Sue Grafton and the New Woman Detective

Susan Rowland

Sue Grafton's PI, Kinsey Millhone is usually linked with Marcia Muller's Sharon McCone and Sarah Paretsky's V.I. Warshawski as the new American tough-gal hard boiled sleuths. Each of them narrates her own story making a 'her' story of the previously male dominated genre. Staring out in A is for Alibi in 1986, Kinsey stands out from the other two by fidelity to her personal style. While all three deploy the standard integrity that marks the loner detective out from the petty corruptions of modern urban life, Kinsey is still taking the unglamorous cases of her early days. Whereas all three professional women maintain deep friendships, are loyal to colleagues, build up alternative families and would never, ever, get sucked into organised crime, Kinsey alone remains the same sort of detective. Sharon McCone has gravitated from a legal co-operative to the kind of crimes where the detective actually needs her personal plane and even V.I. is dipping her toe into the perilous waters of transnational and even trans-historical evil (e.g. the Nazi atrocities in Total Recall). Kinsey's mean streets are those of the working and professional classes of Santa Theresa, fictional Californian smallish seaside town. Her latest adventure in Q is for Quarry sees her taking down market office space and helping out an ailing cop. The two strike up an alliance to re-open an ancient case involving an unidentified local corpse. And here's another thing about Kinsey -- she likes cops. Santa Theresa's finest are hard working guys (no women?) who find it easy to respect Kinsey. Here she differs again from the more tortuous love-hate relationship that V.I. has with Chicago, Grafton gets away with her distinctively corrupt-free police by insisting that Santa Theresa is too small for major league betrayal. Her novels are of small town urban decay and crime. True, Kinsey occasionally gets drawn out to the desert, as in G is for Gumshoe, or into the big west coast cities in pursuit of a lost Theresan soul, such as in H is for Homicide when Kinsey is more or less kidnapped and taken to Los Angeles. And even in Santa Theresa, it has been known for a dark expensive car to draw up as the Mafia reveals that its reach is everywhere. However, mostly, Kinsey patrols the surprisingly dark alleys of the modern American family, the true 'home' of murder.

Kinsey's lack of desire to change her modus operandi matches her intensely independent private life. Lodger in a tiny apartment with an octogenarian landlord, Henry Pitts, Kinsey knows that her love for small cramped spaces is a legacy from her childhood. Both her parents were killed in a car crash in which she became trapped in the mangled vehicle. Raised by unsentimental Aunt Gin, Kinsey's early life was difficult. Two failed marriages are mentioned and although Kinsey has an on-off relationship with fellow private eye Robert Dietz, her usual mode of living is solitary. After a spell in the police force, Kinsey prefers to work alone. In this she is both like an unlike her male predecessors. Typically, the male hardboiled investigator is a loner with a dysfunctional sex life. His basic decency usually shows up the cops as institutionally corrupt. They are an aspect of the big bad city that one well-meaning intrinsically good guy has to endure rather than cure. Kinsey is different. Her inhibitions about relationships have defined limits. After all, she gets involved with the lives of her friends, usually to good effect, and her men tend to have well advertised drawbacks -- like a wife who periodically leaves and returns in the case of cop, Jonah Robb, and Dietz's even more emphatic refusal to be tied down. Kinsey knows that she ends up with uncommitted men because the one thing she most avoids is the typical female role of housewife. She has a history to her horror of full-time domesticity and is a victim of trauma rather than of the contradictions of modern urban masculinity. Another untypical feature of Kinsey and Santa Theresa is the localisation of sin. Murders are the result of criminality at once more individual and general. On the one hand the typical killer is no crazed serial slayer à la Cornwell. He or she is usually a petty criminal entangled in an increasing web of deceit that often started with a venial or financial white collar crime. Often a family has decayed to the point of implosion as in the ghastly legatees in M is for Malice. On the other hand, Grafton presents a world in entropy. Although Kinsey succeeds in bonding with a few good hearted individuals in every story (and some of then come in unconventional packages like the appealing child-woman prostitute in K is for Killer), she discovers each time a society in decline, unsure of its values and easily seduced into taking risks with the law.

This pervasive American moral weakness is matched and in part communicated through settings. Pursuit of justice, or at least the unreliable guidance of her clients takes Kinsey onto seedy joints, cheap housing with seniors on declining incomes, the non-working poor, or for those convinced they can buy their way through social inconveniences, the empty architecture of men whose aging wives sip away afternoons from tall glasses by the pool. Kinsey drives (everywhere) amongst the landscape of cheap motels on the edge of deserts, gas stations, all night coffee shops, depressed malls with trash scatted about, houses gently mouldering into the pacific; the battle with devouring nature already lost and fought without grace. If the poor seem to have diminished lives in Santa Theresa then the rich appear to be even more quietly desperate. This is a world with constant good weather, no hunger and the freedom to shut the door on the wider community. No one reads or thinks about politics beyond the town boundary. Local elections are about favours needed to build yet another tasteless monstrosity as a machine for making money. It is a society that has escaped the constricting values of the past and has only divorce and ubiquitous TV to put in its place. The American dream has soured a little and few can be bothered to remember what was all about. So unsurprisingly heroes are few and far between with those who try to uphold the law in an indifferent, almost apathetic town, picked out as the good guys.

