Sue Grafton was an American mystery author. Her famous “Alphabet” series features private investigator Kinsey Millhone. She was born in Louisville, Kentucky in 1940. Her father was a municipal bond lawyer who also wrote mystery novels, and her mother was a former high school chemistry teacher. Her childhood was a difficult one. Both her parents became alcoholics and Grafton said, “From the age of five onward, I was left to raise myself”. Her mother committed suicide in 1960.
She loved writing, and as a teenager her father taught her how to write novels. She wrote several manuscripts in her early twenties. Sue attended several Kentucky universities and colleges before graduating from the University of Louisville in 1961 with a bachelor’s degree in English Literature and minors in humanities and fine arts. After graduating, she worked as a hospital admissions clerk, a cashier, and a medical secretary in Santa Monica and Santa Barbara, California.
She began writing screenplays and TV movies because of one of her early books, The Lolly-Madonna War. “I got to Hollywood because of two novels I had published early on in my career,” she said. “One was sold to Hollywood.” She worked there for 15 years but towards the end became “very unhappy” because she could not “write by committee.” She decided to give writing novels another go. She said, “To get back to writing alone, I decided to do a mystery because my father had published mysteries back in the forties.”
A is for Alibi was the first mystery Sue ever wrote. She came upon the original idea of naming the series after a letter in the alphabet after reading Edward Gorey’s The Gashlycrumb Tinies. She got up to Y is for Yesterday before she passed away from cancer of the appendix on December 28, 2017.
Sue’s novels have been published in over 28 countries and in 26 languages. She was named a Grand Master by the Mystery Writers of America and also received many other awards, including the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Private Eye Writers of America, the Ross Macdonald Literary Award, the Cartier Diamond Dagger Award from Britain’s Crime Writers’ Association, the Lifetime Achievement Award from Malice Domestic, the Anthony Award given by Bouchercon, and three Shamus Awards.
Sue married three times. Her first marriage was when she was 18 years old, but she divorced two years later. She remarried shortly after, but that marriage also ended in divorce and a bitter custody battle over their daughter. She famously said that during the protracted divorce, she kept imagining ways to murder her husband, resulting in no shortage of material for her books. Her third marriage was a happy one.
Throughout her career, Sue refused to sell the film and television rights to her books because of her own experience in Hollywood. She said in a 1997 interview, “I have made my children promise not to sell her. We’ve taken a blood oath, and if they do so I will come back from the grave: which they know I can do.” In 2021, A&E acquired the rights after her family felt it was the right time to bring her books to the small screen, thanks to the positive changes in the industry, and so that her legacy can live on as her work finds new audiences.
Prior to her death, Sue had said she looked forward to completing her series with Z is for Zero, although she said she didn’t think she would ever have stopped writing Kinsey. She said, “I’ll never get sick of Miss Millhone. She’s largely based on me. Who can get sick of one’s self?”
