WRITERS BORN TODAY - SUE GRAFTON

It's the birthday of crime writer Sue Grafton, author of the Alphabet series, which featured wise-cracking P. I. Kinsey Millhone. The first novel in this series, A Is For Alibi, was nominated for a Shamus Award for Best Novel, but lost to Lawrence Block's Eight Million Ways To Die.

Sue's writing career started long before her award winning series took off and led to best sellers and critical acclaim. The story starts with her birth in Louisville Kentucky to a mother who was a teacher and a father who was a lawyer (with a two year stint in the army during WWII). It was her father, C.W. Grafton, who planted in her the writing bug. He wrote crime novels at night and published four during his short career. His first novel, The Rat Began To Gnaw The Rope, won the Mary Roberts Reinhart Award in 1943.

Her father taught her vital writing techniques and inspired her to start her first novel at age 18. Sue wrote seven novels in those early years, two of which were published, but these did not bring her commercial success.

Sue Grafton's Alphabet Series got it's inspiration from a bitter divorce and custody battle with her husband. While she fantasized about creative ways to kill him in order to preserve her sanity, she started writing down her thoughts. As she later described it, she wrote out her frustrations because she didn't want to spend the rest of her life in prison wearing a drab outfit.

Over the next 35 years the series extended through the alphabet all the way to Y is For Yesterday, published in 2017. Sue Grafton passed away on December 28, 2017. This left her last planned novel, Z Is For Zero, unfinished.

In  2009, Sue Grafton was awarded the Grand Master Award by the Mystery Writers of America in recognition of her contribution to the crime genre.

"Ideas are easy. It’s the execution of ideas that really separates the sheep from the goats."