Just as Kinsey drives around an decaying American twilight so, Grafton takes risks in depicting this criminal milieu of relentless ordinariness. Fortunately, the gallant detective discovers that crime peels away the fast food wrapping of her world to reveal something darker, chaotic, mixing veniality with violence and horror. A decayed body has "small white maggots [that] glowed like a spray of seed pearls". If the corpse is the ultimate sign of the abyss under the banal veneer of small town USA, then this perverse beauty is a trace of its seductive power. One of the best novels to see this is K is for Killer. Here Kinsey's investigation not only brings the standard dead body of the opening pages to imaginative life, it also threatens to turn the detective into some sort of avenging vampire. In a satisfyingly typical opening, Janice Kepler asks Kinsey to investigate the unsolved murder of her youngest daughter, another almost perversely independent young woman called Lorna. The one jarring note in the picture of an unremarkable respectable family is that Janice has been sent a porn film starring the victim. Soon Kinsey discovers that Lorna does not resemble the bland vacuity of her jealous sisters. A very expensive prostitute by night, part-time clerk by day, Lorna was a loyal friend who was tragically addicted to danger. Drawn into her darkening world, Kinsey herself starts to live and work at night, discovering her own personality undergo startling shifts. She befriends Hector, a night radio host whose magnificent beast of a dog howls like a soul in hell when she smells Lorna's scent on Kinsey. Normally a scrupulous respecter of others boundaries, Kinsey questions cop, Cheney Philips about his expensive background. Together Philips and Kinsey are drawn to hooker, Danielle, the child-woman who gives Kinsey lessons on financial management and, at last, a decent hair cut. It is the hair cut that gives the tough minded reader a clue about the fate of Danielle. Rarely does Kinsey let anyone get that close. K is for Killer begins with an evocation of the murdered whose killers go free: "[the] victims of unresolved homicides I think of as the unruly dead; restless, dissatisfied, longing for release." By the end of the novel Kinsey has taken one step into the land of the ghouls. Feeling she may be "turning into a vampire or a werewolf… seduced by the moon", she can only avoid the ultimate identification with two murder victims by becoming an indirect killer herself.

Another recent tale to challenge Kinsey's narrative of herself is O is for Outlaw, which brings her back into the orbit of her second husband, a cop known as Mickey. Characteristically, the start of the case finds Kinsey picking over someone's discarded household oddments, only these are her own, and appear to represent the remains of her ex-husband's life. Kinsey discovers an unopened letter addressed to her. She had left her marriage because she believed that Mickey was trying to use her to falsify an alibi for the beating of a suspect who subsequently died. The letter appears to clear him of the worst aspects of the crime and induces Kinsey to try to track him down. One of the old 'friends' Kinsey encounters is Dixie, author of the letter, lover of Mickey, who accuses Kinsey of a lack of loyalty and faith in Mickey. Certainly, throughout O is for Outlaw, Kinsey finds it easier to kindle a bond with Mickey as a crime victim and centre of a mystery than for someone with whom she shared domesticity. It is telling too, that the novel immediately prior to O is for Outlaw is one where Kinsey is most isolated and friendless. N is for Noose sees Kinsey drawn to the rural Nota Lake, a town so named for its legendary habit of branding criminals. Unfortunately, Kinsey's path to investigating the troubled last days of decent cop Tom Newquist is frustrated by the propensity of the unfriendly locals to 'brand' Kinsey as trouble. She even gets shot by her own client and the identification of a double murderer is left even more unsatisfying as usual. With insufficient evidence of homicide, the guilty party is likely to evade justice in the matter of trying to kill Kinsey. No one much cares and the town is (perversely) glad to see her go. Here, Kinsey suffers the true fate of the hardboiled private eye: to find out the truth (mostly) yet fail in the matter of healing society.

Kinsey's good endings come from an establishment of intimacy with the dead. A good example is the unexpected 'hero' and victim of M is for Malice, Guy Malek. Despite his hellraiser past, Guy fulfils an optimistic Grafton type, the teenager rebel who learns responsibility. Now a Christian, Guy's affection for Kinsey enables her to finally let go of her inner ghosts. In a novel that starts with Kinsey's uncanny double, a cousin Tasha from the extended family that has ignored her and who resembles her physically rather than emotionally (and she has an anti-Kinsey life as a smart lawyer), the tale ceases when Kinsey feels released from grieving over the wraiths of her dead parents and aunt. The fact that tender Guy rather than brisk Tasha achieves this for Kinsey suggests that the road to familial encounters will be rocky. I can't wait for the first meeting with imperious 'Grand', Millhone matriarch. T is for Tyrant anyone?

Susan Rowland's latest book is From Agatha Christie to Ruth Rendell (Palgrave)