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Inglenook Book Club July News

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The Inglenook Book Club met in July at Lakeside Senior Living Community with Geneva Johnson and Shelia Rogers serving as hostesses. The book club was saddened by the sudden death of Russell “Rusty” Newman, son of our Book Secretary, Mary Newman.
The club unanimously voted to donate a book to McKenzie Memorial Library in Rusty’s memory. Club members also attended the funeral service for Rusty held the next day.
After refreshments and the business meeting, President Ward introduced our speaker, Jean McKinnie, whose subject was Sue Grafton, author best known for her “Alphabet” mystery series featuring Kinsey Millhone.
Sue Taylor Grafton was born in 1940 in Louisville, Kentucky. Both her parents were avid readers and encouraged their children to explore all types of literature. Sue’s father was also a mystery writer and had four well-received novels to his credit under the name of C. W. Grafton.
Her father was a municipal bond lawyer who wrote his novels on the side; her mother was a high school chemistry teacher. Her father joined the Army in World War II, returning two years later when Sue was five years old, after which her home life started to fall apart.
Both parents became alcoholics, and from the age of five Sue Grafton was basically left to raise herself. Her mother committed suicide in 1960 after returning home from surgery to remove esophageal cancer brought on by years of drinking and smoking. Her father died in 1982 just a few months before Sue’s A is for Alibi was published.
Sue Grafton graduated from the University of Louisville in 1961 with a bachelor’s degree in English Literature and minors in humanities and fine arts. Prior to her graduation she had married James Flood and had two children, but the marriage ended quickly.
She married Al Schmidt and followed him to California living in a succession of cities before eventually settling in Santa Barbara in 1964.
During that period she worked as a hospital admissions clerk, a cashier, and a medical secretary. In the late 1960s her second marriage ended in a protracted divorce and custody battles over their daughter when she would jot down notes of ways to kill her husband, which later found their way into her novels.
Grafton married her third (and last) husband, Steven F. Humphrey, a philosophy professor, in 1978, with three children from her previous marriages and four granddaughters. They divided their time between Santa Barbara and Louisville.

Her husband taught at universities in both cities. In 2000, the couple bought and restored Lincliff, a 28-acre Louisville estate once owned by hardware baron William Richardson Belknap.
Grafton had begun writing when she was 18 and finished her first novel four years later, then completed six more novels, only two of which were published: Keziah Dane and The Lolly-Madonna. She would later destroy the manuscripts of her five early unpublished novels.
She was asked once in an interview how she stayed strong enough to write when her parents’ drinking took precedence over the day-to-day care of her and her sister. She replied that writing was her anchor and gave her a way to convert all of that unhappiness into something that would serve her.
She had a peace about her parents: they were smart, gentle people who just weren’t good at relationship. As a very young girl, sitting at home alone at night, she would read mysteries with a butcher knife by her side—just in case.
After spending 15 years as a television movie screenwriter, she had become fascinated by mystery series whose titles were related and decided to write a series of novels whose titles would follow the alphabet, and immediately made out a list of all the crime-related words she knew.
This became the series now known as the “alphabet mystery novels” featuring private investigator Kinsey Millhone, a hard-boiled female detective. Kinsey is an ex-cop and twice divorced, a tough character who, in Grafton’s hands, also has a deep understanding of the effects on the people of the crimes she investigates.
The novels are set in a California city called Santa Teresa, a fictionalized version of Santa Barbara. Grafton described Kinsey Millhone as her “alter-ego”—“the person I might have been had I not married young and had children.”
Her books are published in 28 countries in 26 languages. She has won about every mystery writers’ award, some twice.
In 1991 Grafton announced the final book in the series would be called Z is for Zero, but after Y is for Yesterday, she became ill with cancer and was unable to begin that last novel. Sue Grafton died in Santa Barbara in 2017 after a two-year battle with cancer. She was 77 years old.
Our next meeting will be August 14th at Lakeside with Pedie Pedersen and Genia Sherwood as hostesses. Members were reminded of the luncheon on August 2 celebrating Women’s Suffrage at McKenzie First United Methodist Church, as well as the “Southern Fried Funnies” in conjunction with the Southern Fried and Sweet Tea Festival, also in August.
Members present were: Victoria Ard, Linda Edge, Carolyn Goodwin, Suzanne Howell, Geneva Johnson, Shirley Martin, Jean McKinnie, Sandi McMahen, Carolyn Moore, Pedie Pedersen, Marilynn Putman, Shelia Rogers, Gaye Rowan, Suzanne Russell, Genia Sherwood, Sally Sutton, Donna Ward, and Elaine Williams.

Inglenook, July, 2019