In the lobby of the Adolphus Hotel in Dallas, a woman is shrieking.
She isn't distraught, just animated."Aaaaaaahh! A-B-C-D-E-F-G! I can't believe it! I can't believe I'm meeting you!"
The object of this adoration is writer Sue Grafton, on tour with "K" (" `K' Is for Killer"), her latest in a series of murder mysteries.
The jubilant fan is Dori Sanders, author of the novel "Her Own Place," who is also on a book tour.
The day before, adventure novelist Clive Cussler got in line at the Mystery Book Store to ask Grafton to sign "K." He was in town on tour to promote his "Inca Gold."
"People ask me," Grafton says, "if I always intended to do this. The answer is yes and no: I of course intended to base titles on the alphabet. . . . I never, never imagined it would be this successful. Never occurred to me. And I still am very baffled and bemused."
The idea of a mystery series began, she says, with her father.
C.W. Grafton was a municipal bond lawyer whose passion was writing mysteries. Two of the novels he published in the 1940s were part of a series "based on an English nursery rhyme about an old lady trying to get a pig over a stile," she explains.
"His two books were `The Rat Began to Gnaw the Rope' and `The Rope Began to Hang the Butcher.' I have part of a third manuscript called `The Butcher Began to Kill the Ox.' "
"So I lived with that at the back of my mind, the notion of mystery novels, the notion of some way to link titles. Certainly I knew about John D. MacDonald (colors) and Harry Kemelman (days) and other writers who have come up with ways to connect titles."
Grafton found her inspiration in an Edward Gorey cartoon book, "The Gashlycrumb Tinies." "I looked at this series of cartoons, which are based on the alphabet - B is for Basil, eaten by bears; K is for Kate, killed with an ax - and I thought to myself, `Why couldn't you do a series of crime novels based on the alphabet?'
"So the first thing I needed to do was to sit down and mentally go through crime words to see if you could do it. There was no point in doing `A' Is for Alibi,' `B' Is for Burglar' if by `G' and `H,' you ran out of ways to conjure up titles."
Grafton's success seems even simpler than ABC: "A" is for alphabet, "B" is for best sellers. The end.
It wasn't that easy, of course. But almost.
Her series began in 1982 and is almost halfway to "Z." " `K' Is for Killer" was published in April and mimicked "G," "H," "I" and "J" by leaping to the best-seller list in its first week.
Sales were good for the early titles but nowhere near best-seller pace. Then she went to a motivational seminar at a community college.
"The director asked us to decide what we really wanted in life and then to start thinkin' about how to get it," she says in her characteristic sittin'-around-chattin' style. Her delicate, pale oval face looks small under a fan of well-salted dark hair.
"It's just as simple as that. What I came up with was, I wanted to be on the best-seller list."
A publicist mapped a campaign, Grafton followed it, and by the time " `G' Is for Gumshoe" hit bookstore shelves, she'd made her own wish come true.
Before that "big break," though, she had established a track record with movie and TV scripts and other books. Sales of the alphabet series had steadily increased: 7,500 copies of "A" in hardback; 8,500 for "B"; 10,500; 12,500; 24,000. She did a 27-city tour to promote " `F' Is for Fugitive." "F" sold 74,000 and "G" 185,000.
The press run for "K" was 600,000 and it entered the best-seller list at No. 2.
Making a book a best seller can't be done by formula, however, says Lottchen Shivers, the publicist at Henry Holt who helped build Grafton's sales. Marketing must be combined with energy and personality.
"It is totally routine," she says, "to decide to pick authors like Sue out of the pack and say, `I want to send you on a multicity tour instead of a five-city tour.' It's based on the print run of the book or the personality of the author. It is, though, incredibly unusual to send someone out on a 27-city tour, as Sue did for `F'; it's unheard-of for Henry Holt.
"We took advantage of Sue's personality. She's so personable, she's unique, that we knew wherever we took her, she would make an impression, do her job."
You could say "C" is for character: Grafton's deft writing and taut suspense help, but it's Kinsey Millhone who keeps readers hopscotching through the series. A self-reliant, mouthy, thoroughly human private eye. Nancy Drew with attitude.
