to take on a last-minute murder investigation in which the ex-husband of a murdered artist claims that David Barney, her current husband, is guilty as sin. Barney gets to Kinsey and insists he's innocent. But if he is, who's guilty? In trying to learn who's been getting away with murder, Kinsey may be courting her own....

Wendell Jaffe has been dead for five years--until his former insurance agent spots him in a dusty resort bar. Now California Fidelity wants Kinsey Millhone to track down the dead man. Just two months before, his widow collected on Jaffe's $500,000 life insurance policy--her only legacy since Jaffe went overboard, bankrupt and about to be indicted for his fraudulent real estate schemes. As Kinsey pushes deeper into the mystery surrounding Wendell Jaffe's pseudocide, she explores her own past, discovering that in family matters, as in crime, sometimes it's better to reserve judgment

When Kinsey Millhone answers her office door late one night, she lets in more darkness than she realizes. Janice Kepler is a grieving mother who can't let the death of her beautiful daughter Lorna alone. The police agree that Lorna was murdered, but a suspect was never apprehended and the trail is now ten months cold. Kinsey pieces together Lorna's young life: a dull day job a the local water treatment plant spiced by sidelines in prostitution and pornography. She tangles with Lorna's friends: a local late-night DJ; a sweet, funny teenaged hooker; Lorna's sloppy landlord and his exotic wife. But to find out which one, if any, turned killer, Kinsey will have to inhabit a netherworld from which she may never return.

When Kinsey Millhone agrees to do a favor for Henry Pitts, her lovable octogenarian landlord, she literally gets taken for the ride of her life. The family of a recently deceased WWII veteran wants her to find out why the military has no record of his service. All Kinsey has to do, she thinks, is cut through some government red tape. But when the dead man's house is ransacked and his old army buddy is beaten up, she quickly realizes he was not all he seemed. Before long Kinsey is trailing crooks halfway across the country, impersonating a hotel maid, tangling with a baseball bat-wielding grandmother, and running from one very dangerous character. With her money almost gone and her nerves frayed, Kinsey's got to solve a decades-old crime and make it back home in time for Henry's wedding . . . if she can make it back at all. . . .

Kinsey Millhone, the normally bubbly California private investigator, is depressed in Sue Grafton's new alphabet mystery; so depressed she goes back with old flame Robert Dietz for a while. Bad move. Meanwhile she gets wrapped up in a family affair, locating the missing heir to a fortune and then protecting him from his ill-intentioned brothers. Typically, our woman Kinsey has little patience with the boys, but a firm grasp of family dysfunction.

Kinsey takes a case in tiny Nota Lake, Nevada, where deputy sheriff Tom Newquist has recently died of a heart attack. His grief-stricken widow, Selma, is convinced Tom died as a result of the terrible stress he was under during his last weeks, and she's determined to find out the source of that stress. Kinsey sorts through stacks of paper, old notes, bills, and phone lists but can't find a single clue about what was troubling Tom. About to give up and head back to L.A., she finally stumbles on a lead that makes her stop in her tracks. Apparently Tom was following up on a double homicide, and as Kinsey probes further into the bizarre details, she finds that he suspected the killer may have been one of his colleagues.

This time, the alphabet series star will take on the toughest case to date: her past. What begins as a random phone call from a "storage space scavenger" (someone who buys the contents of defaulted storage units) leads Kinsey to a box of old papers and personal effects that her ex-husband, Mickey Magruder, left behind. Inside, she finds a 15-year-old unsent letter from a bartender that, among other things, reveals her former hubby was having an affair. The letter also contains details about the murder of a transient--a crime for which Mickey was blamed. Although never convicted, Mickey was ruined--losing his job, wife, and friends. But 15 years later, Kinsey realizes that foul play may have been involved in the murder, a deadly temptation for her.

Kinsey Millhone is back, and she's broke, which is why she decides to take on a missing persons case involving a rich doctor who may have repeated history by running out on his wife and child. Things heat up when she learns that the good doctor is wanted by federal fraud busters on suspicion of Medicare fraud. Grafton delivers again in this, her sixteenth novel, which takes us into a world cast in shades of black amid shafts of steel and silver - a shadowed land in which the mysterious disappearance of the doctor leads Kinsey into a dangerous maze of duplicity as she taps into the intricacies of a cunning Medicare fraud.

She was a "Jane Doe," an unidentified white female whose decomposed body was discovered near a quarry off California's Highway 1. The case fell to the Santa Teresa County Sheriff's Department, but the detectives had little to go on. The woman was young, her hands were bound with a length of wire, there were multiple stab wounds, and her throat had been slashed. After months of investigation, the murder remained unsolved. That was eighteen years ago. Now the two men who found the body, both nearing the end of long careers in law enforcement, want one last shot at the case. Old and ill, they need someone to help with their legwork and they turn to Kinsey Millhone. They will, they tell her, find closure if they can just identify the victim. Kinsey is intrigued and agrees to the job. But revisiting the past can be a dangerous business, and what begins with the pursuit of Jane Doe's real identity ends in a high-risk hunt for her killer.

Reba Lafferty was a daughter of privilege, Abandoned by her rebellious mother when she was an infant, she was the only child of a rich man already in his mid-fifties when she was born, and her adoring father thoroughly spoiled her. Now, at thirty-two, having had many scrapes with the law, she is about to be released on probation from the California Institution for Women, having served twenty-two months of a four-year sentence for embezzlement. Though Nord Lafferty could deny his daughter nothing, he wasn't there for her when she was brought up on this charge. Now he wants to be sure she stays straight, stays at home and away from drugs, the booze, the gamblers.

It seems a straightforward assignment for Kinsey: babysit Reba until she settles in, make sure she follows all the niceties of her parole. May a week's work. Nothing untoward - the woman seems remorseful and friendly. And the money is good. But life is never that simple, and Reba is out of prison less than twenty-four hours when one of her old crowd comes circling around.

Thirty-four years ago, Violet Sullivan put on her party finery and left for the annual Fourth of July fireworks display. She was never seen again. In the small California town of Serena Station, tongues wagged. Some said she'd run off with a lover. Some said she was murdered by her husband. But for the not-quite-seven-year-old daughter Daisy she left behind, Violet's absence has never been explained or forgotten. Now, thirty-four years later, she wants the solace of closure.

Due out December, 2007