Barbara Neely, Activist Turned Mystery Writer, Dies at 78

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.

Neely was not the first black female mystery writer. Nor was Blanche White the first fictional black sleuth. 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.

Blanche was an opinionated woman, imbued with the passion of the author. 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.

She seamlessly wove political and social commentary into her novels, relying on her real-life experience to connect with readers.

“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.”

Blanche 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 Neely its 2020 Grand Master.

Neely also probed the nuances of the relationship between maids and their employers.

As 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. She ordered her employers’ lives, not the other way around.”

“Blanche on the Lam” won the Agatha Award, the Anthony Award and the Macavity Award for best first novel — three of the top literary prizes for mysteries.

The book opens with Blanche in court facing check-kiting charges. She finds refuge as a maid for a wealthy family in a fictional North Carolina town, where she applies her street smarts to solving crimes.

Neely set the next installment, “Blanche Among the Talented Tenth” (1994), in a resort that catered to light-skinned blacks and where, the dark-skinned and heavyset Blanche wryly noted, “I guess there won’t be a lot of guests sittin’ around talkin’ about how beautiful black is.” That book was followed by “Blanche Cleans Up” (1998) and “Blanche Passes Go” (2000).

“I can think of no better reminder of what you stand for,” Katherine Hall Page wrote in an essay to be published in a forthcoming Mystery Writers of America newsletter, “than this quote from ‘Blanche Passes Go’: ‘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 Ann Neely was born on Nov. 30, 1941, in Pittsburgh to Ann and Bernard Neely. She was raised in Lebanon, Pennsylvania, a steel town near Harrisburg where the German dialect known as Pennsylvania Dutch was widely spoken.

She recalled being the only student in her Roman Catholic elementary school who spoke English and the only one in both elementary and high school who was black.

“I felt very isolated,” she told The Daily News of Lebanon in 1992. “Most of the people I went to school with were quite nice to me, but you can’t be in that situation without suffering a degree of misery.”

She kept a diary and, her family recalled in the statement announcing her death, “demonstrated a vivid imagination, by making up stories from her daily experiences, developing into a young griot.”

She graduated in 1961 from a business school in Jamestown, New York, in the southwest corner of the state, where she worked as a mother’s helper — the closest she came to being a maid — but only for two weeks.

“It was not work I was cut out for,” she said.

Without acquiring an undergraduate degree, she earned a master’s in urban and regional planning from the University of Pittsburgh in 1971 with a thesis that explored the potential benefits of placing women’s prisons in suburbia.

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Even then, though, she told The Boston Globe, “I didn’t know an adjective from an adverb, and I didn’t know writers who weren’t starving.”

“If you grow up poor and black,” she said, “you know you can’t help your mother pay the mortgage by writing.”

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Neely had become an activist by the time she was 19, when she helped organize a tutorial program in Philadelphia. In the 1970s and ’80s she directed a YWCA branch after she and her partner, Jeremiah Cotton, settled in North Carolina, where she also wrote for Southern Exposure magazine.

The couple moved to San Francisco and, finally, to Massachusetts, where Cotton taught at the University of Massachusetts-Boston and Neely became the director of Women for Economic Justice, a welfare reform advocacy group.

Cotton died in 2012. Information on survivors was not immediately available.

Neely also published short stories, starting with “Passing the Word” in Essence magazine in 1981. She began writing full time, she once said, after winning money in a lawsuit when one of her stories was adapted into a play without her permission.

Inspired to pursue literature by the works of fellow black authors like Toni Morrison, Terry McMillan and Walter Mosley, best known for his Easy Rawlins detective novels, Neely later studied creative writing and received a master’s degree from the University of Massachusetts.

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“She paved the way for us,” Kellye Garrett, another black female mystery writer, said in a phone interview. “There was a time that publishers finally realized that books by and about black people would be read by the masses.

“They were looking for a book by a black woman about a black woman,” Garrett added. “As she said to me once, they figured: ‘Well, we’ve got Walter Mosley. It’s almost like we’ve got Fred Astaire, let’s see if we can find Ginger Rogers.’”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times .