She ordered her employers’ lives, not the other way around.” Neely also probed the nuances of the relationship between maids and their employers.Īs she wrote of her main character in “Blanche on the Lam” (1992), the first novel in the series: “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. “As an old organizer,” she said in an interview with The Washington Post in 2015, “you tell people what you want them to know, tell them again, and then tell them you’ve told them.”īlanche White “uses the invisibility inherent to her position to her advantage in her pursuit of the truth,” the Mystery Writers of America said in naming Ms.

She seamlessly wove political and social commentary into her novels, relying on her real-life experience to connect with readers. Neely had taught prison inmates, fought for abortion rights, assailed violence against women and, through her activism and storytelling, ennobled working mothers, defied stereotypes and confronted bigotry and class discrimination, both directed against blacks and within the black community. But Blanche was probably the first fictional black maid to solve a murder while working for a wealthy white family, and to go on to become an avocational gumshoe in a series of books from a mainstream American publisher.īlanche was an opinionated woman, imbued with the passion of the author. Nor was Blanche White the first fictional black sleuth. Neely was not the first black female mystery writer. Neely’s family announced her death through her publisher, Brash Books, without providing further details, except to say that she had been ill for a short time. Barbara Neely, an unheralded social activist who in her 50s became an award-winning writer of mystery novels centered on a savvy black maid who doubles as an amateur detective, died on March 2 in Philadelphia.

Blanche on the lam by barbara neely