Story Skeleton—A Is for Alibi

Story structure relates to the psychological appeal of narrative, that which engages readers and builds in them a sense of anticipation—a desire to know what happens next. Our ongoing exploration now delves into mysteries, illustrating yet again the universality of story structure, albeit from a different angle.

 

By Michelle Barker

Beyond the Sexy Lampshade

Published in 1982, Sue Grafton’s A Is for Alibi is the first in her alphabet mystery series and involves a woman who is alleged to have murdered her philandering husband. Apparently, it was inspired by Grafton’s own nasty divorce during which she might have considered murdering her ex more than once. 

Grafton’s novels broke the noir mold with the introduction of a female private investigator, Kinsey Millhone. This was a key moment for female characters in the noir genre. Up to that point, they were either cast as a femme fatale, a sexy lampshade, or a murder victim. Finally, Grafton gives one a starring role. The core elements of noir remain: an uneasy relationship with the police, the PI’s fierce commitment to her clients, and having her professional code challenged by personal (romantic) involvement. Kinsey won’t take a case unless she believes in it. And once she does, she’ll pursue it to the bitter end, regardless of the cost to her. 

Grafton gives us the hard-boiled voice of the typical noir detective, a little softened as a woman but not much, and she uses the strong first-person narrative voice typical of noir. An ex-cop who was orphaned at age five, Kinsey is thirty-two and has been divorced twice. She has no kids, lives in a tiny apartment in Santa Teresa and isn’t interested in settling down with a man anytime soon. She speaks her mind, challenges people who lie to her, and has a soft spot for underdogs. 

But the novel doesn’t follow the usual noir adventure structure. What we get here is a mashup of noir voice and ethics with a more traditional mystery structure—with misdirects, red herrings, and a list of suspects that doesn’t spiral out of control. Once Kinsey has that list, she follows the trail with a tight focus. We don’t have the constraints of a closed-room or locked-door mystery, but we also don’t have the cascade of escalations typical of noir that draw the reader away from the initial mystery and into an ever-worsening (mis)adventure. In A Is for Alibi, the suspects are each developed as characters in their own right, and they each have secrets and flaws—as does Kinsey. This is what makes her more noir than Holmes or Poirot. In a traditional mystery, the detective doesn’t get an arc, but Grafton gives one to Kinsey. She screws up big time in this case—breaks her code—and it nearly costs her the case, and her life. 

So, with A Is for Alibi Grafton straddles the two mystery worlds—noir and classic—to create something unique.

Plot Points

The Detective’s Code

Often, a mystery novel will start either with the crime or with a demonstration of the detective’s methods before the crime occurs. This is not what Grafton does. The novel starts at the resolution. Kinsey has killed someone and is trying to sort through her feelings about it. It is quickly evident that this is not the crime the novel will focus on. In fact, it’s the resolution of the case she’d taken three weeks previously—but we don’t know yet who she killed, and we don’t know how or why. 

This murder at the end also forms the resolution of Kinsey’s character arc because she kills (spoiler alert) the man she was romantically involved with—who also happens to be the key culprit: Charlie Scorsoni. This is the culmination of some terrible decisions on Kinsey’s part but it makes her both flawed and human. 

But I’m getting ahead of myself. 

The inciting incident occurs right away with the arrival in Kinsey’s office of Nikki Fife—fresh out of prison after eight years for the murder of her husband. Laurence, a divorce attorney, was well known both for his successful practice and his many extramarital affairs. 

Nikki wants to hire Kinsey to find out who really did it. Except everyone, including the police, is convinced she was guilty. She had a motive—and she had the opportunity. Kinsey doesn’t immediately accept the case. She won’t take on a case unless she thinks it’s worthwhile, and in order to decide that, she has to see the case file first. 

While we find out early on that Kinsey is quite happily single, her code doesn’t really emerge (and get tested) until she meets Charlie Scorsoni and is immediately attracted to him. In her view, everyone is a possible suspect, and you don’t get romantically involved with a suspect because it clouds your judgment. 

