Unique American Mystery

Blanche on the Lam – Barbara Neeley

 This 1992 novel is the first full-length mystery with a black woman as the main character. Making this worth reading, then, is as different a protagonist as we’ve ever met in detective fiction. Blanche White is middle-aged, overweight, not a Christian but spiritual, and embracing her curls. Also against expectation, she is contentedly working as domestic. She has a problem with close supervision: “For all the chatelaine fantasies of some of the women for whom she worked, she really was her own boss, and her clients knew it. She ordered her employers’ lives, not the other way around.”

Blanche has returned to her hometown of Farleigh, North Carolina. She is now mother to her niece and nephew as her sister died of cancer. She worries that her no-nonsense Christian mother Miz Cora will take over custody of the kids, while Miz Cora worries that Blanche will be taken away as a revolutionary due to her natural hair.

The book opens with Blanche going through a rough patch. She is unlucky enough to draw a judge in an especially grouchy mood who sentences her to a month on a bad-check charge. Shocking herself, she slips away from the deputy escorting her to jail. That she could be picked any time adds suspense to the action.

On the lam, Blanche ends up cooking, cleaning and caring for a white gentry family at their summer home in Hokeysville. Southern Gothic with fireworks, they are out a William Faulkner novel. Miz Grace is highly-strung with OCD, her husband Everett is a do-nothing irritable under pressure, and wealthy Aunt Emmeline holes up in her room putting away gin.

Cousin Mumsfield, a person living with Down Syndrome, is binned by Miz Grace and Everett as an invisible like Blanche, not worth considering as a real human being that counts. To her surprise, Blanche connects with “Mumsfield, honey,” able to telepathically sense his comings even before he shows up, a prescience she only feels with people closest to her.

This connection bothers Blanche since she is wary of what she calls “Darkies’ Disease.” She knows that indulging the human urge to help the afflicted will make her lower her guard of rational self-interest and undermine her ability to navigate an economy based on exploiting the vulnerable, especially women of color. As for getting close to employers, their problems, their tears 

 Blanche was unimpressed by the tears, and Grace’s Mammy-save-me eyes. Mammy-savers regularly peeped out at her from the faces of some white women for whom she worked, and lately in this age of the touchy-feely model of manhood, an occasional white man. It happened when an employer was struck by family disaster or grew too compulsive about owning everything, too overwrought, or downright frightened by who and what they were. She never ceased to be amazed at how many white people longed for Aunt Jemima.

Blanche gets a strange kind of feeling from the house and its objects, a feeling that something dreadful is going to happen to the family. She witnesses a will just changed by Aunt Emmeline. Disturbed, she activates the intelligence network in The Community only to find out information that only adds to her alarm. Everett may have murdered his first wife to get his hooks on her money, and may do the same to Miz Grace, who loves him too much to see through him.

Class clashes, race relations, and gender roles are examined in original ways. For example, a grocery delivery boy acts with obnoxious disrespect. Blanche utters words in Yoruba she picked up in her travels. She tells him because of the hoodoo she’s thrown his way he should not to be surprised if his privates start to shrivel. And the ploughboy believes her and straightens up in later encounters.

Highly recommended as a unique mystery. When this novel was released in 1992, it won the Agatha Award and the Anthony Award for Best First Novel, and the Macavity Award for Best First Mystery.