Portal:Louisville/Selected biography/11
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Sue Grafton (born April 24, 1940 in Louisville, Kentucky, USA) is a contemporary American author of detective novels. Grafton began writing when she was 18 and finished her first novel four years later. She continued writing, and completed six more manuscripts. Two of these seven novels were published. While reading Edward Gorey's The Gashlycrumb Tinies, which is an alphabetical picture book of children who die by various means, she had the idea to write a series of novels based on the alphabet. She immediately sat down and made a list of all of the crime-related words that she knew.
This exercise led to her best known works, a chronological series of mystery novels. Known as "the alphabet novels," the stories are set in and around the fictional town of Santa Teresa, which is based on the author's primary city of residence, Santa Barbara, California.