This kind of romantic entanglement with the wrong people is something we have seen in both The Big Sleep and The Maltese Falcon. Philip Marlowe is repeatedly tested by damsels in distress, and Sam Spade gets mixed up with the femme fatale but must double-cross her in the end to get justice for his partner. Grafton gives us a nice reversal of roles here. The woman is the detective, and the fatal temptation is a man. 

The Initial Puzzle

Laurence Fife was thirty-nine when he died—a defense attorney with a lot of enemies. On the night he was murdered, he was having drinks with his law partner, Charlie Scorsoni. He came home, took his allergy medication as usual, and went to bed. Two hours later he was sick. By the next morning, he was dead—poisoned by oleander, which had been placed in his allergy medicine capsule instead of antihistamine. 

When the police found Nikki’s diary detailing her husband’s affairs, along with her desire to seek a divorce, they had no trouble establishing her guilt. Laurence had already been divorced once and it had gone badly for his first ex-wife. On balance, murder by oleander seemed like a better option for Nikki than facing him in court. 

Case Accepted

Kinsey goes to see her old boss, Lieutenant Con Dolan in Homicide, and discovers a similar case that happened four days after Fife’s murder. A young accountant named Libby Glass who handled the business of Fife and Scorsoni in LA also died by taking ground oleander disguised as medication. Suddenly, the game has changed. Another unsolved murder means the stakes have gone up. This is no longer just about exonerating Nikki. In fact, Con Dolan is sure that Nikki also killed Libby Glass, but the police were never able to prove it. He’d be quite happy for Kinsey to do that job for him. 

This is the point of no return for Kinsey—the moment she decides to accept the challenge.

What are the chances the two cases aren’t related? Libby’s ex-boyfriend claimed she was romantically involved with an attorney in Santa Teresa. It must have been Laurence Fife. But here is where Grafton creates a nice misdirect. Just because the two cases might be related doesn’t mean the same person committed both murders. But it’s a natural assumption to make—and Kinsey makes it, which means we do, too. 

The trick with these murders is that because the poison was placed in medication that the victims took regularly, the murderer wouldn’t even know when their victim had taken the poisoned pill. No need to worry about an alibi—it’s built into the modus operandi. 

The thing is, Kinsey doesn’t think Nikki killed Libby Glass or Laurence Fife. It makes no sense. Why would she hire Kinsey to dig up more dirt, especially after having already served her time? Even more so if it means risking being charged for a second murder. 

The trail is eight years cold. This won’t be easy, but Kinsey takes the case—not because she thinks she can solve it, but because there’s justice involved. It’s more than likely justice was not served, and Nikki paid a price she shouldn’t have—and that doesn’t sit well with Kinsey. 

When she meets up with Nikki, it’s clear Nikki knows nothing about Libby Glass. She knew Laurence was having an affair with someone, but Laurence was cautious, so Nikki didn’t know who it was and can’t say for sure that it was Libby. 

Gathering Evidence

As soon as Kinsey starts digging into the past (the plot’s rising action), several suspects float to the surface: 

Sharon Napier: Laurence’s former secretary who couldn’t type to save her life and was the only one who freely talked back to him. There’s some weird history between her and Laurence, but it doesn’t seem sexual, and Napier has since disappeared. Turns out Laurence was involved with Napier’s mother and the affair ruined her parents’ marriage and her mother’s mental health, so Sharon blackmailed him into giving her a job and basically got paid for doing nothing. If she’s capable of blackmail, she might also be capable of murder. 

Charlie Scorsoni: Laurence’s legal partner and best friend. Single, conservative, middle-aged—and hot as hell. He lies at first about not knowing Libby Glass, claiming he was covering for Laurence because Laurence was in a relationship with her. But if he lied once, who knows how many more lies he might tell? 

