Sue Grafton Dies at 77

© by Gerald So | 4:00 a.m.

According to her daughter Jamie, Sue Grafton died Thursday, December 28, after a two-year battle with cancer. In the ranks of women writers of P.I. fiction, Grafton is up there beside Marcia Muller and Sara Paretsky and may be the most recognized of the three among the general public.

Her Kinsey Millhone was the first female P.I. I read, and Millhone's world was as immersive to me as that of Robert B. Parker's Spenser. I only stopped reading the Alphabet series back-to-back so as not to limit my taste as I'd done with Parker.

Others have more comprehensive, more personal tributes to Grafton than I. To me, she represents a writer's writer, one who saw every book as a new challenge and always took that challenge on. Also—though I'm a known supporter of tie-in novels, continuation novels, and TV and movie adaptations—I admire that Grafton never sold Kinsey to Hollywood having written the first Kinsey book, A is for Alibi, as the ticket out of her screenwriting career.

Grafton published Y is for Yesterday in August, and her daughter writes that though Z is for Zero was scheduled for 2019, Sue had not begun writing it, and respecting her wishes never to have a ghostwriter, the Alphabet series will end with Y.