C.W. Grafton may be best known today for something he knew nothing about. The full-time attorney and part-time novelist died at the end of January 1982, four months before his youngest daughter embarked on a successful career as a mystery writer. In the decades since publication of Sue Grafton’s A is for Alibi, she repeatedly credited her father as being both a source of inspiration and frustration.
“Because of him, I not only became a writer, but I developed a real passion for the mystery genre,” Sue Grafton wrote in an essay published in 1993.
His death cut short his intention to return to writing, and her death, near the end of 2017 and with one letter of the alphabet to go, thwarted her plans to bring her father’s books back into print. While C.W. may have long been overlooked, he hasn’t been forgotten. His debut novel, 1943’s The Rat Began to Gnaw the Rope, will be republished in the spring.
“Time and fate have arranged things so that C.W. Grafton’s greatest fame in the mystery field will forever be that he is the father of Sue Grafton,” mystery novelist William L. DeAndrea wrote in his exhaustive 1994 book, Encyclopedia Mysteriosa, “but his own contributions to the genre should not be ignored.”
C.W. Grafton published four novels, three of them mysteries and two of those part of an intended series whose titles were drawn from the lines of a nursery rhyme. Both Rat and its 1944 sequel, The Rope Began to Hang the Butcher, featured Gilmore Henry, a short, pudgy attorney who practiced in fictional Calhoun County, Kentucky, which was situated somewhat south of Louisville. Unlike the hard-boiled mysteries Grafton himself loved to read, he infused his own books with a sense of humor.
“I think it’s a nice transition, if you will, from the seriousness of the hard-boiled school and there ain’t a lot of jokes in Dashiell Hammett,” said Leslie Klinger, editor of the Library of Congress Crime Classics series, which is bringing Rat back to bookstores. “There are a few occasional wisecracks but it’s not exactly funny, light reading. Even [Raymond] Chandler. Chandler’s very serious. You get to Grafton and Grafton had the same kind of hard-boiled situations in a way but with a much lighter touch, and fun to read and shouldn’t be languished in history.”
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The history of Cornelius Warren Grafton begins in 1909, when he was born to Presbyterian missionary parents stationed in China. The youngest of three sons, Grafton didn’t step foot in the United States until he was nearly three years old, during his parents’ furlough. That occurred once every seven years and when it did the family made their way to his mother’s native Louisville. Those regular trips to and from China took a couple of weeks aboard a steamship. From a young age, Grafton dreamed of becoming a writer. In reporting on publication of his debut novel, the Louisville Courier-Journal noted Grafton had submitted his first story to a magazine when was eleven: “This horror tale, which was probably influenced by his childish knowledge of Chinese banditry, ended with the villain falling over a cliff and becoming ‘a lifeless mass.’” The article doesn’t indicate if any magazine took a chance on the young writer.
Growing up in China, the brothers learned the speak the language and attended a boarding school in Shanghai, about 120 miles northeast of their parents’ mission. Nicknamed “Corny,” the youngest Grafton acted in school plays, played baseball and basketball, ran track, and eventually watched his older brothers leave for college in America.
Arthur Warren Grafton Jr., the namesake of the middle son, described the route his father had to take and one that likely all three sons followed. His father gave him $20 in gold and accompanied him to the Grand Canal outside Beijing. From there, he caught a barge to Shanghai, a freighter to Yokohama, Japan, another freighter to Portland, Oregon, and a train to Columbia, South Carolina. The last 60 or so miles brought him to Presbyterian College, where the sons of missionaries received a tuition-free education.
If C.W. had previously contemplated a career as a writer, the dream had certainly taken hold by the time he found himself on the grounds of Presbyterian College. The young man, now known as “Chip,” threw himself into becoming a writer. By the time he graduated with highest honors in 1930, he had served as editor of the yearbook and the school newspaper and contributed stories and poems to the college magazine. His classmates voted him the “student with most promise, and the best journalist.” He spent the year after graduation studying journalism at Columbia University in New York, returning to Presbyterian College to teach English. He even cut short his honeymoon in the summer of 1932 to further his studies, this time at Northwestern University outside Chicago.
“My father decided to practice law,” his nephew remembered. “Chip couldn’t make a real good living writing, so he became a lawyer also.”
