{short description of image}

Q IS FOR QUARRY

Sue Grafton

Macmillan £12.99hbk

Reviewed by Peter Guttridge
In this, the latest of Sue Grafton's "alphabet mysteries", the single most important page could well be the last one. It shows four black-and-white photos of the head of an unknown young woman, "Jane Doe", reconstructed in 2001 by a forensic artist from the remains of a body found in 1969 in a quarry in Lompoc, California, where it had been dumped.
The cost of the exhumation and reconstruction was borne by Grafton herself, for the sake of these four photos, rather as in the USA pictures of missing children are circulated on the sides of milk cartons: in the hope that somewhere, someone may see and remember something. Q is for Quarry is in every sense a novel attempt to reopen that unsolved case. It's the first time, for one thing, that Grafton has borrowed an actual murder, though wisely she makes no pretence that her book itself is any kind of reconstruction. It's the 17th adventure of Kinsey Millhone, PI, and very much business as usual. There are papers to be sifted, cars to be tailed, door after door to be knocked on and just occasionally, when there's no answer, to have its lock picked. Off duty, the detective continues to pursue her unloved three-mile runs; to salivate over junk food; to bemoan the fastidious neatness of her apartment and the slobbish scruffiness of her car.
Narrating, she tells us once again about her single, indestructible, all-purpose black dress; about Rosie, the autocratic Hungarian whose tavern she frequents; and about the index cards on which she writes her case notes, and which she shuffles and deals like so many hands of patience.
At first, presumably, the repetitions were a service to new readers, so many lengths of background information helping to support each volume taken in isolation. By now, however, they've become part of the pleasure, part of the reaffirmation that helps restore, each time, a milieu that's constantly receding. In Kinsey's world, it's still April 1988. She types her reports on a Smith-Corona portable. There are no laptops or modems, and if she needs to call someone on the road, she has to look for a pay phone. Not that Grafton's fiction is in any way historical. Apart from one stray mention of "Princess Di", period details are firmly suppressed. The paperback novel Kinsey keeps picking up and putting down never gains a title or author, and even a portrait of "the president of the United States" remains anonymous. The effect of this vacuum of larger cultural or political context is to highlight the local, the individual. Time is personal, seasonal, generational: a matter of architecture, photograph albums and family trees. On the way to the quarry Kinsey has to travel the road where, when she was five, a rock fell on the family car, killing her parents and imprisoning her.
That story is another one she tells in every book. More and more it seems the key to her character. Unlike Matt Scudder, say, or Dave Robicheaux, Kinsey Millhone doesn't change. Traumatised by her loss, she hates change as much as she mistrusts intimacy. Members of the family she never knew she had, relations of the matriarch who disowned her mother, keep popping up to pester her. These sections are the weakest of the book, slices of soap whose flimsy characters talk about the themes they represent. Between Aunt Susanna or Cousin Tasha and even the most incidental character - a wary school secretary, say, or a man bathing a dog - there is a very palpable inconsistency, quite as if the author dislikes these visits as much as her heroine does, and barely knows what to do with them.
Much more interesting are Kinsey's employers on this case: Con Dolan, her grouchy, grizzled cop buddy, currently on medical leave, and Stacey Oliphant, his retired partner. The very names tell us that we are on the backroads of America. Arne Johanson, CK Vogel, Cloris Bargo, Charisse Quinn - we have met such folk before, in the novels of Annie Proulx or the travelogues of William Least Heat-Moon. "In a town this size, the word's already out." Small towns suit a Kinsey Millhone mystery. Everyone knows everyone else's business. Everything is low-key. The peanut-butter-and-pickle sandwiches, the procedure of filling a coffee-maker, the rubbish in an alcoholic's bedroom: one of the endless, patient catalogues of detail will contain the next clue. This is detection as archaeology. With attention and experience, and a high tolerance for solitude and tedium, eventually the world will - must - become readable. When the inevitable second body turns up, you realise, just as Kinsey does, with a jolt of nausea, that you've seen it already, more than once, and taken it for a piece of scenery.