Barbara Neely’s Blanche on the Lam, published by Penguin in 1992, is unusual partly because of its detective, a plump, 40-year-old, gap-toothed black woman. Her name is Blanche White, and she’s very aware of her name’s double irony. She cleans houses and cooks for white folks, sometimes as a temp. She goes on the lam, walking out of the courthouse bathroom and a thirty-day sentence for writing a bad check. In order to get out of town and away from the cops, she takes a temp job in the country house of Everett and Grace--I'm not sure we ever learn their last name-- and their Down-syndrome cousin Mumsfield, who befriends Blanche.
The setting is rural North Carolina, and the mystery concerns a struggle for control of an aging, supposedly drunken aunt of Mumsfield. Rich Aunt Emmeline is the target of plots to get her money, and the plots involve an impostor, a handyman who is later murdered, and an unwilling Blanche. At first Blanche does not understand why Mumsfield's descriptions of his wonderful aunt don't tally with her knowledge of the mean drunk upstairs. Eventually she works it out, but not before a number of adventures, including Blanche’s use of a two-by-four to coldcock Grace, who's chasing her with a knife.
Of more interest than the plot is what Barbara Neely does with her detective: a live-in maid who cleans house is in a unique position to know everything that goes on in a household. If she’s observant and smart, like Blanche, she can have all the family’s secrets figured out in a matter of days. “Reading people and signs, and sizing up situations,” the author writes of her main character, “were as much a part of her work as scrubbing floors and making beds.” Even more advantages attach to this character when she’s in the house of a rich, bigoted southern family: as a poor black woman, Blanche is nearly invisible to Everett and Grace unless they want something to eat, something to drink, or something to be vacuumed.
The charm of Blanche is her complete vulnerable ordinariness. She works hard for a living, taking care of her dead sister’s two children, with some help from her own mother. Blanche was teased as a child until her cousin convinced her that she was a Night Girl who could become invisible just by slipping out into the dark. Blanch used this in her youth, eavesdropping, discovering things and making her mother think she had second sight. Her detective skills are a by-product of her survival skills.
Blanche on the Lam is the first of a series Barbara Neely has written about her detective Blanche White. It won several awards for best first mystery novel, and I think you’ll like it.
