Grafton started off with A is for Alibi back in 1982, and is up to R is for Ricochet, which was published July 13, 2004. I had never picked up a copy of any of them until early August, 2004, when I grabbed a copy of Q is for Quarry from my local library. I liked it, at least enough to keep reading, even though my review of Q is for Quarry isn't exactly glowing.

Though I wasn't overwhelmed by Quarry, Grafton's stories are short and her prose flows quickly, so I wasn't opposed to reading another one. After scanning the Amazon.com reader ratings and seeing that Quarry had just a 3.5/5 while most of her other novels were 4/5 or 4.5/5, I was further encouraged to know I hadn't read the best yet. So I put D, F, or G, the three that got 4.5/5 ratings, on my library list. Lucky me, G was in stock the next time I hit the library!  Lucky you, I've written a review!

Scores:

G is for Gumshoe, by Sue Grafton 
Plot: 6
Concept: 5
Writing Quality/Flow: 6/6
Characters: 6
Fun Factor: 5
Page Turner: 5
Re-readability: 4
Overall: 5.5

(Click here to see these categories explained.)

Having read two novels in this series now, I feel safe in saying that they aren't "mysteries." No matter what the book jackets say. They're detective novels, with some "solving a mystery" components, but those are far from the main thrust of the novel. Kinsey Millhone isn't Sherlock Holmes or Inspector Poirot, or even Encyclopedia Brown.  In the two books I've read, the case was never cracked by brilliant deduction or insight or anything like that. It was solved through a lot of footwork, long hours spent pouring through old newspapers and town hall records, repeated face to face interviews with people involved in the events, and so on. I'm sure that's all much more realistic than some Sherlock-ian brilliance, but it's not very interesting to read about, other than by establishing that Kinsey is a real person and a hard worker.

The stories are certainly not all action, but they have a lot of action elements, and while the mystery always starts things off, it quickly moved into the background as other plot elements take over. The structure of the 2 Grafton novels I've read is much more like like one of the popular 80s detective shows; Magnum PI, or Simon and Simon, or something along those lines. There's a mystery to be solved, always, but the show is really much more about the characters in it, the investigator, his/her friends, and there are always action scenes and a big action climax. In Grafton's Kinsey Millhone novels, the mysteries/cases get solved in the end, but at least in the 2 I've read, you hardly care about the solution when you get it, since the main plot of the novel was something else, and with that already resolved the explanation of the mystery itself (seen in the short epilogue) is just a way to tie up loose ends.

Both books start off with a mystery that Private Investigator Kinsey heads off to unravel, and after spending 50 or 80 pages setting up the mystery and working to solve it, something else of greater importance comes up, and what begins as a subplot soon more or less takes over the story, with the original "solve the case" plot pushed into the background. The mystery is eventually resolved, but it never ties in directly with the rest of the plot, which I think is a major flaw. More on that later.

Many of my reactions to Gumshoe are similar to those I had to Quarry. They're both pretty good detective stories, but in each the main mystery wasn't really that involving, and while there was some danger to the main character, I never really feared for her life. I picked Gumshoe to read after Quarry since the Amazon.com reader reviews pegged it at 4.5/5 stars, and it was a bit better, but still not all that good.

I gave Quarry a 4.5 overall, which might be a touch low, in retrospect. ( I grade novels pretty hard.)  Gumshoe was better than Quarry since it had a better plot, more action/excitement (though I was never actually tense or worried or especially excited), and more interesting supporting characters. It also had a better, more satisfying ending, and wrapped up more of the loose ends. Through about 300 of the 350 pages I wasn't sure how Gumshoe would go, since I was a bit bored with the "psycho hitman hunting Kinsey down" subplot, which had long since turned into the main plot, and her investigation into the original mystery was going nowhere, and was boring to boot. Fortunately, the last 50 pages wrapped things up nicely, with a semi-exciting conclusion to the hitman problem, and a pretty good conclusion to the other mystery.

The main thing that kept both G and Q from being really good stories, in my opinion, is that neither had an especially strong plot. They weren't page-turners, basically. Grafton is a competent writer, Kinsey's character is interesting enough, and even though most of her investigative techniques are boring to read about (lots of face to face interviews, searching through city hall records, old newspapers, etc) they're realistic enough and described quickly enough to not be that boring to read about. That stuff is good; the problem is that the plots never live up to their potential. The mystery parts are not especially mysterious and wouldn't support a quality novel on their own, and the action-heavy subplots are okay, but aren't enough to make a good action novel.  Together they make the books long enough to be satisfying novels, and the sum of the two parts is adequate. The problem is that they don't overlap and merge together in the end. A really good author would weave the plot together in the end, and the 2 threads that seemed separate all along would suddenly come together in a way that the reader would be impressed and intrigued by. You'd get near the end, start hitting the twisty revelations, and be thrilled. "So that's why Character X did that back on page 50!" you'd think, as seemingly unrelated events suddenly made sense. This does not happen.

If it did, my scores for writing quality and page turner and characters and such wouldn't change, but I'd give much higher score for plot, concept, and overall.

I'm not saying it would be easy; it would require a brilliant plot and a very good writer to pull it off. But if it were easy, everyone would do it. As it is, I can see almost any moderately-talented writer churning out Grafton's Alphabet Mysteries; she could die and ghost writers could keep releasing new Kinsey Mallhone adventures for a century with no real drop off in quality. There haven't been any major changes in Kinsey's life, none of the cases are brilliantly-plotted, and none of the subplots are especially imaginative or inventive. Nothing about either novel sucked, but nothing really stood out either, unfortunately.

This sounds (and is) terribly immodest, but I can easily see writing a novel like either of these books in a few months. There aren't any real plot twists, aside from the way the mystery portions of the plots are revealed, and the rest of the novels are straight forward action movie stuff. The writing isn't bad, but it's never especially good either. The really immodest part? I wouldn't write these novels as they are. I wouldn't settle for 2 pretty good plot threads that never tied together in the end. If I had one of Grafton's plots in my head I'd think it was a good starting point, but I would not consider the novel complete until I thought of a way to tie it all together in the end, and tie it together in some logical, intelligent way that made sense and was satisfying to the reader. I would not publish either of these novels as they are. They're bestsellers and critically-praised, but they're not great and they could be much better.

Of course that's easy to say in the theoretical; if I were Grafton and had an advance to earn back and pressure from fans to get a new novel out and had one of these done and knew it was good enough... I'd probably be a whore and put it out as is, and hope I could think of a better plot that would all tie together nicely next time. I'm not claiming that I could rewrite either novel and make them perfect, or that I see some easy way to vastly improve the plots of them both; I'm just saying that I'd be very unhappy if I couldn't do better than these, when they're good, and so close to being great.

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