Writers of Color 50 Books Challenge

Blanche on the Lam (1993) and Blanche Among the Talented Tenth (1995) are the first two books in Barbara Neely's series of mystery novels (there are four so far) featuring Blanche White, a forty-something single black woman who's lived in small-town North Carolina, New York City, and Boston, and makes her living cooking and cleaning houses. She's raising her deceased sister's two children, judges people by the way they react upon learning her name, and has amazing social skills.

Blanche is on the lam in the first book because she bounced a check, was taken to court, and then followed the impulse to slip away when everyone was distracted by a commotion. She then takes advantage of a cleaning company's scheduling mistake to accompany a rich white family on a vacation to their country house, far from the courthouse. Of course, the family's full of sinister secrets...

The happy outcome of the first book enables Blanche to send her kids to a fancy private school, but by the second book she's worried that they're absorbing harmful values about skin color and hair texture. So she accepts an invitation from the children's friends' parents to join them at a fancy seaside resort in Maine -- the sort of place established and patronized by the "talented tenth". Naturally, the regulars at the resort have their own sinister secrets...

Here are my spoiler-free reviews on Goodreads for Blanche on the Lam and Blanche Among the Talented Tenth. As I wrote there, I am not finding the mystery-novel part of these books really compelling so far, but that's more than made up for by the pleasure of reading about Blanche.

I really love these books and want to recommend them to you, but there are a couple of things to note first. One is that there's a very important secondary character in Blanche on the Lam who has Down's syndrome, and I'm not sure how to judge Neely's portrayal of him. I liked how she describes the ways that Blanche relates differently to this character (a white man) because of his disability, but I think there also might be some stereotyping. I would like to hear what a more qualified person thinks about this. The other thing is an offhanded remark in Blanche Among the Talented Tenth about how Blanche's friend was once disappointed in love when she discovered that her boyfriend liked to wear women's clothing. Grrr.