People, Etc. - Publishers Lunch

Sue Grafton, 77, author of the Kinsey Millhone series, died of cancer at her home in Santa Barbara on December 28. The alphabetical series began with A is for Alibi in 1982 and continued through her last book, Y Is for Yesterday, published in August 2016. She had not yet begun writing the final book of the series, which was to be titled Z Is for Zero and published August 2019. Her daughter Jamie Clark wrote in a message on Grafton’s Facebook page, “She was adamant that her books would never be turned into movies or TV shows, and in that same vein, she would never allow a ghost writer to write in her name. Because of all of those things, and out of the deep abiding love and respect for our dear sweet Sue, as far as we in the family are concerned, the alphabet now ends at Y.”

Our news editor Sarah Weinman wrote a remembrance of the author for Vulture. Other crime writers paying tribute to Grafton included Laura Lippman, Jeff Abbott and, Meg Gardiner.

In a short piece, the New Yorker catches up with Walter Minton, 94, former president of Putnam, who “reminisced about the controversial novels he championed in his youth and the trials of getting them into print. Minton was dressed in slacks and a cardigan, with a thinning head of white hair; he still wears the trim, boxy beard that he adopted mid-career. He was thirty-one when he took over Putnam’s, in 1955, and the shelves of his living room offer a higgledy-piggledy tour of his route through twentieth-century publishing, from John le Carré to Mario Puzo to Scott Turow.”