Gwen, the first ex-wife: a dog-groomer who got screwed in her divorce from Laurence, including losing custody of their two children (both now grown). Bitter, according to Charlie, though when Kinsey meets her, she’s pleasant and helpful. This becomes a misdirect. Pleasant and helpful means how could she have committed murder? 

Charlotte Mercer: one of Laurence’s ex-mistresses in an affair that ended badly. “She’d have run him down in the street given half a chance,” according to Gwen. She’s wealthy, an alcoholic, and was never considered as a suspect because she’s the wife of a judge. Maybe she flew under the radar for Laurence’s murder. 

Lyle Abernathy: Libby Glass’s ex-boyfriend who comes by daily to help Mrs. Glass with her ailing husband who was in a car accident. Lyle dated Libby for ten years before she broke up with him and is clearly bitter about having been dumped. Though he’s now a bricklayer, he’d had plans to go to law school. Lyle definitely gives off sketchy vibes and seems like the obvious culprit. Maybe too obvious—but Mrs. Glass adores him. 

Kinsey juggles all the balls at once, following various leads as new information comes to light. Sharon Napier owes money to a lot of people and is not easy to find. Kinsey first goes to LA to speak to Libby Glass’s parents. There she meets Lyle who seems to have a good heart in caring for Mr. Glass, but his attitude changes the moment he hears Kinsey is a PI. He seems off enough that she follows him back to his job site and confronts him about his relationship with Libby. 

“She dumped me after she met that guy from up north. That attorney…” 

            “Laurence Fife?” 

            “Yeah, I guess it was. She wouldn’t tell me anything about him.” 

This assumption about the attorney from up north being Laurence Fife is a key red herring. Fife is the one everyone talks about as being a philanderer. Everyone jumps to the conclusion that if Libby was involved with someone in that law firm, it must be him.

Midpoint: Another Murder

Kinsey manages to track down Sharon Napier in Vegas, where she works as a casino dealer. When Kinsey speaks to her on her break, she seems cagey. Sharon doesn’t hesitate to express her hatred of Laurence Fife. But then someone shows up in the restaurant and Sharon cuts the conversation short, claiming it’s the pit boss. Kinsey doesn’t get a look at the person. She arranges to meet Sharon at her apartment that evening but starts to feel unwell and takes a nap. 

She sleeps through her meeting and is woken by Sharon’s call. While they’re talking, someone comes to Sharon’s door. There’s a sound of surprise, a gunshot, and then a man’s voice comes on the phone. Kinsey hangs up and rushes to Sharon’s apartment but, no surprise, she’s dead. Two things become evident: Sharon knew something important that she was killed for; and had Kinsey gone to that meeting, she might be dead too. 

This is the story’s midpoint. The investigation has now taken an important turn. It seems Nikki might be innocent after all. There is clearly more going on, and whatever it is, someone is willing to kill to keep it from getting out.

More Rising Action

Kinsey visits Laurence and Gwen’s adult children and finds out Laurence and Nikki took a family trip six weeks before he was killed, during which their German shepherd, which was left at home, was somehow run over by a car. The daughter confesses she’d left the dog out by accident and believes that was how whoever poisoned Laurence had gained entry to the house. 

While Kinsey is on the road, Charlie, who’s been flirting with her from the beginning, leaves her several messages: one from Denver, another from Tucson, and a third from Santa Teresa. Kinsey pays a visit to Garry Steinberg, an accountant who worked with Libby Glass and who did not believe she was having an affair with Laurence Fife. He’d also met Lyle who had applied for a messenger job at the accounting firm, and he promises to dig up his job application as well as take a closer look at the old Fife accounting files for Kinsey. 

Then it’s back to the Glass’s house to have a look at Libby’s old boxes of personal items. But as soon as Kinsey and Mrs. Glass go down to the storage bin, someone smashes the lightbulb and takes off, after having ransacked the boxes. Kinsey salvages what’s left and finds, among the papers, a love letter supposedly written by Laurence to Libby. It feels too neat and tidy. But when she shows the letter to Nikki, Nikki confirms it’s Laurence’s handwriting. 

