Eleanor Taylor Bland

• Born: December 31, 1944
• Place of Birth: Boston, Massachusetts

TYPE OF PLOT: Police procedural

PRINCIPAL SERIES: Detective Marti MacAlister, 1992-2007

Contribution

Eleanor Taylor Bland’s highly successful Marti MacAlister series reflects the standard elements of the police procedural: the faith in tireless investigation and the momentum toward resolution via insight rather than intuition, and reaching of an inevitable conclusion based on common sense and legwork. However, Bland’s character, Marti MacAlister, broke new ground as a Black American woman. Because the series has a modern time frame, MacAlister faces only subtle discrimination and the occasional off-putting remark, and her commitment to police work ensures her the respect of her colleagues. Given the two partners’ diverse backgrounds, the series affirms the viability of multiculturalism in the workplace. A strong feminist role model, MacAlister has come to terms with the death of a husband, the responsibilities of two children, and ultimately, the complex emotional experience of a remarriage and stepchildren. The final MacAlister novel, Suddenly a Stranger: A Marti MacAlister Mystery, was published in 2007.

What further distinguishes the MacAlister series is its commitment to pressing social issues and its unflagging sympathy for those who are voiceless victims of social and economic distress—abused women and children, the unhoused, individuals with mental disabilities, individuals with addictions to alcohol or drugs, the unemployed, and older adults.

In addition to her literary contribution as an author, Bland edited Shades of Black: Crime and Mystery Stories by African American Authors (2004), a collection of crime and mystery short stories by Black authors.

Biography

Eleanor Taylor Bland was nearly fifty before she published her first novel. Born Eleanor Taylor in Boston on New Year’s Eve, 1944, into lower-middle-class circumstances, Bland learned from her cab driver father and mother the virtue of stoic patience, the importance of love, a lifelong respect for family, and the importance of a Christian-centered morality. Bland married a sailor when she was only fourteen. When his tour of duty ended, they were stationed in Illinois along Lake Michigan, and they decided to stay. During the mid-1970s, Bland was diagnosed with cancer. Doctors initially gave her little chance of survival, and she endured a rigorous regimen to combat the disease, an experience that encouraged her to return to school. Although she loved reading and considered English, Bland completed a bachelor’s degree in accounting at Southern Illinois University in 1981 and, after relocating to Waukegan, enjoyed a successful career (1981-1999) as a cost accountant for Abbott Laboratories, the pharmaceutical and healthcare giant.

In the early 1990s, Bland was divorced and raising an infant grandson while working full-time. She began reading mysteries in her spare time. She was intrigued by police procedures, finding in their meticulous investigative protocols a parallel to the accounting field. It occurred to her that she should try writing a procedural centered on the kind of character she knew best—a single Black American working mom living in the suburbs north of Chicago who loves her family and sympathizes with the underdog. Because her background was not in police work, she thoroughly researched the manuscript, learning the methodologies of detective work to give her manuscript a gritty verisimilitude.

Dead Time, Bland’s first Marti MacAlister mystery, was published in 1992 and found a wide and generous response among genre fans and critics. Bland captured the unglamorous detail work of police investigation—the low-octane thrill of assembling evidence, weighing testimony, and ultimately piecing together a reliable crime reading—while stage-managing suspense with satisfying twists. In the following years, Bland published MacAlister titles with admirable regularity despite a recurrence of health problems in 1999.

Although Bland completed a handful of short stories and edited a groundbreaking anthology of mystery stories written by Black Americans, her commitment remained to the series and to the evolution of the Marti MacAlister character professionally and personally. MacAlister continued her stellar success as a homicide detective, turning down offers for advancement to lieutenant to stay on the street, and her children matured into responsible young adults. MacAlister herself came to terms first with her husband’s death and then with the challenge of remarriage with a paramedic named Ben Walker. In the later titles in the series, Bland began to explore age and illness (both Jessenovik’s wife and Ben have faced medical crises). Bland relished her rapport with her readers and became noted for frequenting conventions, book signings, and online discussion groups.

Following Bland's death in 2010 from Gardner's Syndrome, Sisters in Crime—a writing association emphasizing equity and inclusion in writing and publishing—established The Eleanor Taylor Bland Grant to support new authors in Bland's honor.

