For the past ten years teaching and writing about crime fiction has been an integral part of my life -- and yet for some reason Sue Grafton has never featured in this process. Instead she remains one of the few high profile crime writers whose books I have simply read. The 'alphabet' series has just been there, like Kinsey Millhone's duvet, a source of comfort reserved for rainy Sunday afternoons. So it was with some trepidation that I approached the process of casting a critical eye over Grafton's prolific output. With the series now standing at 17, a full scale survey seemed impossible, so I opted for the beginning and what might be termed the ending-to-date. Unfortunately it transpired that my copies of A is for Alibi and B is for Burglar had disappeared on 'loan perpetual', so by an admirably scientific process of elimination I arrived at a sample comprising C is for Corpse (1986), O is for Outlaw (1999) and P is for Peril (2001). As it turned out I had little reason to regret my choice -- not least because the process of reading and re-reading left me with a sense of Grafton's novels and her heroine that did not quite fit the critical parameters within which she has so far been discussed. The following, then, is an attempt to 'locate' Sue Grafton within the traditions of American crime writing.
A survey of the critical landscape reveals that Grafton has been acknowledged and applauded as one of a founding triumvirate of hard-boiled women crime writers. In a recent study by Hans Bertens and Theo D'haen, she is described as having made a 'seminal' contribution to the genre, and along with Sara Paretsky and Marcia Muller, is awarded the perhaps somewhat dubious accolade of being dubbed a 'grand old lady'. Bertens and D'haen are obviously not the first to compare these writers. In 1994 Sally Munt identified Grafton and Paretsky as exemplary producers of 'liberal feminist' crime fiction -- an appellation in Munt's book that is almost synonymous with the failure of political agency. But Munt's analysis is useful, not least because it also provides a succinct account of what distinguishes these two writers. "Warshawski", she observes, "offers a fantasy of femininity, whereas Millhone offers relief from femininity." While a little harsh on Paretsky, this is an admirable description of Kinsey Millhone. Famously lacking any 'feminine' clothing beyond her all-purpose black dress, the early novels make comic play out of Kinsey's distance from 'appropriate' femininity. In C is for Corpse, for example, she makes a desperate attempt to conform for the benefit of her wealthy client's family, scrabbling around the back seat of her car to construct an outfit:
On the floor, I found a pair of black spike heels I'd bought when I'd intended to pass myself off as a hooker in a tacky part of Los Angeles. When I'd gotten there, of course, I'd discovered that all the whores looked like college girls, so I'd abandoned the disguise.
Inevitably her impersonation of classy femininity is as inadequate as her attempt at its opposite, and the critics Priscilla Walton and Manina Jones have applauded Grafton's capacity to 'disrupt normative gender and sexual representation' through ironic commentary and comic spectacle. The conventions of femininity are a closed book to Millhone, and as the novels have progressed, Kinsey's 'failure' has ceased to become an object of self-conscious comedy, mutating instead into the blunt assertion of subjectivity found in P is for Peril:
I felt less than glamorous in my jeans and turtleneck, but it couldn't be helped. I didn't have time to go home and change. Into what? I don't have anything else. This is what I wear.
Later in the book this refusal of femininity is reinforced by Millhone's self-conscious description of herself as 'Phillip Marlowe in drag'. Although initially the comparison seems misleading -- drag implying a conscious deployment of femininity of which Millhone is constitutionally incapable -- when considered in relation to the novel's narrative voice, the image becomes altogether more appropriate. I suggested above that Sally Munt, as a critic, is somewhat disappointed in the feminism of Grafton and Paretsky, describing the 'New Woman' detective as 'a sheep in wolves' clothing'. Scott Christianson, however, offers a rather different point of view. In an article exploring Grafton's use of the classic devices of hard-boiled narrative -- tough talk and wisecracks -- Christianson suggests that: "Like her many male counterparts -- Sam Spade, Philip Marlowe, Lew Archer, and Spenser -- Millhone attempts to order her chaotic and violent experience in a careful narrative which, above all, tries to remain true to her experience even when she cannot make sense of what exactly is happening to her."
The crucial point about these novels as feminist texts, he concludes, is their appropriation of hard-boiled language to inscribe a specifically female subjectivity. The Millhone books, he claims, "explore what it means to be a woman with the emphasis on a woman, who happens to be a hard-boiled private detective". Christianson's perspective is shared by more recent commentators such as Bertens and D'haen, who see the significance of Millhone residing in her capacity to make us question both detective absolutes and the value of the patriarchal social structures that shape and constrain the lives of the women and men caught within them. Grafton, then, has succeeded where many have failed. She has constructed a female detective capable of inhabiting the form of hard-boiled detection while yet problematising its prejudices and limitations. Yet for me, the picture that has emerged above does not quite capture the dominant tone or mood of the novels. Perhaps this is because I cannot seem to locate them comfortably within the hard-boiled template. Christianson commends Millhone's use of 'language as power' -- both in her public encounters with a frequently hostile world, and in her private accounting of events. Undoubtedly the interior world of the private investigator is convincingly reshaped by Millhone's doubts, desires and contrary perspective, but the empowerment of the narrative voice must be set against the limitations of her public persona. Kinsey seems capable of wisecracking only when in disguise or under threat -- when she is lying, assuming a false identity, or putting a brave face on the prospect of imminent death. When presenting herself without this shield, she appears more frequently paralysed than empowered by social discourse - especially when detached from her familiar blue-collar environment. Encounters with the idle rich prompted Philip Marlowe to some of his sharpest witticisms. In the same situation, Kinsey Millhone is, often as not, rendered speechless.
