My family read the Grafton Alphabet series end to end.
I’d revisited the first few books a few times over the last thirty years, but most of them I’ve read a single time, generally the year of publication. We started giving them to each as hard-covers on Christmas, or for birthday presents. Audiobook versions percolated through the family, as boxes of rental audio cassettes, packs of CDs, purchased or borrowed from libraries. Sometime after my father died two years ago I started re-listening to the Sue Grafton mysteries on Audible, starting with A, and going on from there, with the goal of rereading the entire series. I was reading H when my mother died on the first day of 2021.
I’m pushing sixty, so it’s not like the loss of my parents is anything but an ordinary, foreseeable tragedy. But the deaths have hit me hard. I have enjoyed escaping into these books as I walk an hour or two or three a day.
Sue Grafton died in 2017 at age 77, getting ten years less life than my parents had, but having almost completed her alphabet. Z is for Zero, her family tells us, will never be written. Sue’s alphabet ends at Y. and that is oddly appropriate, I think. A Work of Art Is Never Finished, Merely Abandoned, as the saying goes.Still, Sue got a ton done, before vanishing into that other country where my parents now reside.
The series consists of the internal monolog of Kinsey Milhone, a twice divorced, former cop private detective living and working mostly in fictional California city she calls Santa Theresa, a place I thought was real for thirty years. Toward the end, Grafton throws in a few new viewpoint characters, non-recurring, having perhaps gotten tired of the rendering the single voice for decades.
If you’re interested in Grafton and her life and work, the Wikipedia link here is a good place to start. This post isn’t really about her, or the mysteries, but about my family’s experience of them.
The books are about mortality, for me now, about what a life work should look like, about the length of time I got to spend with my parents, from my birth in 1963 until their deaths the last two years. The alphabet is a yard stick, stretching from the beginning of my college years to my late fifties.
The series begins as contemporary detective fiction set in the early 80s when it was written. She publishes a book a year in the series until M in 1996, as she turned 56 years old, and thereafter it takes he two years per book. She wasn’t able to quit her screenwriting until G is for Gumshoe, which gives you an idea of how hard it is to make a living writing novels, even in popular genres.
The series turns into a period piece relatively quickly, as time passes more slowly for Kinsey than it does for her readers. Y is for Yesterday book ends the series in more ways than one. It contains staged events (in other viewpoints) from 1979, with the action of the book’s present, 1989.
Grafton had no interest in writing about the internet or smartphone culture. Born in 1940, she was a decade younger than my parents; in this she was like my mother, a more extreme technohater. My mother earned a Phd, and wasn’t sure why one had to rewind a video tape. Her cellphone’s ring made her jump a foot in the air–she never learned to answer one. The batteries went dead and they ended up in a pile of newspaper.
So, the Kinsey Alphabet-minus-Z, written from 1982 to 2016, 44 years, span only 7 years of Kinsey’s life, taking us from her mid twenties to her early thirties.
Most non-YA protagonists are in this age range. Old enough to be doing something interesting, to be out of adolescence, but young enough to avoid having to get up three times a night to pee, or experience hot flashes. Each alphabet mystery spans a few days or weeks, with a month or two between books, working gigs Kinsey doesn’t consider worthy of sharing any details.
So Kinsey is falling into a singularity, time slowing, living six times slower than you and I.
And so, Kinsey remains, always, in her prime. On most days running three miles a day, except when she’s too beat up to get out of bed.
My father said, about the late sixties and early seventies, that that was his time, their time, my mother and him, and this struck me as sad, to feel like a creature out of time, on the sidelines, watching an increasingly bizarre game play itself out in their endless wash of twenty four hour news.
So Grafton drifted into her own past, as the years went by, and never had to learn new private detective stuff. Kinsey went to libraries and looked at microfilm and made calls from phone booths and listened to her answering machine and did all these things we now think of fondly.
Unlike my father, a one time computer programmer gradually infuriated by ever new release of Windows. He once owned three computers at once, but by the time he’d died had only a few tablets without keyboards that he hated typing on. Our communication faded away during this time, without email, to the occasional phone call, very brief, as if that generation could never fully understand that long distance phone calls didn’t cost anything anymore.
So I fall into my past, my time with my family, because these are among the only books, certainly the only series, that all of us read. Not sure they both got to Y.
We read them, and spoke of them in no great detail, ever. “That was a pretty good one. H or G. I can’t remember.” But we lived in Kinsey’s head together. The first few paperbacks lived in the stacks of books that never made it into the bookshelves in our house on Westerly Terrace, in the post war boom suburb of my dying home town.
The books are rendered in sometimes excruciating detail, the camera almost always on. They are immersive. They become repetitive. A person doesn’t change all that much, usually, in only seven years. We see Kinsey as a complete human being, frozen in her era.
Living her best life, on her own terms, in her time, the 80s.
What forty and fifty something Kinsey might have become we can only imagine. But we got to live so long ourselves, my parents and I. We avoided being shot in dumpsters or buried by bulldozers, just like Kinsey.
I miss Grafton, even though her work is done and you can really ask much more from life, to find good work to do and to be able to do it. Seventy Seven seems less and less like old age to me, though.
I’ve written and published a stack of shorts and novellas and a few novels; Grafton was ten books into the Alphabet at my age, and just a few years into making her living as a novelist. I feel sometimes I have daydreamed my life away, as I re-read Grafton rather than leap into the literature of this moment.
I have my news addiction for that, as did my parents.
I miss Kinsey. Never knowing what her next story might have been. I dream about Z is for Zero. I have imagined a book where a romance arc sticks; she marries someone again, third times the charm–but dies saving him, heroically. The lover, male most likely, as we never get any sense that Kinsey is anything but heterosexual, gets sucked in to the game looking for her killer, and becomes a vigilante, and finally, a PI in the 90s, as the internet changed everything.
I imagine writing these books, this series, using numbers instead of letters. In fact, I wrote a novella about a writer trapped in a weird dystopia writing these books at gun point. (
I’m trying to remember the titles I gave them… One for the Money, Two Steps Ahead, Three’s a Crowd, Four by Four, Take Five, Deep Six, whatever. You get the idea. Seven Up.
My companion series never has to end. Because I hate endings. Even fulfilling ones.
I miss Grafton, and my parents, and my past, and the worlds that could have been.
So. Now it’s time to write. I will fade away completely, then, not be me, and not miss a thing.
Wish me luck.
