Sue Grafton at Malice Domestic

Sandra Parshall

 Accosting a world-famous author in the restroom at a conference is considered the worst kind of behavior. But there was Sue Grafton at the sink, and there I was, and I doubted I’d get another chance. Besides, I didn’t actually accost her – never touched her, in fact. All I did was babble about what a thrill it was to have her at Malice Domestic and to hear her speak in person.

She was most gracious. Something similar probably happens whenever she sets foot in a public place. Each time I saw her or heard her speak over the weekend, I was impressed by her accessibility, her cheerful personality, and her patience with adoring fans. If any author has earned the right to be a prima donna, Sue Grafton has – she was at Malice to receive a Lifetime Achievement Award – but she remains... well, nice.

She’s also very funny. On a panel with other honorees Donna Anderson and Carole Nelson Douglas, she shared some of the gratifying, amusing, and occasionally bewildering letters she receives from readers. (She responds only to real letters sent through regular mail. If she tried to answer all her e-mail, she probably wouldn’t have time to eat and sleep, much less write.) In the bewildering category, one reader accused her of endorsing animal abuse because she wrote about a character who did nasty things to innocent creatures. A lot of readers apparently want to see Kinsey Millhone on TV or in movies. Sue said she would rather roll naked in ground glass than sell the rights to her character. She worked in Hollywood for 15 years before turning to mystery writing, and she doesn’t want Kinsey in the hands of scriptwriters and producers.

A reader once asked whether she is paid for “product placement” in her novels. The answer is no, but she’s received unsolicited gifts from the folks who make Vlasic pickles and Jif peanut butter (ingredients in Kinsey’s favorite sandwich), and the company that makes Saucony athletic shoes. After someone at Saucony saw a photo of Sue wearing that brand, she began receiving a new pair of shoes every few months. After a while she’d accumulated so many that she asked her benefactor to desist. Now she’s sort of regretting that she stopped the flow of free shoes. (She wears size 6, by the way.)

On another panel, Sue told her own aspiring writer story (every writer has one). She worked in Hollywood, hated writing by committee, and was desperate to get back to solo writing. She had seven unpublished novels. An agent had told her she showed no talent for plotting. That assessment made her so mad that she was determined to show the woman just how well she could plot. We probably have a blind-to-talent agent to thank for the Alphabet Mysteries.

What will happen when she reaches the end of the alphabet eight years from now? (And would she like a nickel for every time she’s been asked that question?)  She doesn’t know. Every new book scares her and makes her wonder if she can do it again. She doesn’t even know yet what the W will stand for in that book. “I don’t want to outstay my welcome,” she said, and she isn’t sure whether she’ll continue writing.

She promised her readers one thing: she won’t kill off Kinsey in the last book. But exactly where her character will be and what she’ll be doing when the series ends –  “That’s up to Kinsey.”

Best Reads of 2010, Part 3

Elizabeth Zelvin

Three more books that came out prior to 2010 made it onto my list of last year’s favorite reads. I read Sue Grafton’s U Is for Undertow (2009) last January, and I thought it was her best in years. I haven’t missed a Kinsey Millhone book since A Is for Alibi, and I deeply respect Grafton’s groundbreaking achievement in creating her and keeping her alive and solving crimes. But in recent years, there have been times when I found myself reading one of her adventures dutifully rather than with pleasure. I have grown impatient with Kinsey’s isolation, her lack of personal growth, and the series device of cramming all her cases into the 1980s instead of letting time pass and the world change. But I really enjoyed Undertow: the pace, the plot, the secondary characters, the fluency of Kinsey’s voice. The fact that I liked it in spite of a crucial plot element being one of my most intense pet peeves—the accusation of child abuse that turns out to be falsified—is probably a point in favor of the book’s strength. As a therapist, I have worked with many abuse survivors over the years, and I think focusing on the exceptional cases when it didn’t really happen sends a subtle and pernicious message. I feel the same about stories that feature a false accusation of rape.

The death of Donald Westlake in 2008 at what I consider the shockingly early age of 75 was a great loss to the mystery community and to the literary community at large. I read his final Dortmunder book, Get Real, with a kind of doubled consciousness. On one level, I was thoroughly absorbed in the story; on another, I had two thoughts over and over: “This is prime stuff; Westlake’s still at the height of his powers,” and “Damn! there aren’t going to be any more.” Westlake was one of the funniest writers ever, the kind of writer you could read passages from aloud and have someone who hadn’t even read one of his books howling with laughter. To me, his voice is one of the most distinct and inimitable in fiction. Authors as distinguished and distinctive as Charles Dickens and Dorothy L. Sayers have had posthumous works completed and additional works written by other writers. But I doubt anyone will tackle the book Westlake’s death left barely started. Who could imitate or fabricate that endlessly inventive sense of humor? Get Real was particularly satisfying to me because it skewered another of my pet peeves, reality TV. Someone has the bright idea of building a reality show around Dortmunder and his engaging band of professional crooks, and what ensues is delicious and hilarious.

Ariana Franklin is another of the small group of recent authors whose first mystery, Mistress of the Art of Death, left me eager for more. I loved the next two in this historical series with endearing characters, including a delightfully strong and clever protagonist, 12th-century forensic pathologist Adelia Aguilar. Unfortunately, I found this year’s fourth entry in the series disappointing. I saw through the plot devices hiding the murderer; worse, Adelia disregarded warnings and walked into danger throughout the book in the best tradition of TSTL heroines, what readers call “too stupid to live.” On the other hand, I read and loved Franklin’s standalone, City of Shadows (2006). Franklin took a less familiar aspect of a familiar setting—Nazi Germany during the rise of Hitler—and a well-known historical puzzle—the murder of the Romanov royal family and the possible survival of the Princess, sorry, Grand Duchess Anastasia—and not only gives them a twist but sends them spinning. It’s tremendously suspenseful; a happy ending is by no means assured. And the unlikely main characters gradually engage more and more of the reader’s sympathies as the story unfolds.

I woffled about adding Tana French’s Faithful Place (2010) to my list, but in the end decided the book deserved a place there. For the third time, this gifted writer has taken an idyllic relationship and shattered it to provide the foundation of the story. For some reason, flaws in French’s work seem to make readers angry at the author rather than at the characters. (No, I take that back. It depends: one friend whose judgment I respect disliked the protagonist of Faithful Place, while I did not.) My favorite bit was the character’s rant, delivered to his nine-year-old daughter, about people who are famous without having accomplished anything. My least favorite was a gratuitous attack on therapy and therapists, another of my pet peeves and one that’s appeared in all three of French’s books. But hey, if her characters had gone through treatment—good treatment with an experienced and ethical therapist like, say, me—where would her stories be?