By Daniel Gewertz

The conveniently tidy endings do turn killing into an entertainment. They also allow us to briefly believe in redemption. And that is not the vainest of hopes.

Some 77 years ago, critic Edmund Wilson caused a stir with a New Yorker essay dismissing the whole genre of mystery with high-handed hostility. The idea of an elitist critic writing anything about popular genre fiction was a rarity in the 1940s, a pre-television era when “serious” critics avoided pop culture as assiduously as writers on haute cuisine dodged neighborhood bar & grills. The three brows — high, middle, and low — rarely met. Wilson’s contempt wouldn’t have shocked his most regular readers: America’s foremost literary critic had already sprinkled scorn upon genre fiction, calling Lord of the Rings “juvenile trash” and H.P. Lovecraft a hack. That a few dozen of Wilson’s readers had the temerity to admit being mystery lovers seemed to annoy the imperious critic no end. In 1945, America was a war-weary nation in concerted need of escapist entertainment. Wilson, meanwhile, quipped that one answer to the wartime paper shortage might be to legally deny mystery publishers the privileges of the printing press.

The sly name of his lordly essay — Who Cares Who Killed Roger Ackroyd? — was a play on the old Agatha Christie title.

This past month I discovered, in my local Little Free Library, a softcover copy of an old mystery favorite of mine, Sue Grafton’s C is for Corpse. I decided to reread the book, some 36 years after its initial appearance. I liked it so much, I then took on the small project of rereading the two books that led off Grafton’s “alphabet series,” a string of 25 best-selling books that mightily assisted the emerging trend of female gumshoes.

I haven’t read much crime fiction in recent years. Back in my semi-regular mystery consuming years — the ’80s and ’90s — I focused mainly on Raymond Chandler, Ross Macdonald, and, among the newer breed, Grafton, Robert Parker, John Lutz, and a few of Gregory Mcdonald’s and Lawrence Block’s more comedic books. In rereading the A, B, and C of Grafton — Alibi, Burglar, and Corpse — I renewed my old affections. And I experienced one minor revelation. I didn’t really care who killed whom. I was perfectly pleased to live, for a while, inside the narrative mind of Sue Grafton’s private eye, Kinsey Millhone.

Grafton’s climb to success as a novelist was formidable. Starting while a college student, wife, and mother at age 20, she wrote seven novels, eventually publishing two, Kesiah Dane and The Lolly-Madonna War. (The latter became a movie, Lolly-MadonnaXXX, starring Jeff Bridges and Rod Steiger.) For many years she made her living writing scripts for TV movies. (In a move fanaticized by many a struggling writer, Grafton destroyed the manuscripts of her five unpublished early novels.) She was 42 when her first Kinsey Millhone mystery was published, and she kept up the TV writing until her seventh bestseller, G is for Gumshoe.

One problem facing any long-running PI series is the aging process: how does a fictional detective fight, flee, dash, and dominate with unflagging energy in middle and old age? Grafton solves this niftily: Kinsey is forever in her 30s, and every book is set in the ’80s. This plan works on another level, too: The ’80s was also the last full decade that a fictional sleuth could track down clues without the pedestrian tool of the Internet. Kinsey depended on coincidence, perceptive guesswork, the personal interview, the public library’s microfilm collection, and a few favors from semi-friendly, infrequently flirty policemen. Like a lot of fictional private investigators, she had begun as a cop, but couldn’t tolerate police culture and its fiats. The idea of a fearless, hard-bitten loner trying to save the world — or at least solve the crime — has been a staple of urban detective novels for 90 years. Kinsey Millhone isn’t as crazily heroic as some of her male predecessors, but she shares with them many loner hero traits. She’s intractable, for starters. Police chiefs are still a private investigator’s entrenched enemy. And, in tribute to Raymond Chandler, her California turf, Santa Barbara, is renamed Santa Teresa, just as he did.

While fictional PIs play fast and loose with police procedures, the books themselves follow fairly closely to genre ground rules, something that Wilson claimed, with some justification, was evidence of their inferiority. One weakness of the “alphabet” novels is the supposedly breathless endings. Once it became clear the books were to be a series, it was hard to get worked up over the life and death struggles in the final pages. They became performative. We knew Kinsey wasn’t about to die!

It must be said, though, that Grafton effectively mined her own stormy life much like many a primo literary novelist. In real life, Grafton’s father — a lawyer and mystery novelist — came back from service in WWII when she was five; both parents then promptly became full-time alcoholics. Grafton killed off Kinsey’s parents in a car crash when her heroine was five. In real life, Grafton married at 18, quickly had two babies, and divorced at 21. Briefly married a second time, she suffered a drawn out divorce replete with wretched custody battles over her third child. In her first Kinsey book, A is for Alibi, a main character suffers the same excruciating legal battles.

Grafton’s work rests midway between the cozy of Christie and the grisly of Lehane. While many male PIs are cast in the armor of foolhardy bravery, Grafton’s Kinsey Millhone is more realistically cautious. She is also less cynical: more apt to see the good side of people, though she reserves her judgment on those hard to fathom. And her life isn’t quite as lonely. Though she lives alone in a remodeled 225-square-foot garage, her landlord is a fatherly buddy: a dashingly handsome octogenarian baker and crossword puzzle creator named Henry Pitts. And her favorite neighborhood hangout is a dingy restaurant-bar owned by an outrageously bossy Hungarian named Rosie. So, there is at least a small sense of community. When Kinsey is on a case, she isn’t anybody’s fool, but she’s also honestly interested in the people she interviews, and quickly warms to the more benevolent ones.

