the first to be suspected, regardless of the crime

Barbara Neely, Blanche White and more

The 1992 cover of Blanche on the Lam, the first in Barbara’s best-selling series (image via Wikimedia Commons)

In the world of Barbara Neely’s books, invisibility became a crime-solving superpower.

When Barbara Neely first dreamed up the character of Blanche White, a Black maid for a white family in North Carolina, she wanted readers to look at Blanche’s supposed weakness — the “lowliness” of her station and race — a little differently. Over the course of four best-selling mystery books, villains often underestimated or entirely overlooked Blanche. But once she stepped into the role of “accidental detective,” she caught murderers, unmasked charlatans and nabbed blackmailers.

Barbara grew up in Pennsylvania steel country, and she later recalled the pain of being the only Black student in her private school classrooms. She turned to books and fictional worlds for solace, “making up stories from her daily experiences, developing into a young griot.”

Still, Barbara didn’t publish a short story until 1981, when she was nearly 40 years old. She’d worked much of her career as an education and labor activist, creating housing programs for formerly incarcerated women and directing a YWCA branch in Philadelphia. She thought of her fiction as something she did on the side. “If you grow up poor and Black, you know you can’t help your mother pay the mortgage by writing,” she wrote. 

Once her 1981 short story was published in Essence, however, she began writing for magazines and radio shows. After hours, she drafted the first of her Blanche books, the multi-award-winning Blanche on the Lam. Critics praised the series for its political and social commentary as well as its thoughtful characters, dark humor and well-plotted mystery. 

As Barbara wrote in Blanche Passes Go, the fourth book in her series: 

Did white people have any idea how much energy and hope and downright stubbornness it took to live and work and try to find some fun in a place where you were always the first to be suspected, regardless of the crime?

Barbara passed away in 2020, just a few months after the Mystery Writers of America named her Grand Master, its highest honor. In 2021, the organization created a Barbara Neely scholarship program for Black writers — applications are open now!  

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More on 🕵🏾‍♀️: 

• Barbara Neely, Activist Turned Mystery Writer, The New York Times

• Crime Fiction’s Pioneering Women of Color, CrimeReads

• Barbara Neely Tackles Race, Class and Color, NPR 

• The Rich, Underappreciated History of Mystery Writers of Color, TIME Magazine

• “Women Detectives,” The Cambridge Companion to Crime Fiction 

More from me: 

• Some excitement: I’ve been accepted for a residency at the Sundress Academy of the Arts in Tennessee. I can’t wait to spend February 2025 polishing up this novel draft — and also feeding chickens and goats. 

• Also in excitement: starting tomorrow, Substack is funding gift subscriptions for select readers! That means you could have until November 4 to try out a free month of alllll things A Woman to Know — just look to see if you have a “Claim Gift” button available in your Substack app. 

• What’s your favorite way to spend Halloween? I’ve been mainlining TCM classics and liking every single costume pic I see on social media. Send me yours!

  

  @juliaccarpenterfavorite time of year 🖤 #nyc #halloween

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