C.W. worked as an adjuster for an insurance company while attending law school at night. He graduated in 1935 and found work as an associate in a Louisville firm. His brother was with another firm entirely, but 1938 found both Graftons at the same practice: Arthur as a partner and C.W. as an associate. Within two years the brothers were partners in Grafton & Grafton and, more importantly to the future of mystery fiction, C.W. was a father. His first daughter, Ann, was born in 1937. Sue came along three years later.
“While I was growing up,” Sue told novelist Kym Roberts in 2015, “he often talked about his love of crime fiction and his passion for writing.”
One day in August 1942 C.W. summoned a stenographer to take dictation. Instead of a legal brief, however, he began dictating a novel.
His elevation to partner may have spurred C.W. to take a risk he likely wouldn’t have dared as a mere associate. One day in August 1942 C.W. summoned a stenographer to take dictation. Instead of a legal brief, however, he began dictating a novel. The mystery story he told was about a young lawyer named Gilmore Henry hired to find out why the head of a company was willing to buy stock, for much more than it was worth, from the heirs of a man apparently killed in a car accident. The firm’s four stenographers took turns taking dictation, with work in the office stopping as the day’s pages were read aloud. A few months into the process, C.W. learned he could submit his novel in a contest with its publication as the big prize if it was done by the end of October.
He completed The Rat Began to Gnaw the Rope with four days to spare and dedicated his debut novel to his wife Vivian and their two daughters.
The Mary Roberts Rinehart Prize was a new competition meant to call attention to writers who had never published a mystery novel before, and C.W. became its third winner. For winning, C.W. received $2,000: a $1,000 advance against royalties from publisher Farrar & Rinehart and another $1,000 from contest co-sponsor magazine Collier’s. In today’s dollars, that amounts to nearly $30,000.
Rinehart, who served as one of the judges, was a wildly successful writer who published 60 novels and hundreds of short stories during her lifetime.
“She was a major best-seller way back in the day,” said Barbara Peters, a longtime friend of Sue Grafton and founder of The Poisoned Pen bookstore in Scottsdale, Arizona. She and her husband later launched Poisoned Pen Press and have partnered with the Library of Congress on the Crime Classics series. “She was definitely the queen of suspense in her time, so an award with her name on it would have meant a lot.”
Great reviews also helped propel sales of the book. The New Yorker described it as a “Fast, humorous story with flashes of brilliance …” Writing in the San Francisco Chronicle, Anthony Boucher (a future founder of Mystery Writers of America) praised the book’s “fast, ingenious and humorous action” and suggested Gilmore Henry should be “nominated for junior partnership in the legal firm of Gardner & Fair”—a reference to Erle Stanley Gardner of “Perry Mason” fame and his pen name A.A. Fair.
C.W. signed with a crackerjack literary agent in New York named Bernice Baumgarten, whose other clients included Raymond Chandler and even her own husband, novelist James Gould Cozzens.
Within two months of its May 1943 publication, The Rat had sold out of its initial 6,000-copy run, Farrar & Rinehart began a second run, and C.W. enlisted in the Army. C.W. had served in the Army ROTC in college, where he was named “most militaristic,” and went into the service as a lieutenant. The final page of The Rat contains a four-paragraph note from C.W., titled “About the War” in which he advised the reader: “At best, we will have our hands full for a long time to come. Many of us who are not yet in uniform will be called into service, and we will be ready.”
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“The day my father left for the Army, he decided the way to do it was to have little Army uniforms made for my sister and me,” Sue Grafton remembered for the 1996 documentary “Women of Mystery.” “He decided what we should do is salute each other. So my sister and I were stood in front of the fireplace and we saluted. He was gone from the time I was 3 until I turned 5.”
C.W. Grafton (right) and brothers Arthur (center) and Thomas (left)
Arthur Grafton also enlisted, choosing the Army Air Corps, and the brothers shuttered the law firm until their return in 1946. Both wound up working in military intelligence, serving in the China-Burma-India Theater of operations.
C.W. left something else behind other than his family: a second book. Once again featuring Gilmore Henry, The Rope Began to Hang the Butcher was published in early 1944. C.W. dedicated the new book to the stenographers who took the dictation, calling them the “four swell gals in what used to be a law office.”