When she finally gets home, Charlie is waiting for her and insists on taking her out to dinner. Naturally, they end up sleeping together. Afterwards, as she puts it, “I felt comforted and safe, as though nothing could ever harm me as long as I stayed in the shadow of this man…” This is another key turning point in the novel. Charlie now has her where he wants her: emotionally compromised and trusting—which is ironic, considering that all the disasters she has just encountered were engineered by him. He murdered Sharon, ransacked the boxes, and planted that love letter which he’d originally stolen from the legal files of Fife’s divorce. 

Garry Steinberg calls back. Apparently, Lyle worked as an apprentice to a locksmith, which means he knows how to get into houses and could easily have gotten into the Fifes’. And cash started going missing on the jobs he worked—which means he’s dishonest. While the real culprit is in Kinsey’s bed, the red herring—Lyle—is emerging as the likely murderer. 

Kinsey sees Charlie again, but when she tries to question him about Sharon Napier, he gets angry at the “third-degree” and accuses her of using him. Kinsey’s instinct for self-preservation kicks in—along with her refusal to take any shit from men—and she storms out.

Charlie shows up at her apartment to apologize, and they end up back in bed. The next morning Kinsey finally has some sober second thought. She’s breaking her code about getting personally involved with anyone connected with a case. What she’s doing with Charlie is unprofessional at best and dangerous at worst. She starts to question if the sex is clouding her judgment or if she just wants to consider Charlie a suspect because she’s afraid of intimacy. In the end, the code wins out. She breaks off the relationship at least until the case is closed—and Charlie gets pissy about it (of course he does; this foils his plan). 

Homicide calls to confirm Laurence Fife’s letter is real, but it still doesn’t feel right to Kinsey—and her instinct proves correct. Sharon Napier’s mother’s name is Elizabeth. The letter was written by Laurence, but not to Libby Glass. To Elizabeth Napier. So how did it end up in Libby’s things? 

Nabbing the Culprits

Murderer #1: Gwen

An offhand comment from Nikki’s son Colin about a photograph of Gwen being the Fife kids’ grandmother makes Kinsey suspicious, but she sets it aside. But when she meets with Gwen and asks when she’d last seen Colin, Gwen lies. Something is off. Further questioning of Colin reveals the more likely truth: Laurence took up again with Gwen while Nikki was out of town. Gwen has grey hair, and Colin would have only been three at the time, so it makes sense that he would have seen her as a grandmother. 

Following her intuition, Kinsey meets with Gwen and accuses her of Laurence’s murder—and Gwen folds. She hated Laurence. He used her guilt about the affair she had (never mind the scores of affairs he’d had) to screw her in the divorce. Not just with money, but also by denying her custody of the children. This last affair was a sort of revenge. 

Gwen used her daughter’s keys to get into the house the weekend the family was away and doctored up one allergy pill. But she denies killing the dog and claims to know nothing about the deaths of Sharon Napier and Libby Glass. 

This should be the moment when everything falls into place and all the answers come clear. But they don’t. Gwen’s murder of Laurence makes sense, but the other two? Things don’t become clear until Kinsey sorts out an important misdirect: maybe there’s more than one murderer. Someone who heard about Laurence’s murder and piggy-backed on it, using the same M.O. to kill Libby Glass and making it seem like one person was responsible for both. This is the turning point that moves us toward the climax. 

The next morning Kinsey hears Gwen has been killed in a hit-and-run accident that might not have been an accident. She immediately confronts Lyle—and he breaks down. Not because he killed Libby—or at least, not on purpose. They’d had a fight, and he gave her a tranquilizer not knowing it had been replaced with oleander. When he came back and found her dead, he panicked, thinking he’d be accused of the murder. He wiped away his fingerprints and disposed of the pills. But he did not break into the storage bin. 