Analysis

Eleanor Taylor Bland’s Marti MacAlister lacks the eccentric idiosyncrasies that often distinguish procedural protagonists. She never swears or makes wisecracks, and she respects authority (except for a particularly ambitious female lieutenant who has emerged in the later titles in the series as something of a nemesis). She attends to paperwork diligently and seldom resorts to violent engagement, strong-armed interrogations, High Noon dramatics, shootouts, or police work that bends the rules to effect a high-stakes arrest. She never drinks (save her addiction to coffee), and she lacks cinematic sexiness (she is, by her own admission, overweight, an imposing five feet, ten inches, and one hundred sixty pounds). Her off-duty life is far from exciting. She is happiest on those rare evenings when she can enjoy a Whoopi Goldberg video marathon with her children and then make love with her husband. The MacAlister series lacks the full-throttle feel of other modern procedurals: Its protagonist simply builds a case, does the job, and when there is a preponderance of evidence, brings in the perpetrator, police work that seldom dazzles but always succeeds.

The series centers on the psychology of investigation—the piecing together of forensic evidence and witness testimonies, the grueling eighteen-hour days, and the ultimate moment of insight (often presaged by one of MacAlister’s high-stress headaches and her inevitable turn to acetaminophen). As procedurals, each volume focuses on a single investigation, although other cases, frequently cold cases, become entangled. Given Bland’s omniscient narration and the shifts from MacAlister to the victims and, at times, to the killers, readers often know the killer’s identity and can, therefore, follow the twists of police investigations.

While maintaining the genre’s intricate methodologies, the MacAlister series has created a central character who generates reader sympathy, unusual in the genre (conventionally, readers either admire the central character’s acumen or envy their cool). Bland counterpoints the mayhem of MacAlister’s investigations with the ordinary life she maintains as a working mother. She shows MacAlister encouraging her kids to stay committed to school while she adjusts to being a young widow and enters into a romance with Ben Walker. Bland anatomizes with candor and delicacy the dynamics of grief (Ben’s wife had been killed by a drunk driver) even as it gives way to new love. MacAlister enjoys a close relationship with her mother and daughter, each generation offering moral insight to the next. Although her relationship with her son is more problematic (she is painfully aware of his need for a male role model), she maintains a generous communication with him. In addition, MacAlister maintains friendships with a variety of recurring characters, which underscores her sympathetic heart and the value she invests in friendship.

Although as procedurals, the novels in the series regularly center on murders among the privileged or those motivated by greed, career ambitions, and a desire to better their social position, each volume constructs a case that also involves Bland’s sympathy for the victims. Her victims exist on the margins of urban society. They are the collateral damage of overworked government agencies: street people, dropouts, prostitutes, AIDS patients, battered wives, the mentally disabled, people with substance use disorder, and most of all, children. (Bland herself became a recognized community activist in the Waukegan area.) MacAlister frequently relies on the help and testimony of those often ignored by other investigators, which gives those typically rendered voiceless a compelling narrative presence and gives the series its compassionate awareness that the forgotten deserve attention, respect, and assistance. Without abandoning the intricate twists of the procedural to indulge in obvious polemics, Bland fashions such misfits into vivid characters who come across with verisimilitude and poignancy.

Dead Time

The initial murder victim in the first Marti MacAlister procedural, Dead Time, is one of society’s throwaways, a Jane Doe schizophrenic choked to death in a flophouse. MacAlister, new to the Lincoln Prairie force, listens to the junkies and winos, whose testimony the first-response officers simply ignore. Still haunted by the shooting death of her husband a year and a half earlier, MacAlister quickly becomes enmeshed in a gruesome series of stranglings, the explanation of which leads her and her partner back fifteen years to the death of a singer, apparently accidentally electrocuted on a naval base while preparing to entertain troops headed to Vietnam.

With meticulous care, MacAlister and Jessenovik unearth a jewelry smuggling and fencing operation under the direction of a ruthless special operations officer who used the chaotic final years of the Vietnam War as a cover for his wrongdoing. Although Bland deftly handles the intricate details of the investigation, what distinguishes this novel is the group of five homeless kids whom MacAlister befriends. The children are squatting illegally in the flophouse the night of the murder, and their testimony is crucial, which puts them in danger from the special operations officer. MacAlister goes beyond merely keeping them safe so they can help piece together the case, making them her special project, which gives the narrative a compassionate feel appropriate to a mystery set at Christmas time.

