Grafton's new mystery delves into a real crime

NEW YORK -- Sue Grafton needed a fresh plot for the 17th mystery in her alphabet series. So she turned to a real murder.

"'Q' Is for Quarry," set in 1987, features Grafton's famous private eye, Kinsey Millhone. It involves a murder that took place in the summer of 1969. The body of a young, white woman was found with multiple stab wounds and a slit throat in a quarry outside Lompoc, Calif., about an hour north of Santa Barbara. The woman was never identified, the murderer never found.

The sassy, tough and wisecracking Kinsey is asked by two local detective friends to help them go back and try to solve the cold case.

Grafton, who fictionalized the murder, borrowed heavily from the real autopsy reports in writing her novel. "Almost word for word," she says in a voice filled with the Southern cadence of Louisville, Ky. "I skipped some of the nitty-gritty details because it was not pertinent."

Like the real slain woman, Grafton's murder victim was also wearing a pair of homemade pants with an unusual fabric -- "daisy-print, dark blue with a dot of red on a white background" -- and she also had unusual dental features.

A friend who is a retired forensic pathologist first mentioned the case to the 62-year-old author. Friends often suggest story ideas, but this one intrigued Grafton largely because the body was found outside Lompoc, a town that figures in other Grafton novels.

When she started the alphabet series, Grafton wrote that Kinsey's parents died near Lompoc when the detective was 5. In later novels, Kinsey learns she has family still living in Lompoc.

Grafton, with a warm, sweet smile and sparkling brown eyes, talked about her new mystery in an interview in the basement conference room of a midtown hotel.

She says she became so involved in the 33-year-old case that she paid $2,500 to exhume and rebury the body, which was in an unmarked grave, so a facial reconstruction could be made. She has included photos of the reconstruction at the end of her novel, hoping someone will recognize the young woman, who had blue eyes, not brown as the color photos show, and naturally brown hair that had been dyed blond.

"She still wants to go home," Grafton says of the victim.

Grafton's alphabet winners started in 1982, when Kinsey debuted in '"A' Is for Alibi," a murder mystery inspired by the author's unfulfilled homicidal urges toward an ex- husband. Then came '"B' Is for Burglar," '"C' Is for Corpse," "'D' Is for Deadbeat" and so forth.

Her friend, crime writer Elmore Leonard, who is awed by Grafton's tenacity, recently quipped that when she got to "M" she could have easily titled the book "'M' Is for My God!"

In fact, when Grafton was working on "'H' Is for Homicide," she said in an interview with The Associated Press, "All I have to do is stay in good health and of sound mind. I figure, for the first half of the alphabet, people will be betting I can't do it. Through the second half, they'll be rooting for me."

The alphabet series has sold millions of books worldwide, and has kept Grafton on best-seller lists.

But the author wants her readers to know that she is the same person she's always been, that success hasn't changed her a bit. She has always, she says, been a sloth at heart.

"What I'd really like to do," she says, "is never get out of bed and lie around and eat bonbons."

Grafton shares two homes with her husband, Steve Humphrey, a professor of philosophy: a 4 1/2-acre estate outside Santa Barbara and a 23-acre spread outside Louisville.

"We sort of go (to Louisville) when the fancy strikes us," Grafton says, and often go to the Kentucky Derby.

She is told that in the 1930s there was a race horse named Sue Grafton.

"I have a good pedigree," she shouts in delight. "I don't know why people criticize me!"