The Rope centered around Gilmore Henry working for a client who sold a life insurance policy he shouldn’t have. A series of murders spins from that simple start, the bodies start piling up, and the attorney finds himself looking for clues.
Farrar & Rinehart paid C.W. a $500 advance for The Rope, plus 10 percent royalties on the first 2,500 copies sold, 12.5 percent on the next 2,500 copies, and 15 percent on every copy sold after 5,000, according to letters in the archives of Boston University. The money wasn’t enough to walk away from the law. He received $966 in royalties in October 1944, and another check, this one for $382, arrived the following May. During all of 1945, C.W. earned $1,332 from his novels.
Although Boucher panned C.W.’s sophomore effort, saying the mystery was too easy to solve, others heaped praise upon it. The New York Times noted: “Since the author has used only two lines of the well-known nursery rhyme for his title, we may expect to hear more of the adventures of Gilmore Henry, and that will be all to the good.”
But when C.W. returned from the war near the end of 1945, he came back with a departure from his two mysteries. My Name is Christopher Nagel, published in 1947, told the story of a young man leaving high school and entering college in the 1920s. The book, which received critical praise, was a work of mainstream fiction; Sue Grafton would call such books “just a loosely structured novel with no good homicide in it.” Having dictated his first two novels, C.W. took to the typewriter himself this time. As he rotated through first India and then Ceylon and then China, C.W. amassed hundreds of pages. He completed the book during a burst of late-night writing during the 17 days aboard ship returning to America.
“That’s when life started to fall apart at home. My father would start his day with two jiggers of whiskey and he’d polish off a fifth by day’s end.”
With her father back in Louisville and practicing law again, Sue told The Wall Street Journal in 2017, “That’s when life started to fall apart at home. My father would start his day with two jiggers of whiskey and he’d polish off a fifth by day’s end. Yet he practiced law without a flaw.” Her mother drank as well, and spent her days reading mysteries and smoking. She wound up developing throat cancer and killing herself by taking an overdose of barbiturates, dying on her younger daughter’s 20th birthday.
Her parents, Sue told Barbara Peters during an event in 2013, were “lovely, smart, educated people, and they loved books and they loved detective fiction, so you know, they were good people. But they just weren’t very good parents so from the age of 5 on I literally raised myself.”
But if her parents did one thing right, it was to encourage their daughters to read. They brought home used paperbacks. Vivian Grafton would read each one first, and label the books as “dirty,” “dull” or “good.” Ann and Sue were encouraged to read whatever they wanted. (Ann grew up to become a librarian.)
Arthur Grafton Jr. describes his uncle as “an alcoholic of the first rate” and offers his father’s theory about what drove C.W. to drink. “My father told me once that he thought the problem was that Chip wanted to be a writer. He never wanted to practice law. He only practiced law because that was a way to make a living.”
“All the while he practiced law, he really wanted to be an author,” his widow and second wife, Lillian Grafton, told USA Today in 1988. Initially one of the stenographers who took dictation from C.W.—“one of the four swell gals”—she went on to law school herself, became an attorney in his firm and married him in 1961.
Although C.W. may not have liked practicing law as much as he enjoyed writing, he proved to be a successful attorney. In one high-profile case where he represented a Kentucky utility, he took the Internal Revenue Service all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, finally prevailing in a 1949 ruling that the company did not owe $19,698 in taxes from 1940 ($361,891 in today’s dollars). He also developed an expertise in municipal bonds, which provided local governments a mechanism to fund projects such as for schools.
C.W. struggled for four years over his fourth book, a stand-alone mystery titled Beyond a Reasonable Doubt. He dictated the first 150 pages before hitting a snag and put the manuscript away for more than a year. When he picked up the pages again, he worked on it until past midnight at the law office one day a week. To finish it, he rented a room in a downtown hotel and worked day and night for a week. He complained to his literary agent in February 1949 that he had “never worked so hard or so long on anything” and a month later admitted: “The major trouble with the story is that there is very little interest at the outset.” His agent found the story exciting but the hero unsympathetic and unlikable. Beyond a Reasonable Doubt featured an attorney named Jess London who, in a fit of pique early in the book, kills his brother-in-law and confesses to the police. He then must spend the rest of the novel trying to play down his confession and survive the inevitable trial.
