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Kinsey Makes a Difference

There are authors’ deaths, announced casually on the radio, that provoke an involuntary cry of loss. The recent death of Sue Grafton, author of the alphabetically themed Kinsey Millhone detective novels, was one such. How could you not mourn a writer with whom you’d kept company – and 25 books – for 36 years? An added sadness was that she would not now complete her task of a book for every letter of the alphabet. We had had Y Is for Yesterday (2017) and awaited, confidently, Z Is for Zero. Except that now it won’t be. ‘In our family’, said one of her daughters, ‘the alphabet now ends with Y.’

I first read her in 1982, a year which, coincidentally, saw the introduction of two giants of female private-eye mysteries. Sue Grafton’s Kinsey Millhone made her bow in A Is for Alibi while Sara Paretsky introduced V. I. Warshawski in Indemnity Only. I discovered there was another more painful connection between them: both writers’ childhoods were shaped by their mothers’ alcoholism. For Sara Paretsky, childhood was a life of domestic drudgery as the main carer for three siblings and a martinet father. For Sue Grafton, aeons of neglect and an absent father allowed her to work her way unimpeded from Nancy Drew to Raymond Chandler. Her early writing career was spent in television. To write her way out of it, she turned back to her first love, detective fiction.

I say detective, not simply crime fiction, because to purists the distinctions between crime, mystery and detective fiction are finely calibrated. In her autobiographical Kinsey and Me (2013) Grafton pays her dues to her mentor, S. S. Van Dine who, in 1928, first laid down the rules for detective fiction. Self-evidently, he says, there must be a detective detecting, and the ‘I’ of the narrative must be assumed to be revealing all the information they know. The murderer must be someone who has been visible throughout the plot – no new c

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There are authors’ deaths, announced casually on the radio, that provoke an involuntary cry of loss. The recent death of Sue Grafton, author of the alphabetically themed Kinsey Millhone detective novels, was one such. How could you not mourn a writer with whom you’d kept company – and 25 books – for 36 years? An added sadness was that she would not now complete her task of a book for every letter of the alphabet. We had had Y Is for Yesterday (2017) and awaited, confidently, Z Is for Zero. Except that now it won’t be. ‘In our family’, said one of her daughters, ‘the alphabet now ends with Y.’

I first read her in 1982, a year which, coincidentally, saw the introduction of two giants of female private-eye mysteries. Sue Grafton’s Kinsey Millhone made her bow in A Is for Alibi while Sara Paretsky introduced V. I. Warshawski in Indemnity Only. I discovered there was another more painful connection between them: both writers’ childhoods were shaped by their mothers’ alcoholism. For Sara Paretsky, childhood was a life of domestic drudgery as the main carer for three siblings and a martinet father. For Sue Grafton, aeons of neglect and an absent father allowed her to work her way unimpeded from Nancy Drew to Raymond Chandler. Her early writing career was spent in television. To write her way out of it, she turned back to her first love, detective fiction. I say detective, not simply crime fiction, because to purists the distinctions between crime, mystery and detective fiction are finely calibrated. In her autobiographical Kinsey and Me (2013) Grafton pays her dues to her mentor, S. S. Van Dine who, in 1928, first laid down the rules for detective fiction. Self-evidently, he says, there must be a detective detecting, and the ‘I’ of the narrative must be assumed to be revealing all the information they know. The murderer must be someone who has been visible throughout the plot – no new characters are allowed to turn up fifty yards before the finishing line like marathon cheats. And the solution must have its roots in the present or past life of the victim. Armed with these stern but fair injunctions Grafton spent five years writing her first Kinsey Millhone. It’s hard to convey how completely shocked I was by it – for one simple reason. At the end of the book Kinsey kills the murderer. She not only owns a gun but also uses it. I was fully up to speed with women who solved crimes while knitting small fleecy garments from a safe distance, and who relied on the police to handle violence. But there is all the difference in the world between being the person who notices when a neighbour’s milk bottles aren’t taken in and suspects foul play, and being a woman who hangs up a shingle announcing her intention of spending her working life in the company of – among others – the marginalized, the dishonest, the unstable and the downright psychopathic. In her autobiography Grafton goes some way to explaining why this choice of protagonist appealed to her:
The post-war Private Eye – Philip Marlowe, Lew Archer – spoke strongly to me. He was a character I recognized and was drawn to. War had unleashed him. Peace had brought him home. He carried our rage. He championed matters of right and fair play. At the same time he violated the very rules the rest of us were forced to embrace.
This somewhat ambiguous moral position spoke deeply to our heroine. Kinsey believes in having the guilty brought to account but she’s comfortable with bending the rules. Admirably tidy in her housekeeping, her accounts up-to-date and bills paid, in pursuit of justice she is distinctly off-piste. She is a fluent and convincing liar. She has mastered reading documents upside down on desktops. She carries a set of door picks and uses them. To justify her presence, she carries a bogus clipboard. To justify this behaviour, she has the bedrock conviction: I don’t like people getting away with murder. Not that a private detective’s life always involves violent crime. Far from it. The bread-and-butter work is serving writs, chasing up spouses and checking the validity of insurance claims. But between these mundane tasks come the stories that will lead to mayhem, and often bloody mayhem. Nothing gives me greater joy than an opening paragraph from either Chandler or Grafton. Invariably it is a fine day – we’re talking southern California here – and they’re sitting idly at their desks, waiting for someone to employ them. Like Mrs Culpepper in Grafton’s short story ‘Between the Sheets’ (1986):
I squinted at the woman sitting across the desk to me. I could have sworn she’d just told me there was a dead man in her daughter’s bed. Which seemed a strange thing to say in such perfectly modulated tones and with a pleasant smile. ‘You’re sure he’s dead?’ I said finally. ‘I’m not positive,’ she replied uneasily. ‘But he was cold. And stiff. And he didn’t breathe at all.’ ‘That should cover it,’ I said.
The tone is immediately recognizable: laconic, wise-ass, laid-back. Grafton’s plots, she claimed, usually came from the local newspaper. Living as she did in Santa Barbara (Santa Teresa in her books) the extremes of wealth and poverty are very great. But the motivation for crime in either milieu is always the same: money, power, sex, revenge. Why do I read so many detective novels? I can console myself with the fact that 50 million copies of Grafton’s books have been sold, so I am not alone in needing this particular fix. But I bristle when people dismiss them as mere genre fiction and then invoke the shade of Jane Austen. Only detective fiction! Only first-class writing, wit, originality and deft plotting! But even more than this: a battle is being fought in her books, between good and evil. The arena is recognizably our world, where people are randomly killed and justice is by no means a certainty. As Grafton herself puts it: ‘In however a formulaic way, the world of the Private Eye offers up containment and hope and the belief we all have to grimly hold on to: the belief that the individual can make a difference.’ What does any child in a chaotic and disordered household long for? Regular meals, ideally not always cooked by yourself, clean clothes and some sense of order. And when it dawns that it isn’t going to happen, perhaps this idea grows instead: it has to be me. I can be the one in charge. The one who creates order. The one who says what’s right and wrong. And enforces it. Twenty-five times in fact. So you can say that, in every sense, on my watch, people don’t get away with murder. And we’re grateful for it.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 60 © Frances Donnelly 2018


About the contributor

Frances Donnelly lives on the Norfolk/Suffolk border where she still bakes cakes.

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