C. W. Grafton

Cornelius Warren ("Chip") Grafton (1909–1982) was an American crime novelist. He was born and raised in China, where his parents were working as missionaries. He was educated in Clinton, South Carolina, studying law and journalism, and became a municipal bond attorney in Louisville, Kentucky.

The hero of his first two mystery novels (The Rat Began to Gnaw the Rope and The Rope Began to Hang the Butcher) was a lawyer named Gilmore Henry. Using the first two lines of a nursery rhyme as the titles of his first two novels suggested that other Gilmore Henry novels would follow, but none did. (A partial manuscript of a third novel, The Butcher Began to Kill the Ox, is known to exist.) Henry did not appear in Grafton's two subsequent novels.

The Rat Began to Gnaw the Rope won the 1943 Mary Roberts Rinehart Award.

In World War II, Grafton served with distinction as a military deception officer in the India-Burma theater. Grafton was married to Vivian Harnsberger, and they had two daughters, Sue and Ann. Sue Grafton (born 1940) is also a writer and is famous for her "Alphabet Series" of crime novels. C. W. Grafton died four months before the publication of "A" Is for Alibi.

C.W. Grafton's law partner, Spencer Harper Jr., named his younger son Grafton Sharpe Harper after him.

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