Five questions for Sue Grafton

Novelist Sue Grafton's latest in her "Alphabet Mysteries" series -- "S Is for Silence" (Putnam, $26.95, 374 pages) -- is atop the New York Times best-seller list for fiction. Grafton's protagonist, private investigator Kinsey Millhone, has been on a long roll since her introduction in "A Is for Alibi" in 1983. Here are excerpts from a recent interview.

Why are you adamant about never allowing a Kinsey Millhone novel to be made into a movie? Or a TV series. It's not bitterness, it's hostility -- a much cleaner emotion. I was happy and wide-eyed in Hollywood for a while. But after a while I realized I didn't like them tampering with my work.

I've heard you created the series during a six-year divorce and custody battle with your second husband, when you would fantasize about ways to murder him. Yes, and I came up with some lulus, including one that I knew would actually work. But I knew I'd get caught because I'm really very intimidated by authority. I have my devious side -- I can cook up these schemes -- but when it comes to acting out, I knew I would blow it. So I decided to just put it in a book and get paid for it.

The mystery-thriller genre keeps growing. Why? Because it's the one form in which the reader and the writer are pitted against each other. My job is to be a magician and perform sleight of hand. I give you all the information but divert your attention so I can pull a rabbit out of a hat.

Though you've said that Kinsey is you, only younger, smarter and thinner, there are also oceans of differences. She is my unlived life and my sassy inner nature. There are many things I observe in the world (about which) I have learned to keep my mouth shut. But in Kinsey, I have the perfect channel for my dark side. She is defiant of authority, she is willing to break and enter, she lies at the drop of a hat and is very proud of it. Now, I too have some reputation for lying. I write fiction, after all. But really, I think of our (relationship) as one soul in two bodies -- and she got the good one.

In real time, Kinsey would be 55 years old. She's 37 (in fiction time). When I finish the series with "Z Is for Zero," it will be the narrative year 1990 and she will turn 40. Then it will be "Over and out, folks."