Kinsey returns to Santa Teresa with a pretty good idea now of whodunnit. She goes back to see Garry Steinberg and asks if it’s possible someone (i.e. Charlie) was embezzling money from Fife’s accounts. Possible, yes, and not easy to trace—but Libby Glass was particularly good at catching such things. Is there a chance she figured it out and Charlie started an affair with her in the hopes of getting her to look the other way? Absolutely. Especially seeing as how he’s doing that to Kinsey RIGHT NOW. 

Murderer #2: Charlie Scorsoni and the Romance Beats

Charlie insinuates himself with Kinsey right from the start of the case and manipulates her emotionally to keep her from suspecting him. He hides in plain sight, with Grafton throwing us off the trail repeatedly. Nikki says Charlie is “unlikely” as the culprit, and Gwen corroborates this. At first glance, he doesn’t seem to have benefitted from the murder financially or professionally, so right away, he’s off our radar. This is our first misdirect, and it works nicely because it’s the two people closest to Laurence who are responsible for giving us (and Kinsey) this information. 

But it’s Kinsey who makes all the big mistakes here. She breaks her own code and doesn’t suspect Charlie as much as she should. And he’s smart. After she interviews him briefly (during which he lies about not having known Libby Glass), he sets to courting her right away, pulling up in his Mercedes at the end of her run and going back to her place to have a drink. 

“I thought I’d be especially winsome so you wouldn’t put me on your ‘possibly guilty’ list,” he says. Cute. If he’d been a woman in The Big Sleep, he’d be batting his eyelashes. 

Kinsey claims she’s suspicious of everyone, but she lets down her guard around Charlie because he’s charming. She talks a big talk about “no connections, no commitments” with guys, but Charlie wins her over quickly and she ignores all the warning bells that ring in her head. 

They don’t sleep together right away, but a friendship develops. In other words: trust. And there’s no doubt about the chemistry smoldering beneath the surface. Charlie knows how to turn it on. Even Kinsey comments that she can see it happen, almost like a switch—which should be an indication that he’s manipulating her, but… she’s human, and he’s hot, so she dismisses her instinct. 

When Charlie says he’s going to Denver, Kinsey assumes he stays there. When he calls repeatedly from various locations, she believes him. 

“I can’t give you information,” she says to him, then tells him she’s going to Vegas to talk to Sharon, and then back to LA to go through Libby Glass’s personal boxes. Kinsey makes it easy for him to follow her to Vegas (he can just call her answering service and find out where she is). Turns out he’s been looking for Sharon for some time. He hops on a plane, follows Kinsey, and she leads him right to Sharon. 

Sharon must have known Charlie had been involved with Libby Glass. She’d kept her mouth shut during the trial, but she knew she could blackmail him with this kind of information and there were calls on her phone bill to his number. 

From Vegas, he goes to LA just ahead of Kinsey and breaks into Libby’s boxes before Kinsey gets to them. 

The other misdirect comes from the assumption everyone makes that if Libby Glass was romantically involved with an attorney from Santa Teresa, it must have been Laurence Fife. He’s the one who’s having all the affairs. Lyle, who knows Libby best, assumes that’s who it is—which leads us to assume it as well. The letter Kinsey finds in one of Libby’s boxes seems to corroborate this. 

Charlie is all about manipulation. After Kinsey returns from Vegas and deals with the ransacked boxes, he takes her out for dinner and sleeps with her to lower her defenses and win her trust—just the way he’d hoped to do with Libby Glass. But Libby refused to cover for him, so he had to silence her. Which he did, by doctoring up her tranquilizers. 

When Kinsey questions Charlie, he immediately gets upset and speaks about their “relationship.” He has set this up with the expectation that she will treat him differently, i.e., not like a suspect. This is finally when she realizes she has broken her code and must take a step back. 

