(In a move fanaticized by many a struggling writer, Grafton destroyed the manuscripts of her five unpublished early novels.)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. (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. 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. Grafton’s climb to success as a novelist was formidable. I was perfectly pleased to live, for a while, inside the narrative mind of Sue Grafton’s private eye, Kinsey Millhone. In rereading the A, B, and C of Grafton - Alibi, Burglar, and Corpse - I renewed my old affections. 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. I haven’t read much crime fiction in recent years. 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 decided to reread the book, some 36 years after its initial appearance.
#Sue grafton free
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. The sly name of his lordly essay - Who Cares Who Killed Roger Ackroyd? - was a play on the old Agatha Christie title. Wilson, meanwhile, quipped that one answer to the wartime paper shortage might be to legally deny mystery publishers the privileges of the printing press. In 1945, America was a war-weary nation in concerted need of escapist entertainment.
That a few dozen of Wilson’s readers had the temerity to admit being mystery lovers seemed to annoy the imperious critic no end. 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. The three brows - high, middle, and low - rarely met. 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. 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. They also allow us to briefly believe in redemption. The conveniently tidy endings do turn killing into an entertainment.
0 kommentar(er)