The public/private tension encapsulated here speaks to a fundamental conflict in the character Grafton has created. Kinsey Millhone is a woman forced prematurely into adulthood, who would, ideally, like nothing better than to retreat into childhood. The oft-repeated story of the death of her parents is central to the narrative. Abandoned at the age of five, and brought up by a kind but distant aunt, she seems to have bypassed the processes of play and companionship. In all its retellings, her narrative skips from the loss of her parents to the catastrophes of her marriages, pausing only occasionally to comment on the experiences of her lonely childhood (1986: 190-191). Not surprisingly, in adulthood she has emerged as a loner, but she cannot evade the pull of a past she was denied. This tension manifests itself in three key tropes: her pattern of living, her transgressive fantasies, and a process of unresolved mourning that shapes and constrains the choices she makes in her adult relationships. To expand: Kinsey lives in a doll's house under the kindly supervision of her fairy godfather, Henry Potts. She has, in effect, never left the single room of childhood, and her greatest comfort is to retreat to this space. In more recent novels her relationship to her room has changed. Initially the converted garage that is her apartment was excessively minimalist - an encampment that could be left at any minute, but since its refit in the style of a compact yacht, it has evolved into a fantastical bolt hole within which she can escape from the effort of public life. And encountering the world is an effort. The language of the novels constructs daily living through a series of verbs that exaggerate the actions involved. Kinsey 'snags' her drinks, 'hauls' out her typewriter, 'hefts' her bag. When she starts up her car she 'fires' up the engine and 'snaps' on the lights. While on one level the diction implies urgency and purpose, the cumulative effect is wearing. After a day spent toting, hefting and hauling, is no surprise that Millhone finds exercise hard to contemplate.
The transgressive fantasies are perhaps less unusual. Behind a fairly placid exterior -- unlike Warshawski, Millhone is slow to anger -- Grafton's detective seethes with inappropriate, often violent urges. Confronted by an unwelcome figure from the past, a fantasy revenge erupts into her consciousness: "I wanted to lift her front chair legs and flip her backward, just for the satisfaction of hearing her head thud against the stone floor." These eruptions parallel the drives of early life, variously manifesting themselves as sexual desire, violence and a cheerful scatological fascination with what lies beneath: "Everything looked spotless. I wondered where the little birdies dropped their tiny green and white turds." Kinsey Millhone does not want to play with the grown-ups, and when she confronts the world as an adult, it is always with the eyes of the child looking out from within. Finally Millhone is locked into the past by the impossibility of completing a mourning process initiated by the death of her parents. The frequent repetition of this, her birth myth or origin story, bears witness to its fundamental importance in the shaping of the detective's character. Her losses as a child have left a legacy that manifests itself in a repeated attraction towards those in some way marked by loss or death. From Bobby Callahan, the initially disabled and soon to be dead client she is drawn to in C is for Corpse to the misfit brother Guy Malek in M is for Malice, Kinsey's choice of attachments indicate both a repeated reworking of the grief experience (as these characters typically die, exposing the detective afresh to the betrayal of bereavement) and a search for others as detached as she is from the comfortable conventions of society. In her attraction to those who have suffered, and who she recognises as being like her, Kinsey repeatedly risks further betrayal, and a perilous re-encounter with the pain she is seeking to assuage. Grafton makes the dilemma explicit at the end of F is for Fugitive, concluding Kinsey's narrative with an impossible question: "If love is what injures us, how can we heal?"
Re-reading, then, reminded me of the pervasive melancholy that underpins Millhone's character -- a subdued self-containment that adds an air of disquiet to the character's otherwise convincing claim to take pleasure in her own company. And perhaps it is this trace of mourning that explains why the detective landscape of which I was most reminded in P is for Peril was the bleached and melancholic suburban California of Joseph Hansen's early Dave Brandstetter novels. Although the two detectives come from different ends of the social and sexual spectrum, they both shuttle in their mismatched cars between the empty palaces of the wealthy and the desolate spaces of the poor, exposing in the process the bleak disfunctionality at the heart of American life. Both Brandstetter and Millhone repeatedly uncover the failure of the American dream as manifested in the imperatives of heterosexual family life. Grafton's novels are peppered with disenchanted couples, bitter divorces, destructive family ties. In this context it is hardly surprising that Millhone feels little need to fight her inclination towards solitude. The family, Grafton tells us, is oppressive and potentially deadly - which perhaps accounts for Kinsey's reluctance to embrace the cousins who emerged mid-series as a curious throwback to her unresolved past. Indeed, anything that smacks of family distresses her, as is evident in P is for Peril, when Kinsey contemplates the drawbacks of renting space from Lonnie Kingman:
Where once I'd been attracted to the sense of family I felt at the firm, now all I saw were attendant psychodramas. Jeniffer was Cinderella with a diminutive IQ. Ida Ruth and Jill, like the spiteful stepsisters, were simperingly nice to her in person but talked about her behind her back every chance they could. I'm not sure what part I played, but I did my best to avoid participation by hiding in my room.
Hiding in the sanctuary of her room, the child Kinsey spies on the vagaries of the 'adult' world into which she was so precipitously thrust. Small wonder that as an adult herself she gives few hostages to a public sphere she recognises as fundamentally untrustworthy. In her undemonstrative way, then, Grafton has succeeded in satisfying both critical and popular taste, and has seen her consciously anti-feminine detective take up comfortable residence at the heart of a central American trope. But at some level I wonder whether Kinsey is not so much anti-feminine as pre-pubescent and, as she evades the imperatives of patriarchy behind her duvet and a good book, she reminds me above all of the child camping out in her parent's garden, playing with an independence that is as scary as it is liberating.
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