Make no mistake: "I am Kinsey," Sue Grafton says.
"I am certainly very like Kinsey in our no-nonsense, down-to-earth attitude. Also our smutty mouths. I cuss just as much as she does, if not more. I tone down her language for the reading public as a courtesy."
Grafton is married to her third husband, Steven F. Humphrey, a philosophy professor and collaborator on some of her scripts. She has a sister who's a librarian and three children from her earlier marriages. Kinsey has had several marriages and is an orphan.
"Her nature," says Grafton, 54, "is simply a projection of my nature, with certain differences in our biographical histories. I felt she needed to be 32 because that seemed to me a believable age for a woman who's single, physically fit, chasin' and bein' chased by the bad guys.
"I've decided she will age one year for every two and a half books, so that when we get to `Z' Is for Zero, she will turn 40."
The name Kinsey she got from a birth announcement in the Hollywood Reporter. Some aspects of Kinsey Millhone's life are "real," some fictional. Grafton says she owns two of Kinsey's handguns. Henry the landlord is invented. The little black dress is real - the one Kinsey keeps wadded up in a box in her VW bug.
Details, such as the dress, Grafton believes, are what tell her stories.
"I think the lazy writers try to editorialize. They try to tell you what you're supposed to be thinking or feeling.
"I don't have to tell you adjectives," she says. "I don't have to say forlorn, abandoned, or anything else. If I give you the information, you can attach to it what you will. And maybe that's one of the reasons my readers get so involved. I give them some room to participate."
Do women readers fantasize about being as unfettered and unhelpless as Kinsey?
"I suspect many women are, in fact, as independent as she is," Grafton says. But also, "I think Kinsey has a sort of interior freedom that people might envy. I sometimes envy it."
At times Kinsey is even her creator's role model. "I find in my own life that something will come up and I will be feeling especially put-upon, and I think to myself, `Would Kinsey Millhone put up with this?' And this answer comes back, `Well, no ma'am.' "
Grafton says Kinsey is braver than she but not reckless. "I don't like the movies and the books in which the woman hears a sound at night and goes out with a little candle in her nightie into the howling abyss."
Like Kinsey, Sue Grafton runs almost daily. She rises at 5:30 and gets into her pickup truck to go meet a longtime friend, Florence, 62. They do a three-mile stretch on the running path along the beach in Santa Barbara, Calif., where she lives.
At breakfast, she says, "I read the Metro section of the L.A. Times, which is where all the murders are, just to see if anybody's thunk up some new way to do it."
She writes on a word processor with WordPerfect, working from 9 till 11:30, stopping for lunch with her husband and working again till 3:30 or 4. Then she does more exercise - swimming, walking or bicycling. "Usually by 7:30 or 8, I'm in my jammies in bed reading a book, which is my favorite time of day," she notes.
"In general my life is very quiet, and I do a lot of research, so Miss Kinsey Millhone takes me on many a merry chase. Because of her, I talk to police officers, attorneys, and I go into jails and I talk to the coroner, and I do a lot of book research, too. I'm forever calling up some total stranger, trying to sweet-talk 'em into telling me all their secrets."
Although the books have been coming out regularly each spring, Grafton says she may not be able to continue that pace. She's told her publisher, Henry Holt, that she needs time to craft her books, not simply meet a deadline, and she's already gotten a bit behind with "K."
"I thought that `K' was for Kidnap. And I worked on that premise for four months, could not make the story jell. Threw it in the toilet and started again. So instead of delivering a manuscript the first week in September, I turned it in the first week in December."
She refuses to make long-term deals and only recently signed her contract for "M" and "N." She won't say how much money is in it; she will say that she'll never sell Kinsey to Hollywood.
"They would botch it. You would hate it. And then you'd be sitting here saying to me, `How did you feel about the movie?' and I'd be throwing up in the other room."
Grafton believes she has a covenant with her readers. She doesn't fully understand why they're so attached, she says, but "I know they are engaged in a love affair with Kinsey Millhone, and that's wonderful for me and for them.
"I don't sit and try to think of wonderful things that Kinsey could do or be, I just let her be as sassy and flawed and independent as she will. And if people rejoice in that, then aren't I lucky?"