Though Grafton counts as a feminist in the mystery genre, she is of an old-fashioned ’80s model: Kinsey Millhone calls out sporadic examples of male chauvinism, but she has no trace of political correctness. She frequently complains about fat people as if their bloated torsos and jowly chins were personal affronts. The physically attractive and well-dressed always get a goodly share of compliments. And Kinsey is well aware of certain men’s sex appeal, especially older men. The vainglorious rich tend to receive more gibes than the sleazy poor, but Kinsey is an equal opportunity insulter to the mendacious of all classes. The only gay male character I ran across in the three novels was a minor one, a bartender, and he met a bad end. But Kinsey seemed to like him well enough.

“I’m 32 years old, twice divorced, no kids. The day before yesterday I killed someone, and the fact weighs heavily on my mind.” These lines are from the first paragraph of the first Kinsey book. The tone may be matter-of-fact, yet it is less tough than the male PIs who preceded Kinsey Millhone. Kinsey is endearingly honest. And here’s a true anomaly in the detective genre: Kinsey is a PI able to poke holes in her own prejudices. The best example is B is for Burglar. After unleashing her acerbic wit at length about a (probably innocent) suspect and her middle-class neighborhood, house, furniture, hair-style, plumpness — she executes an about-face. “I hated this part of my job — inserting myself into somebody else’s pain and grief, violating privacy. I felt like a door-to-door salesman,” Kinsey narrates. “I also hated myself vaguely for being judgmental. What do I know about hairstyles anyway?” It is not an admission Philip Marlowe would make.

Edmund Wilson had a point when he complained about the needless details of detective fiction. This staple of PI books has existed, presumably, because PIs are in the business of noticing every detail as a possible clue. Grafton’s frequent descriptions of clothing, houses, and furnishings are surely excessive. More interesting is her mode of detailing the quotidian parts of the private eye job, like note-taking on index cards. And the way she leans upon garden-variety moments, everyday confabs, and unproductive ponderings often has purpose. They set up the satisfying shock of a swift plot development. Few would argue that even stylishly written detective fiction can compare in depth with the finest works of “serious” fiction. Yet in the moments when a mystery’s answers begin to reveal themselves, the reader can experience a jolt of such joyful focus! A satisfying rush ensues: especially after a chapter of amiable stasis. One becomes so alert at a well-executed moment of reveal.

Mystery lovers commonly defend the genre by crediting the sturdy storytelling. But strong storytelling empowers many types of novels. To put a finer point on it, an adroit mystery turns on intrigue, tension, release: a trio of dramatic aspects admittedly rare in our own humdrum lives.

The mystery crime novel — even the gritty, blood-letting ones — is essentially an escapist experience, true. The idea is that even the most baffling murders can be solved by a soldier of ethical right — given enough patience, acuity, and courage. That moral absolute is indeed like a fairy-tale equation transposed to the red-gash world of corpses and crime. The bodies may pile up, but justice prevails. The conveniently tidy endings do turn killing into an entertainment. They also allow us to briefly believe in redemption. And that is not the vainest of hopes.

Mystery writer Sue Grafton: her climb to success as a novelist was formidable.

The better crime novels portray a sleuth one is happy to identify with. This admiration of a hero — especially one who’s more human than super — is also nothing to be ashamed of. Psychic escape is an essential literary gratification: the ability to live with a character and imagine yourself entering the adventure! It is a novelistic staple purposefully absent in much so-called serious literature, and yet the whole invention of the novel wouldn’t have caught on without it.

One weakness of detective novels is a PI who is emotionally above the fray, the sleuth narrator who’s strictly the critic of a corrupt society, and whose poetic flair is purposefully purple, the metaphors not just muscled but steroidal. Grafton works a simpler canvas. I’m partial to A and C, the two books that have an emotional underpinning. My favorite is A is for Alibi. One can tell Grafton is writing as if her professional life depends on it: putting every ounce of her talent out there, but without any sense of stylistic overkill. Here was a writer in love with Southern California. The descriptions of nature often attain an uncluttered elegance. And there is also a sexual relationship here, with a suspect no less: a plot point that breaks the PI rulebook. (Did Mike Hammer ever have sex, or did he just salivate?)

The next best of the first three is C is for Corpse, and Kinsey’s emotional involvement is again paramount here. In the first paragraph we learn that young Bobby Callahan died three days after he hired Kinsey. It is a believable sibling-like rapport they strike up, and it powers the book. In all three books the alienated rich of Santa Barbara is a territory she flat-out owns. The niftily plotted B is for Burglar is the more awarded book, but I found it less involving. (I read it last, so it’s possible I’d just binged too long at the fair.)

It has been over four years since Grafton’s death, at 77, one volume shy of the last letter. Before her death she stipulated that “Z is for Zero” should never be ghostwritten, and that no TV shows or movies be made from her Kinsey novels. Her children and third husband agreed on what Grafton termed “a blood oath” not to sell out Kinsey Millhone. “If they do so, I will come back from the grave: which they know I can do,” she wrote. But the second of those two wishes has, just months ago, been betrayed: her family has sold her books to A & E Studios for future TV movies. So — these wealthy Santa Barbara schemers seem straight out of a Grafton novel: the tale of a corrupt, duplicitous family. Her widowed husband defended the decision by noting that TV movies have improved immeasurably since the ’80s, back when his wife wrote them. If Kinsey Millhone were on the case, she’d see right through this excuse. The truth is that TV movies have not undergone a transformation since 2017, when Grafton was still alive, kicking, and dead set against a TV Kinsey. We shall see if the blood oath commands the power of retribution.

For 30 years, Daniel Gewertz wrote about music, theater and movies for the Boston Herald, among other periodicals. More recently, he’s published personal essays, taught memoir writing, and participated in the local storytelling scene. In the 1970s, at Boston University, he was best known for his Elvis Presley imitation.