The first book I read by Sue Grafton was G is for Gumshoe. That was sometime in the mid 1990s and I’d picked it up at a flea market while vacationing in Collingwood, Ontario. I was immediately hooked by Grafton’s feisty female PI and the Santa Teresa, California, setting, and went on to purchase (at full price!) A is for Alibi, B is for Burglar and so on until I was all caught up, one of the many readers eagerly awaiting the next alphabetical instalment.

In 2014, attending Bloody Words, a now defunct mystery convention once held bi-annually in Toronto, we were asked to dress up as our favorite fictional character for the banquet. I’m not much on dressing up, but I do own a black “all purpose” dress (actually a skirt and top) of some sort of indestructible, non-wrinkling material, and so I wore that and told everyone I was Kinsey Millhone.

As a fan, I was super excited to learn that Sue Grafton would be Left Coast Crime’s 2019 Guest of Honor in Vancouver. After all, by then I’d read every single one of her books and I immediately signed up for the conference. Unfortunately, Grafton died prior to the event, though I was fortunate to meet her daughter and share my all purpose dress story. She said her mother would have loved it, and I think she might have.

Last summer, I got into audiobooks (though I still prefer reading, they’re great when you’re on the road). I decided to revisit Kinsey Millhone, starting with A and mostly listening to the series in order (I say mostly, as I borrowed the books from the library’s LIBBY program, and sometimes there was a long wait so I’d skip ahead). Last week, I finished the series with Y is for Yesterday and I have to admit I felt a sense of loss all over again.

But here’s the thing. Listening to the books over the course of a year, vs. reading them over the course of two decades, I have to say certain things surprised me. I’d forgotten, for example, that Kinsey swore, that she was sexually active in some books (and lamented her celibacy in others), that she started adding multiple POVs about midway through, or that she had a tendency to “page pad” just a bit with lists or details that could have been skipped (Henry’s brother, William’s, health issues come to mind). But mostly I’d forgotten that Kinsey really had aged (so many people think she didn’t) albeit at a much slower rate than the rest of us. What surprised me the most, however, was just how much Grafton’s style of writing, especially her later works, impacted my own. I wish I could have told her that, too.

I’ve read interviews with Grafton where she’d announced that Z is for Zero would be released in 2019, though by all accounts, she’d been too ill to write it, and like me, was a panster vs. an outliner. As noted in her obituary, the alphabet ended in Y, and we are the poorer for it. RIP Sue Grafton. Your legacy lives on.