Y Is For Yesterday

Alphabet Soup

In 1982, Sue Grafton started her Kinsey Millhone Alphabet series, with A is for Alibi. She has gone through almost every alphabet in the English language, and with Y Is For Yesterday, she has written 25 bestselling novels starring the feisty private detective, with just Z Is For Zero to go.

Kinsey Millhone is one of the most popular characters in detective fiction, a single (with occasional, very brief romantic entanglements), independent, courageous, witty and totally kickass female, who through A to Y has solved crimes and fought felons up and down her stomping ground of Santa Teresa, California. She lives in a studio apartment, owned by the octogenarian Henry Pitts, who is also an expert chef, and her best buddy. His fun family of long-living Pitts is like Kinsey’s surrogate clan, and their watering hole of choice is Rosie’s bar and restaurant owned by a ferocious Hungarian woman, who often feeds them foul-sounding delicacies from her homeland, with Kinsey’s preferred drink of chilled chardonnay.

The series has remained in the 1980s, so no cell phones, computers just about making an appearance, phones are rotary, and notes typed on manual typewriters or handwritten on index cards. The most advanced gizmo of the age is the copier.  By 1989, when this one is set, VCRs have made an appearance.

Y Is For Yesterday starts with a prank that snowballs into a tragedy. A girl calls Iris steals a question paper to help her friends Troy and Poppy pass a tough test. An unsigned note to the principal gets them caught and suspended. The school bully Austin claims that their classmate Sloan snitched, and instigates a social boycott of the poor girl.

Austin is also the mastermind behind a porn tape in which his friends Fritz, Ted and Bayard sexually assault a drunk Iris. Sloan steals the tape so that she can force Austin to call off the ostracism. She ends up dead, with Fritz and Troy going to jail.  Bayard turns informer and is released, Austin vanishes without a trace.

When they are released, Fritz’s parents receive a copy of the revolting tape with a demand for money if they don’t want it to reach the police and send the boys right back in prison.  Which is when Fritz’s mother Lauren calls Kinsey to try and trace the blackmailer. They don’t intend to pay and open themselves up for more blackmail demands, but the flip side is their beloved son being arrested again if the tape reaches the police.

The novel moves between 1979, when the cheating, rape and murder occurred, and 1989, when Kinsey starts investigating.  She has problems of her own, when the psychopath Ned Lowe, who tried to kill her in the last book reappears, and starts stalking her.

Much to Kinsey’s annoyance, the genial Henry agrees to play host to a couple of homeless tramps and their dog.  There is a minor subplot involving Kinsey’s cousin Anna and her romantic shenanigans.

Kinsey is still her brave, likeable self, but the students who had caused the scandal, now grown up into not-very-nice adults, make her efforts to help them feel like a lost cause.  Since it is written in a flashback-flashforward style, in which the same incidents are seen from the points of view of the various characters, large sections of the book seem repetitious.

 Still, for fans who have been with Grafton right from the start, the ending of the series would be like losing a friend.

Y Is For Yesterday

By Sue Grafton

Publisher: Marion Woods/Putnam

Pages: 483