I took the title
of this essay from the blurb on the back cover of Barbara Neely’s first novel Blanche
on the Lam (published in 1992). Of the main character, author Jane
Langton writes, “Blanche is the most refreshing accidental sleuth to appear in
a long time….”
Barbara Neely was born in 1941 in Lebanon, Pennsylvania,
according to the information on Wikipedia, and attended the University of
Pittsburg. In an interview in the AARP magazine on February 1, 2011, Neely
relates her experience as a “self-taught author”
One of
my throwback urges, as a self-taught author, was to explore what could be
taught about writing. So I entered a university M.F.A. program. There were days
when I felt as if I’d been thrown into the kiddie pool. But from this
experience came many rewards: a stint working with middle school writers, a
couple of semesters volunteering as a reading-writing facilitator for a group
of adult women and plans to use my new degree to start a program for adult
learners in collaboration with community centers and other groups. I hadn’t
anticipated any of this at 60.
This self-taught
mystery writer has written only four novels featuring her accidental detective.
In the opening
chapter of this suspenseful novel, maid Blanche White stumbles into a dangerous
situation when she flees from the court house after being sentence to 30 days
in jail for writing a bad check and coincidentally finds her way to the house in
which the employment agency had scheduled her to work.
In the small town
of Farleigh, North Carolina, Blanche lives from pay check to pay check. She
often writes a check with the intention of making it good on payday. However,
she fails one too many times to make good on the bad check. When a commotion in
the hallway of the courtroom distracts the deputy escorting her to the
restroom, Blanche takes advantage of the opportunity to escape through a side
door.
After blindingly
finding her way to the Carter house, Blanche moves with the family from the
town house to the country house. Her employer, Grace, is the niece of the
matriarch of the family, Emmeline Carter, who remains locked in her room in the
country house. Blanche dislikes Grace’s husband Everett when she first meets
him. She likes him even less when she discovers he is a friend of the sheriff
who might discover Blanche is a wanted woman.
It doesn’t take
her long to discover this good old southern family has secrets. She begins to
suspect the secrets might have led to five murders, two of which are in the
past. Her suspicion leads to danger that will take all of her strength and wits
to avoid.
Forty-year-old
Blanche is dark-skinned, stout, five foot seven woman who cares for her dead
sister’s two children. She makes a good amateur sleuth because she doesn’t
always trust physical evidence: “She lived too long to rely on concrete
evidence to tell her whether something was true.” Like Christie’s Miss Marple,
she is a keen observer of human nature. Although she puts on the mask for the
white folks to hide her intelligence, she is very articulate.
Neely does a good
job of conveying Blanche’s ideas without using dialect even when she wear the
mask to hide her intelligence to fool the white folks. Like many traditional
mysteries where the setting is isolated, in this case, the violence is off
stage until the end when it comes at you full force.
Coincidences
happen in life, but If a writer uses one in fiction, she must make it
believable. The coincidence of Blanche blindly finding the very house the
employment agency had assigned her to clean is acceptable because it initiates
the action.
Langton was right.
Blanche is very refreshing. I like her. You might well come to the same
conclusion once you read and enjoy Blanche on the Lam.
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