Eleanor Taylor Bland
Fiction
Eleanor Taylor Bland was a pioneer in crime fiction. Her first crime novel, Dead Time (1992), featured Marti MacAlister, an African American female police detective who works and resides in a Midwestern American town that closely resembles Bland’s own adopted home town of Waukegan, Illinois. Bland also published several works of short crime fiction and edited a collection titled Shades of Black: Crime and Mystery Stories by African-American Authors (2004). When she passed away in 2010, she was one of the most prolific African American authors in the genre. With Marti MacAlister, Bland created an enduring heroine who went against the grain of perpetuated stereotypes related to African American women in much of U.S. popular culture.
