My Midwest Inflight Magazine

Louisville native and mystery writer Sue Grafton sheds light on what makes her tick.

By Michael J. Bandler • Photography by John Nation
Hair & Makeup by Gerry Robertson Styling by Kathy Crum

On and on through the alphabet, mystery novelist Sue Grafton writes, encouraging her sassy yet savvy P.I. protagonist, Kinsey Millhone, forward to confront challenge after challenge, all of them invariably laced with murder and attendant mayhem.

“It’s the one form of fiction in which the reader and the writer are pitted against each other,” Grafton says. “My job is to fool the reader, and the reader’s job is to try to catch me. That’s the game I’m playing. So not only do I have to know what I’m doing, I have to figure out what the reader thinks I’m doing. I have to be in my mind and their mind at the same time.”

It’s late afternoon and Grafton is at her comfortable, nearly century-old Georgian home that she shares with her husband of almost 30 years, Steven Humphrey, in the Glenview section of Louisville, a scant 10 minutes from downtown. She is celebrating the December publication of her latest book, “T” is for Trespass.

Kinsey’s been stalked and threatened and scammed and throttled—is there a peril she hasn’t faced?

“There’d better be six of them,” Grafton cracks. Twenty books down, six to go—U to Z. The title of her just-published book, she says, echoes the New Testament phrase, “Forgive us our trespasses.”

“It’s also because Kinsey is trespassing on everybody’s turf. I always like a word for the title that works in different ways,” she says. Indeed, as the plot ensues, there’s a lot more trespassing on people’s rights and privacy.

Grafton’s been at this now for more than 25 years. Her books zoom onto the bestseller lists faithfully, frequently within days of publication. One year later, like clockwork, the paperback release garners even more enviable sales figures. She’s been translated into more than two dozen languages, including Bulgarian, Indonesian and Estonian.

“A” is for Alibi was published in 1983. (“I got paid $10,000, the print run was 6,500 copies, and I thought that was the most marvelous thing that ever happened to me,” she says.) Since then, the stories have arrived at a steady pace; one a year for the first few years, then roughly one every two years. But as the flow decelerated, the length of each expanded by as many as 100 pages, growing more complex—and thus more pleasurable.

“T” is a good example. It’s one of her darkest books, along with “K” is for Killer. The central villain, Solana Rojas, is—simply stated—a psychopathic predator. The book is also the first “open mystery,” as Grafton calls it, that she’s written.

“In the closed mystery, the reader doesn’t know whodunit,” she says. “In an open mystery, you know whodunit, and you know what’s going on. What you don’t know is how Kinsey’s going to outwit the wicked one. The whole point is the revelation of that fact.”

Grafton researches meticulously and checks facts constantly, out of respect for her readers. Recently, someone called attention to the fact that her latest novel makes a passing reference to Post-it notes, which appeared, at first blush, to have come along later than the timeframe of her book—the late ’80s. She checked, and the company that makes Post-it notes first distributed them in 1980.

From the outset, Grafton envisioned “A” and “B” as the beginning of a series. As such, she was realistic about her character and the time span the books would cover, starting Kinsey at age 32—and having her jog three miles religiously throughout the text.

“I figured, if she aged one year for every book, it was going to start getting silly. [The time frame thus far has extended only from 1982 to 1988.] I wanted to keep her vigorous enough so that if she were chasing a bad guy, you’d believe she could do it. I didn’t want her to have arthritis,” she says.

The question that constantly intrigues her readers—particularly new fans—is, what separates Kinsey, the twice-divorced thirty-something, described on the writer’s Web site as “borderline delinquent,” from Grafton herself—twice-divorced, now blissfully married, in her 60s?

“I am much more domestic than she is,”

Grafton says. “I’m crazy about my kids [she has three] and grandkids [four, including one named Kinsey]. I’m really a little Martha Stewart at heart—I love domestic issues. I love knitting. Kinsey knits and crochets; her aunt taught her to do that for a different set of reasons—so she would learn to pay attention to detail and improve her eye-hand coordination.

“I live a better lifestyle, thanks to her—which I appreciate. She’d probably be very unsettled if she saw the way I have profited from her adventures. She jogs, I walk. My feet started breaking down; she hasn’t come to that yet. I walk 5.4 miles a day at Thurman Hutchins Park on River Road. The track is nine-tenths of a mile, a figure eight, so if you walk six laps, it comes out exactly to 5.4 miles. That’s further than Kinsey runs.”

The details of Grafton’s life and her transformation from bored Hollywood screenwriter to successful novelist have been recounted many times. The daughter of an attorney father who wrote mystery novels on the side and a high school chemistry teacher mother, Grafton spent her childhood and young adulthood in Louisville. She attended I.N. Bloom Elementary School, then Highland Middle School and Atherton High School before her years at the University of Louisville, from which she graduated in 1961.

What she remembers today about those years—besides a “scary” sixth-grader, three years her senior named Hunter Thompson—was the fact that her parents allowed her to roam the 400-plus acres of Cherokee Park by herself.

It was a different time, she says, certainly not one she could ever credibly portray in her ’80s-rooted novels. “Parents didn’t worry about girls being snatched up and brutalized or murdered,” she says. “I had a lot of freedom. I would wander neighborhoods. I feel very fortunate that we grew up in such an innocent time.”

Upon graduating from college, Grafton went briefly to Cincinnati, then moved to California a year later, where she began working on some writing projects, turning out a couple of early novels and then spending about a decade writing scripts for TV and films. During that period, she was married and divorced twice. One standout event of the first relationship was the birth of her eldest daughter. The second marriage, from which she has a son and a daughter, was anything but uneventful. In fact, she once said she wanted to “nuke the guy.”

