Reprinted with permission from Destination Magazine

Queen of the "alphabet mysteries," novelist Sue Grafton takes us on a sunny afternoon tour of the Southern California town where she lives and where she brought heroine Kinsey Millhone to life.

When the Shoreline Beach Café's hot crab cakes and grilled-chicken burritos arrive at our table, lunchtime talk with mystery writer Sue Grafton turns to murder. Here in Santa Barbara, 95 miles north of Los Angeles, we're surrounded by crime scenes and familiar settings for Grafton's fictional star detective and alter ego, Kinsey Millhone.

The great swath of Highway 101 cuts through the majestic nighttime setting of Santa Barbara - The last city in California to remove traffic lights from the major highway and construct an overpass. Here the coast makes its east-west turn and won't be north-south again until Point Conception, almost 40 miles away.

And from behind a screen of magnolias, live oaks, slash pines, cabbage palms, cedars, sawtooth palmettos, wax myrtles, and the abundant Spanish moss, the wilderness calls. On the Atlantic front, along Main Beach, shore birds are cheeping with excitement and so is a pickup truckload of birders, thumbing their field guides, adjusting their binoculars: "Ooh! Look at that little guy. If it's a short-tail, it's a common." (The husband of one enthusiastic birder, himself a bit lukewarm, mutters dryly: "Watching the birders is more fun than watching the birds.")

On Rainbow Beach, an ethereal seascape of fine taupe sand and silver combers, a solitary guest searches for sand dollars. Deep in a forest, beside a dark pond, a hushed party of four watches as dozens of great and snowy egrets tend their nests in a willow-pond rookery. Nearby, a giant pile of oyster shells, called a midden, shows one fascinated couple just how well coastal Indians dined before the white man came.

The word "unspoiled" is much misused, but here it truly resonates. "What people say to me all the time is, 'Don't change a thing,'" says innkeeper McIntyre. "I think we're unique on the Eastern Seaboard. There's not much else like us. People enjoy the simplicity of it. They check in here tense and world-weary, and by the time they leave I have to push them out the door."

"Just over there, practically outside that door," Grafton nods toward Leadbetter Beach and responds to a question. So that's where Kinsey popped up and blasted Charlie Scorsoni to bits in "A" Is for Alibi. And we've just come from the harbor and its curving concrete breakwater, where she tried to save suicidal murderer Renata Huff in "J" Is for Judgment.

In all the alphabet mysteries - 14 to date, with "0" Is For Outlaw due in bookstores this fall-Grafton uses the pseudonym Santa Teresa for Santa Barbara, playfully renaming the city's beaches, parks, and streets. Read enough Grafton, and you may be afraid to visit. "I am responsible for most of the homicides in town," she acknowledges, her eyes full of mischief.

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