Sue Grafton

Sue Taylor Grafton was an American author of detective novels, most famous for her "alphabet series" that follows private investigator Kinsey Millhone in the fictional Santa Teresa, California. Her father, C. W. Grafton, was also a detective novelist, and she named Ross Macdonald as the writer who most influenced her crime fiction. Before the alphabet series took off, she worked writing screenplays for television movies.

Grafton was born in Louisville, Kentucky, to C. W. Grafton and Vivian Harnsberger, both children of Presbyterian missionaries. Her father worked as a municipal bond lawyer and wrote mystery novels at night; her mother had been a high school chemistry teacher. When Grafton was three, her father joined the Army during World War II, returning when she was five. After that, her home life fell apart. Both parents became alcoholics, and Grafton later said she was left to raise herself from age five onward. She grew up in Louisville with her older sister, Ann, attending Atherton High School. She spent her first year at the University of Louisville, her sophomore and junior years at Western Kentucky State Teachers College (now Western Kentucky University), and graduated from the University of Louisville in 1961 with a bachelor's in English literature and minors in humanities and fine arts. She was a member of Pi Beta Phi. After college, she worked as a hospital admissions clerk, a cashier, and a medical secretary in Santa Monica and Santa Barbara, California. Her mother died by suicide in 1960 after returning home from surgery for esophageal cancer caused by years of drinking and smoking. Her father died in 1982, just months before "A" Is for Alibi was published.

Her father, who loved detective fiction and wrote at night, taught her about writing and editing, grooming her to become a writer. Inspired by him, Grafton started writing at eighteen and finished her first novel four years later. She went on to complete six more novels, but only two—Keziah Dane and The Lolly-Madonna War—were ever published. She later destroyed the manuscripts of the five unpublished ones. Unable to succeed with novels, she turned to screenplays, spending the next fifteen years writing for television movies such as Sex and the Single Parent, Mark, I Love You, and Nurse. She sold the movie rights for The Lolly-Madonna War and co-wrote the screenplay for the 1973 film adaptation Lolly-Madonna XXX, which starred Rod Steiger and Jeff Bridges. Her screenplay for Walking Through the Fire won a Christopher Award in 1979. With her husband, Steven Humphrey, she adapted Agatha Christie's A Caribbean Mystery and Sparkling Cyanide for television and co-wrote A Killer in the Family and Love on the Run. She also provided the story for the 1983 TV movie Svengali. Screenwriting taught her story structure, dialogue, and action sequences, and she felt ready to return to fiction. During a bitter divorce and custody battle that lasted six years, she imagined ways to kill or maim her ex-husband. Those fantasies were so vivid she decided to write them down.

Grafton was drawn to mystery series with linked titles, like John D. MacDonald's Travis McGee books (each with a color in the title) and Harry Kemelman's Rabbi Small series (each with a day of the week). While reading Edward Gorey's The Gashlycrumb Tinies—a picture book listing alphabetized ways for children to die—she decided to write a series with titles following the alphabet. She immediately sat down and listed every crime-related word she could think of. These became the alphabet novels, featuring sleuth Kinsey Millhone. The name rhymes and alliterates with Sharon McCone, the heroine of Marcia Muller's crime novels; Grafton called Muller the founding mother of the contemporary female hard-boiled private eye. The series is set in Santa Teresa, a fictionalized Santa Barbara, following Ross Macdonald's lead in creating a fictional version of the city. Grafton described Kinsey Millhone as her alter ego, the person she might have been had she not married young and had children.

The series starts with "A" Is for Alibi, published and set in 1982. "B" Is for Burglar followed in 1985, and after that, Grafton usually released a new book every year or two. Each title combined a letter with a word, except for X. After "G" Is for Gumshoe, she quit screenwriting to focus on the novels. Though written between 1982 and 2017, all the Kinsey Millhone books are set in the 1980s, with each taking place only weeks or months after the previous one. The final novel, "Y" Is for Yesterday, is set in 1989. The name of each book was a source of speculation. In May 2009, Grafton said she was trying to figure out how to get from "U" Is for Undertow to "Z" Is for Zero, and that knowing the endgame title for Z didn't mean she knew what V, W, X, and Y would be. She said the series would end with "Z" Is for Zero, but she died before she could begin writing it. Her daughter stated that Grafton would never allow a ghostwriter to write in her name, and as far as the family is concerned, the alphabet now ends at Y.