Continuing through the Alphabet according to Sue Grafton

More quick takes, to get caught up

This spring I undertook the challenge of revisiting Sue Grafton’s alphabet mysteries featuring Kinsey Millhone, a private investigator plying her trade in Santa Teresa, California. It’s been feeling like a self-guided master class in the art and craft of building a series. With each volume I notice things she did, that made the series work.

Grafton wrote and set A is for Alibi in 1982, and each book that follow continued a consecutive trajectory on Kinsey’s timeline, sometimes with just a few weeks or months between cases, even though there might be year or two between publication dates. Y is for Yesterday (published in 2017) was set in 1989.

Grafton had a title for the last volume, Z is for Zero, but died in 2017 without having written it.

Kinsey Millhone conducted her investigations in the world before cellphones or personal computers. She took notes by hand, and transferred each raw piece of data to its own index card, and would sometimes shuffle the deck, or lay them out Tarot style in her search for intuitive links.

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She also relied on an cassette tape answering machine to take her calls used a portable Smith-Corona typewriter to type her reports. Each volume in the series was framed as a “respectfully submitted” case file.

I left off my substack account of the journey at M is for Malice. Since then, I have enjoyed N through Q, and am working on R.

Grafton began her plan for the series with an alphabetized list of crime words. Part of the fun is to watch for how the title letter will appear in the story. In Q is for Quarry, there is a town called Quorum, and an actual quarry.

“Q” was the only one Grafton based, at least loosely, on a real-life incident, the discovery of the remains of a still-unidentified woman in a quarry near Lompoc, California. The e-book and print versions contain a special author’s note about the case.

I’m reading/listening to R is for Ricochet this week. The background for criminal activity in that one is the world of international banking and money laundering.