Flashback: Sue Grafton.

Two interviews with Sue Grafton can be seen via the Internet Archive.

"G Is for Grafton" (TV Santa Barbara, 2008). In a short clip, Grafton talks about how she started writing.

"Kinsey and Sue: An Interview with Sue Grafton" (Maryville Talks Books, Maryville University/Left Bank Books/St. Louis Public Radio/Higher Education Channel Television, 2014, coinciding with the release of Grafton's W Is for Wasted and Kinsey and Me). In addition to talking about these works, she discusses the three mysteries of her lawyer father, C. W. Grafton, and the travails of Hollywood.

Hard-boiled detectives and libraries.

Philip Marlowe (Humphrey Bogart)
meets a librarian from the Hollywood Public
Library (Carole Douglas) in the trailer to
The Big Sleep (1946)

Peter Igelström, librarian at Linköping University's Valla Library, takes an entertaining look at the relationship of hardboiled detectives to libraries and librarians. "One wonders why the library is a potential stigma to a hard-boiled detective," he states.

First modern female PI in US mysteries.

Read my letter in the December 7 Washington Post regarding the first modern female private investigator in American mystery fiction (sorting out the debuts of Delilah West, Sharon McCone, V.I. Warshawski, and Kinsey Millhone).

U-Chicago's Popular Literature Collection.

Univ of Chicago Library's Special Collections finished an inventory last year of its Popular Literature Collection, which includes about 2000 paperbacks and science fiction magazines, some with lurid

Portrait of Anthony Berkeley Cox
by George Morrow
from Jugged Journalism (1925)

covers. Now, finally, the finding aid is online. Books in the collection include Trial and Error (1945 ed.; film 1941) by Anthony Berkeley [Cox], Death in the Blackout (1946) by Anthony Gilbert, Of Tender Sin (1952) by David Goodis, The Rope Began to Hang the Butcher (1944) by C. W. Grafton (father of Sue), Bimini Run (1952) by E. Howard Hunt (yes, the Watergate figure), Dread Journey (1947) by Dorothy B. Hughes, Wall of Eyes (1943) by Margaret Millar, and She Faded into Air (1941) by Ethel Lina White (best known for The Lady Vanishes). Some covers from the collection are posted here.

Happy birthday, Sue Grafton.

Shamus, Anthony, and Macavity winner Sue Grafton, the creator of path-breaking PI Kinsey Millhone, was born today in Louisville, Kentucky, in 1940. Her first novel, Keziah Dane, was published in 1967, and Grafton also has several television scripts to her credit, such as an adaptation of Agatha Christie's Sparkling Cyanide (1983).

Millhone debuted in A Is for Alibi (1982), the same year of the first appearance of Sara Paretsky's V. I. Warshawski. Millhone's latest outing is T Is for Trespass (2007).