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T is for Trespass is the title of Sue Taylor Grafton’s latest marvel of a mystery, but there are plenty of T words to describe the wildly popular novelist herself: tenacious, thorough and timeless are among them. Her literary role models include masters of the classic detective novel Raymond Chandler and Ross Macdonald. And although her story lines prove topical and terrifying, Grafton herself is an amiable, albeit hardworking, wife, grandmother, fitness buff and cat lover. She maintains a home in her native Louisville, Kentucky.
Grafton and her husband of 20-plus years, Steven Humphrey, live part of the year in Southern California, where they met, but the author has made it clear she’s not a Hollywood kind of girl. She had enough of that in the 1970s and ‘80s when she made her living writing screenplays for film and television. (Her television movie, Walking through Fire (1979), earned her a Christopher Award.) She lived in Columbus, Ohio, from 1976 to 1982, but had to spend much of her time during that period in Hollywood.
“I was happy to bail out. It’s not a nice place,” Grafton once said of Hollywood. She has said repeatedly she will never sell out her engaging heroine Kinsey Millhone to Hollywood, and has made her offspring take a “blood oath” they won’t either.
Love for Novels
Grafton’s passion has always been the novel. Her father, C.W. Grafton, was a well-known Louisville bond attorney who wrote crime fiction on the side. While a student at the University of Louisville, from which she graduated in 1961, Grafton majored in English Literature and minored in the Humanities and Fine Arts.
Her first published book, Keziah Dane (1967) was actually the fourth book she’d written. Her fifth book, The Lolly-Madonna War (1973) was made into a film starring Rod Steiger and Gary Busey.
But it was a low point in Grafton’s life that started her on the path toward the heights of literary fame. In the very early 1980s when Grafton was living in the German Village section of Columbus, she went through a bitter divorce and would console herself at night with creative ways she could whack her ex.
It was during that time she came up with Millhone, the blue-collar detective with a chaotic love life, a passion for junk food and a strong moral compass. As Grafton began to write what would become A is for Alibi, the first of her alphabet series of novels, she turned to Sunbury, Ohio, investigator Joe Driscoll for guidance. Grafton has said it was Driscoll who planted “the tiniest notion” that would grow into her best-selling series of books starring Millhone, one of the most beloved detectives of fiction.
It’s not surprising Millhone is an old-fashioned sort of detective. Although Grafton grew up in an upper-middle class world, she has worked many sorts of jobs in her life, including stints as a cashier, admissions clerk and secretary.
Shifting voices engage readers
In T is for Trespass, which many have called her best to date, Grafton engages the reader by shifting between the voices of Millhone and Solana Rojas, a greedy sociopath who hasn’t even a passing acquaintance with a moral compass. Rojas is not really Rojas - it’s an identity stolen by a criminal from a well-respected and experienced private caregiver. It allows the woman to prey in myriad ways on some of society’s most vulnerable.
The novel unfolds enticingly, although readers know the bad guy, or in this case woman, from the start. The tension comes as Millhone starts to catch on to what Rojas is doing to a neighbor and has to decide when and how to intervene.
One of Grafton’s remarkable attributes is her ability to write outside time. Although T is for Trespass is set in the late 1980s, pre-Internet and cell phone, it explores some of the biggest fears of Americans 20 years later: abuse of the weak, the breakdown of the system meant to care for them and the theft of personal identities. Add in the timeless horror of a shattering betrayal of trust and you have a novel bound to keep readers awake at night - and not only from the desire to finish just one more page.
– By Mary Ethridge
Book info:
T is for Trespass
By Sue Grafton
ISBN: 0399154485
Published by Penguin Putnam. $26.95
Visit Sue Grafton’s Web site:
http://www.suegrafton.com/index.htm
