Chris:

If you are among the millions who have read the novels of Sue Grafton, you may have wondered if our alphabetical scheme for this humble blog owes a debt to Sue Grafton’s alphabetical scheme for her Kinsey Millhone series. Yes, of course. How could one know and love her writing and not be enchanted by the simple elegance of her overall design?

Sue Grafton passed away Thursday, Dec. 28, in her beloved Santa Barbara after a two-year struggle with cancer. I did not know until the next day that she and her husband, Steve Humphrey, had a kitchen garden on their estate in Louisville, Kentucky. (Sue was born in Kentucky in 1940 and had returned there for part of each year in the past two decades.)

Steve, I learned, is the gardener in the family, but his love for plants and dirt had sparked garden enthusiasm in Sue, and she helped him in the restoration of the formal gardens on the estate, which they bought in 2000. In an article in Kentucky Garden and Gun in 2014, she spoke of the kitchen garden:

“We have an asparagus bed, potatoes, strawberries, blueberries, raspberries….It’s all organic….We’re like little farmers.”   http://gardenandgun.com/articles/sue-graftons-kentucky-garden/

Now, if you read the Kinsey Millhone books, you won’t find much about gardens or gardening.  Kinsey, as you know, is all detective all the time. Even when she spends the rare minute or two on such domestic pursuits as cleaning her tiny apartment or making a peanut butter and pickle sandwich, she’s worrying about clients and clues. She always gets down and dirty with cases, but the only time she really messes with the actual dirt is when she’s looking for bodies or hiding in the underbrush on a stakeout.

Still, for me, there is much of the gardener in Kinsey, and that’s why I love her–and why I love her creator. Kinsey is everlastingly curious, in the gardener’s simple and dogged kind of way. She never tires of wondering what might turn up next, and she pays attention to the smallest details. She cares very little about how she looks, but she cares very much about recording the progress of cases bit by bit. Like the gardener out for the daily exploration of the premises, she’s always optimistic about the next encounter with someone or something she hasn’t seen before or the next conversation with a “person of interest.” It’s not much of a stretch to say that she likes to add a bit of “water” to a conversation in the form of an intriguing question, just to see what might pop up. She might even get to the root of the matter by enough careful digging.

So, in her own way, Sue and Kinsey were fellow gardeners with all of us who like to get our hands dirty. Alas that she will not be gracing us with the final “Z Is for…” of the series, but A through Y are all perennials, firmly planted in our memories. As long as we return to them, they will continue nourishing us in years to come.

As for that yet-to-be-born “Z,” I think many of the seeds that she planted are already sprouting in the minds of all of us who loved Sue Grafton, and they will appear like the first blooms of the California spring, each in its own surprising way. Live on, dear Sue.