A Race to Z?

In the contest to write a woman-detective mystery for each letter of the alphabet (A to Z), it is pretty much a dead heat between Mary Daheim and Sue Grafton. Both women will publish a “U” entry (the 21st letter of the alphabet) this year: Daheim’s The Alpine Uproar is due out at mid-year, while Grafton’s U Is for Undertow is scheduled for December.

Daheim’s series is set in the fictional mountain town of Alpine, Washington, where Emma Lord owns and publishes the Alpine Advocate (the town’s weekly newspaper). In her spare time she and busybody sidekick Vida Runkel stick their noses into a seemingly endless and statistically off-the-charts number of local murders for such a sparsely populated region. Emma is a good friend and former lover of the plodding sheriff, Milo Dodge, who doesn’t seem to mind that she does his job for him in just about every book.

Grafton’s character, P.I. Kinsey Millhone, works solo, operating mainly as an insurance investigator out of fictional Santa Teresa, California. Of course, a number of her cases progress to involving dead people, and those are the ones that are respectfully submitted for our reading pleasure. One of Kinsey’s lovable quirks is that she is forever stuck in the 1980’s when the series started and will never own a cell phone, do a background check on the Internet, or worry about global warming.

So who is going to win? In the age department, Grafton will be 69 this month while Daheim was born in 1937, so no apparent edge either way there. Daheim hasn’t been at it as long as Grafton, who started her alphabet series in 1982, 10 years earlier than Daheim. Because Grafton is no longer on the book-a-year pace she maintained from 1985 to 1996, the smart money is on Daheim to finish first. Not only is she averaging more alphabet mysteries per year than Grafton (1.17 vs. .75), Daheim is a more prolific writer overall. Since 1991 she has also cranked out 24 books in her bed-and-breakfast mystery series. If you ask both women whether there is a “race,” no doubt they would deny it, stating that the goal is to write a quality mystery for each letter of the alphabet, no matter how long it takes.

Meanwhile the Mud Bay blog is wondering what they are going to do when they get to “X.”

Titles so far. Daheim’s books are listed first, followed by Grafton’s:

The Alpine Advocate 1992
The Alpine Betrayal 1993
The Alpine Christmas 1993
The Alpine Decoy 1994
The Alpine Escape 1995
The Alpine Fury 1995
The Alpine Gamble 1996
The Alpine Hero 1996
The Alpine Icon 1997
The Alpine Journey 1998
The Alpine Kindred 1999
The Alpine Legacy 1999
The Alpine Menace 2000
The Alpine Nemesis 2001
The Alpine Obituary 2002
The Alpine Pursuit 2004
The Alpine Quilt 2005
The Alpine Recluse 2006
The Alpine Scandal 2007
The Alpine Traitor 2008
The Apline Uproar 2009

A Is for Alibi 1982
B Is for Burglar 1985
C Is for Corpse 1986
D Is for Deadbeat 1987
E Is for Evidence 1988
F Is for Fugitive 1989
G Is for Gumshoe 1990
H Is for Homicide 1991
I Is for Innocent 1992
J Is for Judgment 1993
K Is for Killer 1994
L Is for Lawless 1995
M Is for Malice 1996
N Is for Noose 1998
O is for Outlaw 1999
P Is for Peril 2001
Q Is for Quarry 2002
R Is for Ricochet 2004
S Is for Silence 2005
T Is for Trespass 2007
U Is for Undertow 2009