1 January 2018
This won't be an objective appraisal of Sue Grafton, who died today of cancer at the age of 77. I was a fan first, reading her Kinsey Millhone novels in high school and sticking with the series all the way to the end. I interviewed her twice: once for the Los Angeles Times in 2009, and four years later, onstage at the Toronto Public Library. I admired her ability to stick with her own voice, not let success go to her head, and to stretch herself in her writing. As the editor of two anthologies of 20th-century crime works by women that were published in 2013 and 2015, I was floored by her kindness in bestowing blurbs when she hardly did that sort of thing anymore.