Author John Dunning, who wrote a series of mystery novels about a bookseller named Cliff Janeway, compared the father and daughter writers in Booked to Die. The character noted that Sue’s books are “breezy and readable, entertaining but never challenging. Her father, C.W. Grafton, once wrote one of the cleverest, most gripping novels in the literature. His book, Beyond a Reasonable Doubt, is by most accounts a cornerstone, but if I want to sell it I have to do in on her popularity.”
Beyond a Reasonable Doubt would be C.W.’s last—and perhaps best—book. It was reprinted 26 years later by Garland Publishing Co. as part of its Fifty Classics of Crime Fiction, 1900-1950 series, putting C.W. in the company of Chandler, Rex Stout, and Agatha Christie
C.W. started a third book about Gilmore Henry, this one to be called The Butcher Began to Kill the Ox. Economic realties intruded. “At a certain point, he just decided that he couldn’t make a living as a writer,” Sue told the Spokesman-Review newspaper in 1996. By 1960, C.W. proclaimed to the local newspaper he was done with writing: “I find I can make a better living as an attorney.” His law practice, the Courier-Journal noted, kept him working until midnight some nights and through the weekends, but he hoped to return to writing once he retired.
Before shelving his writing career, C.W. planted the idea of a writing life within his youngest daughter.
“One of the things my father did, at the end of a workday, he would work on his novels,” Sue told actress Judy Kaye during a public appearance in Nashville in 2016. “So when I was 8 and 10 and 12, he was talking to me about writing.”
Sue told the Worcester, Massachusetts, Telegram & Gazette in 1995: “My father always used to tell me, ‘Keep it simple.’ He would say spell correctly, use proper punctuation, pay attention to the basics. Most of all, he stressed transitions. ‘Every writer has the big scenes,’ he said, ‘but if you don’t take care of the transitional scenes, you won’t have a reader when you get to the big ones.’ The other thing he taught me was to pay attention to minor characters.”
He also cautioned her against becoming an attorney.
Sue needed her father’s advice on how to take rejection. She wrote her first novel at the age of 22, but it wasn’t published. Neither were her second or third books. Her fourth attempt—Keziah Dane—found a publisher and was released in 1967. A subsequent novel, The Lolly-Madonna War, came out two years later and got her to Hollywood where she wrote the screenplay for it and where she remained for 15 years working on film and television projects. Meanwhile, her sixth and seventh novels failed to find a publisher. But on her eighth try, with the mystery A is for Alibi, she struck on a successful formula with a long-running series about private investigator Kinsey Milhone.
She dedicated her first mystery: “For my father, Chip Grafton, who set me on this path.”
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Peters, who considered Sue like a sister, said she wanted to see her father’s books back in print. That was something she didn’t plan on undertaking until after finishing her final Kinsey Milhone novel, to be titled Z is for Zero, but she died near the end of 2017 about four months after publication of Y is for Yesterday. One task she never would have attempted, she told Peters in 2008, is finishing her father’s uncompleted third Gilmore Henry book. “I never understood how his mind worked. He was a very clever man. … I wish now I had understood his process. I just don’t know how he worked. Had I known that, I might in fact be able to go back and piece together his intention.”
In a short autobiographical sketch C.W. wrote and now contained in the Boston University archives, he wrote: “This life has not been particularly eventful or noteworthy.” He went on to write that he has had “a few minor distinctions if you can call them that” and listed the case he won before the Supreme Court and his four books, all out of print. “Not very much to show for seventy-one years.”
But he was wrong. Even out of print, C.W.’s books continued to find appreciative readers. One of them from England named Ralph Spurrier, wrote to C.W. in March 1980 to let him know that. C.W. wrote back: “It has been 30 years since my last book was published and I have had every reason to believe that all of them are completely forgotten. How thoughtful of you to give me such an uplift of spirits.”
C.W. suffered a stroke a few months later but recovered sufficiently to return to practicing law. He died in January 1982, at the age of 72, from a heart attack that felled him during a church service.
Decades later, Spurrier published his own mystery novel, A Coin for the Hangman. He’s now working on a sequel to his 2016 book and as a tip of the hat to C.W. has decided to call it The Butcher Began to Kill the Ox.
—Thanks are due to Jackson Ripley for digging into the Sue Grafton archives at Boston University.
