At the beginning of the year I started thinking about a fictional private eye I once admired named Kinsey Millhone. Kinsey was the invention of Sue Grafton, a crime writer whose books I devoured when I was starting out as a journalist and getting over a couple toxic relationships with men. Kinsey was a loner and a bit of a misanthrope, the kind of hard-boiled detective that Raymond Chandler describes in his essay “The Simple Art of Murder”:

“Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid.”

Except for one thing: Kinsey was a woman. Some of the things I loved about her: She went for solitary runs along the beach like I used to do and, after a long, hard day solving crime, washed down her favorite dinner – a peanut-butter-and-pickle sandwich – with a big glass of white wine. In the same essay Chandler evokes the world of noir fiction he practically invented, one where “gangsters can rule nations and almost rule cities”—one that, coincidentally, reminded me very much of today.

This essay, “Hard-boiled,” explores what Kinsey meant to me then—and still means to me now. I’m so grateful to the editors at Persimmon Tree magazine for publishing it in their winter 2025-26 edition. You can read it here.