As it turns out, though, there have been other happy events. One is her marriage to Humphrey, a professor at the University of Louisville and the University of California at Santa Barbara (the couple lives part of the year in California). They lived in Columbus while he was pursuing his Ph.D. at Ohio State University, then moved to Santa Barbara in 1982. That’s where another happy event materialized—the birth and flowering of her alphabet series.

“I took my homicidal instincts and turned them into a profession,” Grafton says. “A lot of people do that—and end up in state prison. That actually became the plot line for “A” is for Alibi. Good can come out of our dark side. I’m a shining example of that.”

In 1993, Grafton was honored by her alma mater as a distinguished alumna. While she and Humphrey were in Louisville, they spent an afternoon with a real estate agent. “The houses we saw seemed ridiculously inexpensive, given California standards,” she says. By day’s end, they had seen 17 properties and bought the second one they saw, and seven years later, they moved to where they live today.

Since returning to Louisville for keeps, Grafton has transported Kinsey there a few times to investigate cases, and dotted the texts with local references. “L” is for Lawless cites the areas of Shively and Portland, the Gene Snyder Freeway and the Henry Watterson Expressway, and skips across the Ohio River to pinpoint a boat-building company in Jeffersonville, Ind. In the book, besides coming across such high schools as Louisville Male and Atherton, readers were able to visit, vicariously, The Brown Hotel and learn about its culinary creation, “Hot Browns.” As Kinsey put it, the delicacy “turned out to be an open-faced sliced turkey sandwich, complete with bacon and tomatoes, baked with the most divine cheese sauce I ever set to my lips. I mewed like a kitten.”

So what drew Grafton home? “The change in seasons and the spectacular thunderstorms,” she says, citing Lilly’s Bistro, Jack Fry’s and Avalon among her favorite haunts. “We love taking visitors to the Glassworks to watch artisans working with blown glass, fusion and flamework. And you can see Louisville Slugger baseball bats being manufactured at the Louisville Slugger Museum.
Guests also like that.”

One of her very favorite spots—not really too unexpectedly, given how she spends her days—is Cave Hill Cemetery, which is more than 150 years old.

“The grounds are beautiful, but what I love most is the sense of history,” she says. “The tombstones and monuments represent hundreds of Louisville families, both humble and grand. It’s like a series of short stories I never tire of reading.”

And who knows?

Just being there might also trigger a sudden thought that takes her back to her dark side. In the journals for her early books that appear on her Web site—peeling back the curtain on the writer in mid-thought—she refers constantly to that dark side as her “shadow” or “right brain.”

“We all have a public persona, the one we want the world to believe we are—kind, generous, concerned for others,” she says. “Then we have our dark side, serious stuff. That’s where we are petty and jealous and competitive and spiteful and talk behind people’s backs. I employ my dark side when writing books. It’s where all the creative energy lies. So you have to be careful that you don’t get hung up on being a perfect person, totally out of touch with the part of you that has all the juice.”

Sprinkled through the journals are some marvelous inner asides. She ponders a “J” title: “Juvenile—but then I’d have to deal with some precocious adolescent.” She considers changing course in “L”: “I think it’s time to go for an action ending again—both ‘J’ and ‘K’ have quiet endings…I need something with pizzazz this round.” She conjures up a prospective atmosphere: “I think I want this book to take place exclusively at night.” She makes notes about research she needs to do for a flashback: “Were there paper drives in 1960?”

One truth that’s evident from the journals is that she never begins with the title. Her musings list possible words to explore later on, after the plot is set; words like “hemlock” and “jawbone” never made it past the first round.

“I begin with the eternal questions, the ones that drive me insane: Who hired Kinsey Millhone, and what was she hired to do?” she says. “You’d be astonished how tricky that question becomes. Who’s behind it? Who is paying the money? It has to be a situation in which I feel somebody would legitimately hire an investigator to do what is at hand.”

And it has to vary; they can’t all be insurance fraud, which has led to a struggle for “U.” “I’m so bored with clients walking into the office of a private investigator,” she says. “I think, how else can it happen? What else can I set up that would allow her to get involved in a case and still have it be a legitimate concern? And I think I’ve finally got it.”

Not to worry—no spoilers here. “I had the story, but I was planning from the wrong point of view,” she says. “So I’ve written the first chapter twice. I knew it wasn’t right, so I just sat there until I got it right. Now I think I have. I always say that with some trepidation, though. As soon as I get uppity, I get slapped down for it.”

As she approaches the home stretch in her ABCs, does she ever fear running out of ideas? “Sure— every time I start a book, especially if I feel stuck or frustrated,” she admits. “I think, ‘Alright, I always knew there was going to be a limit somewhere, and clearly this is the end of the line for me.’ You worry, ‘What if I’m boring? What if nobody likes it? What if I fail?’ The answer has to be, ‘So what? What if you do?’

“I’m not complacent. I don’t fake it. I can’t afford to. My job is to do it as well as I can. People will disagree about [the quality of] the books. That took me a long time to learn and live with. You can’t please everybody all the time. Therefore, I just need to please myself, to do the best job I can. That’s my goal.”

From time to time, Grafton will think about other goals— such as learning how to write a play. For now, though, she wonders whether she can ever plumb the depths of the criminal psyche.

What? She’s never done that? From “A” to “T,” and with “U” on her hard drive? “I always feel I can do better,” she says. “It’s not to disparage my accomplishments; sometimes just getting from beginning to middle to end is an amazing thing to me. The beauty of the mystery is I just don’t think I’ll ever conquer it. I’m always going up against myself. That’s the fun of it and that’s the madness of it—at the same time.”