As soon as Kinsey discovers Charlie stole the letter Laurence had written to Elizabeth Napier out of the divorce file, the pieces fall into place. It was Charlie who broke into the storage bin and planted the letter in Libby’s boxes for Kinsey to find. 

Only one piece remains: proof that Charlie was the one to run over Gwen with his car. Well—not his car. Turns out he used his partner’s. Kinsey finds the car with telltale dents—and then Charlie finds her. In the climax, there’s a chase, and then Kinsey hides, gun at the ready. And still, Charlie is almost able to sweet-talk her out of her hiding spot—until she sees the butcher knife in his hand. She kills him, thus answering the question posed by the opening page. 

We get only a short epilogue to let us know Kinsey was not charged in Charlie’s murder but that it will haunt her for the rest of her life. She screwed up, and she knows it.

Relationships

The external plot of this novel—and the primary focus—is about solving the murders, but the novel also explores the nature of relationships and emotional manipulation. Everyone seems capable of deception in this book. By the time we find out Gwen is the one who offed Laurence, the reader is almost ready to hand her the oleander and say, you go, girl. To say he had it coming is an understatement. If Gwen hadn’t done it, there was a lineup of people who were willing to step in and give it a shot. 

Nearly every character lies, including Kinsey. There are affairs and counter affairs, guilt, and revenge—and it all comes down to power. This gives the novel a decidedly noir flavor. No one can be trusted. Kinsey makes the fatal mistake of believing in someone’s innocence—believing they’re genuine and that they aren’t in fact using her romantically to protect themselves. Indeed, Grafton opens the novel with Charlie’s death for this reason.  

Nikki was taken advantage of by her cheating husband and paid the price for another person’s crime. Meanwhile, not trusting men seems to be the lesson that twice divorced and avowedly single Kinsey has learned—sort of. She’s as easily duped as anyone—in other words, she’s human. 

There is really only one happy relationship in this book: Kinsey’s college friend Nell, who is married with two children, three cats and a hot tub. She gets about a paragraph of attention when Kinsey visits her and wonders if she could ever have a life like that. On balance, it seems emotionally safer for her to be alone—but the reader senses this might be a copout. Kinsey’s willingness to let down her defenses for Charlie seems to indicate that she wants connection more than she admits.

How to Write this Kind of Mystery

Grafton gives the reader a detective who transforms—a gutsy move considering she plans to write twenty-six of these novels. It sets the bar high, but it also makes Kinsey relatable. This creates a closeness between the reader and Kinsey which makes us more inclined to turn to Book Two. If we’re attached to her, it means we’ll be invested in what happens to her over time. 

Kinsey is a flawed character, which also endears her to the reader. She makes mistakes that anyone might make. So: humanizing the detective—making them smart but flawed and committed at all costs—is the first order of business. 

Writing a mystery is like performing a series of magic tricks. It’s sleight of hand. Get the reader to look over here, while the real place they should be looking goes unnoticed. Give them some likely suspects. Let characters comment on each other in ways that are either distracting or misleading. Let the detective be fooled as well. We trust Kinsey, so if she acts like she doesn’t suspect someone, we won’t either. 

Allow for assumptions to be made—assumptions that turn out to be wrong. In A Is for Alibi, several assumptions cause trouble: that there is only one murderer; that Laurence Fife was the one having an affair with Libby Glass; that the letter addressed to “Elizabeth” was meant for Libby; and that hot Charlie Scorsoni could not possibly be the murderer. 

Finally, play fair. Don’t withhold information from the reader as a way of tricking them. If they feel tricked, they won’t thank you for it. The key details can (and should) be small and initially ignored by the detective, but they should all be there for anyone to find—if they’re paying attention.

In Conclusion

The first print run for A Is for Alibi was a mere 7,500. By the time Grafton got to G, her books were so popular she was selling hundreds of thousands of them. Sadly, she died of cancer before she could reach the end. Z remains unwritten. The books have been published in twenty-eight countries, translated into twenty-six languages, and have received numerous awards.