Done Wrong

In Done Wrong (1995), the fourth installment in the series, Marti MacAlister emerges into her strength not merely by dint of her unraveling a most intricate case involving police cover-ups and drug trafficking but also because she is compelled to confront her dark suspicions surrounding the apparent suicide of her husband, Johnny, found shot through the head by his own gun during a drug bust in a Chicago cemetery three years earlier. When an undercover narcotics officer, Johnny’s former partner, apparently commits suicide by jumping from the second floor of a Chicago parking garage, MacAlister cannot accept the medical examiner’s ruling. On her own time, she returns to Chicago with Jessenovik and begins the difficult work of focusing her acumen on her husband’s undercover world.

MacAlister upends an entrenched departmental administration intent on burying the circumstances of Johnny’s death: Johnny knew that a careless police officer had killed a child in an earlier drug bust in which a considerable sum of money had disappeared, and MacAlister begins to glimpse the depth of cooperation between corrupt city detectives and the street kings of the drug empire. However, she comes ultimately to the peace that she has sought—the knowledge that her husband had not committed suicide but instead had most likely died as part of a departmental vendetta. Done Wrong is compelling for its shadowy uncertainties, typical of procedurals that involve undercover work with its inevitable moral ambiguities as police officers become part of the criminal world. However, MacAlister’s emotional growth sustains this novel as she makes her peace with the past: She revisits the neighborhood where she grew up, now a drug war zone, and reestablishes ties with Johnny’s friends. She also confronts her present (she and her daughter have a frank discussion about birth control) and plans, at last, for a future that can include Ben Walker.

Windy City Dying

The tenth novel in the series, Windy City Dying (2002), is distinguished by Bland’s decision to hand over part of the narrative center to the psychology of a deranged serial killer—a university-educated Black American who has been released after serving fifteen years for killing a coworker at a prestigious financial firm when evidence of his bookkeeping irregularities surfaced. The released felon begins to exact vengeance on those he blames for his ruin, not by killing them but by killing their loved ones to make them suffer more keenly. Because MacAlister’s first husband was the arresting officer, MacAlister herself is on the killer’s list but has been saved for last, as her death would provide the most obvious link to the killer’s case. Given the numerous (and brutal) killings, the shifting point of view, and the shattering of linear narration, the novel reveals a new confidence in Bland as a writer. Bland manipulates suspense by counterpointing MacAlister’s gradual realization of the ties between the multiplying murders with her own peril as the killer stalks her and Ben, whom MacAlister has just married.

Investigating the emerging pattern brings MacAlister once again to confront the ghost of her first husband. His coded notebooks help her break the case. What further distinguishes this novel is the eventual showdown in a hospital stairwell when MacAlister confronts the killer, dressed as a woman. She draws her weapon and kills the psychopath, a singular moment in the MacAlister series. The novel is of interest to series aficionados because, as part of the investigation, MacAlister revisits the five street children who appeared in the first volume (one of the children is initially accused of the first killing). She is saddened to find that since that Christmas five years earlier, the foster care system and street life have driven the children toward alcohol and violence and have robbed them of their self-esteem and any sense of a future. In contrast, MacAlister’s own daughter faces a difficult decision of whether to devote herself after high school to the longshot possibility of Olympic success in volleyball. The young woman forsakes the opportunity for athletic stardom to make her commitment to her family, part of the series’ larger theme of the powerful counterforce of love in a dangerous and chaotic world.

Principal Series Characters:

• Marti MacAlister is a Black American homicide detective in her forties with ten years of experience with the Chicago Police Department. After the mysterious suicide of her husband, an undercover narcotics detective, she joins the police force in Lincoln Prairie, a suburb sixty miles north, as a way to help her and her two children handle their grief. Meticulous, organized, and patient, Detective MacAlister is a model of tenacity, investigative perseverance, and compassionate police work.
• Matthew “Vik” Jessenovik, MacAlister’s partner and the son of a police officer, is a gruff veteran of the Lincoln Prairie detective force. Despite his deep-seated reservations about women detectives, which derive from his Old World Catholic assumptions as a second-generation Pole, he ultimately complements his partner and ably assists in the demands of investigatory police work.

Bibliography

"Eleanor Taylor Bland Crime Fiction Writers of Color Award." Sisters in Crime, www.sistersincrime.org/page/EleanorTaylorBland. Accessed 20 July 2024.

Evans, Robert C. Notable Crime Fiction Writers. Grey House Publishing, 2021.

Fabre, Michel, and Robert E. Skinner. Conversations with Chester Himes. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1995.

Klein, Kathleen Gregory, ed. Diversity and Detective Fiction. Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1999.

Klein, Kathleen Gregory, ed. The Woman Detective: Gender and Genre. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1995.

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Vicarel, Jo Ann. A Reader’s Guide to the Police Procedural. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1999.