Lompoc California, 1969: Crossroads of the Drug Trade
Timeline 1969 - Lompoc, on California’s Central Coast was at the crossroads of the drug trade. The psychedelics came through from the Bay Area on their way to the California Southland. As if in exchange; from the Southland came the Mexican marijuana and the South American cocaine. Amphetamines were already being ‘cooked’ in houses near Lompoc. And out of the exotic orient came small parcels of heroin, courtesy (it was alleged) of military members coming back from Vietnam and Thailand.
It was that brief shining year so soon after the ‘Summer of Love’ when the country was preparing to leave the sixties behind, and to step forward into the seventies. Into this volatile soup of chemicals came a young woman, a girl really. No one knows where she came from, and no one knows her name, because her life and all her hopes were savagely stolen by ‘Person/Persons Unknown’.
Sue Grafton, a local writer wrote of this crime against humanity in her book ‘Q is for Quarry’”
I got my copy on loan from the Santa Maria library. But I chose the audio version so I could ‘read’ it while driving. Judy Kaye narrates it in a very well done style. She shows very high ‘voice-control’ skills and manages the many accents of the various characters quite well.
Sue writes in the style I would imagine Ellery Queen writes in. Now, I have never read an Ellery Queen novel, so I might be wide of the mark in this statement. I am not a huge fan of murder-mysteries, I only got the book because it takes some facts from a local unsolved murder that has perplexed me for nearly forty years, and weaves a tapestry of real and imaginary scenes, some of which I know, and some that I feel must be fictional. Note: the local County Seat and County name are changed (is this to protect the innocent?)
The murder happened in 1969 outside Lompoc, and remains unsolved, even to the point where we don’t even know who the girl was. And in all of these years, no one has come forward to claim her as a long disappeared sister, daughter or girlfriend.
This crime so fascinated Ms. Grafton that she got the local officials to look into this matter again. They disinterred the body, and had a forensic sculptor do a probable recreation of the girls features and image.
One can see further info on the murder and the investigation by going to Jane Doe Unsolved Crime
The people at the library said that the book caused such a stir among the local folk when first released, that it was always on the ‘waiting list’ of books, and never really sat on the shelf until I checked it out a few years ago.
Sue Grafton has written a great many highly acclaimed books. Anyone interested in the genre would like her writing style. Personally, the local scenery that unwove fascinated me while the story played out. It’s fun to live in a little tiny place, and read about it in a novel, it’s just gloomy that it is a sad case that brings the news.