Sue Grafton belonged to an elite group of writers who created gutsy, independent, smart, and sassy female protagonists who knew how to solve crimes.
Sadly, Grafton left us in 2017 before completing the last book in her Alphabet series, but her iconic private investigator Kinsey Millhone, the thirty-something, twice-divorced Californian, lives on.
It is no accident that Grafton’s Kinsey Millhone series first became a smash hit in the 1980s. Kinsey was the right protagonist at the right time. The eighties were an era in which women were not only entering the workforce in large numbers but also breaking into nontraditional roles in law, medicine, law enforcement, and finance.
Women were smashing old stereotypes, and Grafton's Kinsey crashed into the once male-dominated detective genre. Kinsey showed women and men that she could handle herself on the street, outsmart the bad guys and cope with whatever adversity life threw at her.
In an interview with the New York Times in 1985, Grafton said: “Most of the hard-boiled male detectives go through murder and mayhem, and it has absolutely no impact on their personalities. I find it more interesting to see what the constant exposure to violence and death really does to a human being.” In the first novel in the series, A is for Alibi, Kinsey tells readers: “The day before yesterday I killed someone and the fact weighs heavily on my mind.”
In her Kinsey Millhone series, Grafton dealt with the ramifications of violent crime, giving Millhone the complexity of a real woman. And she gave her readers a character that they savored throughout the 25-book series and which they can come back to again and again well into the future.
For her work, Grafton was honored in her lifetime with the title of Grand Master from the Mystery Writers of America. She once wrote to readers on her website: “These novels take incredible focus, ingenuity, energy and imagination.”
And she managed to sustain all those qualities for more than thirty-five years of writing. Brava.
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