title: Shades of Black: Crime and Mystery Stories by African-American Authors
author:  Eleanor Taylor Bland 
description: Talking about African-American mystery writers, editor Bland says, "In my opinion, the most significant contribution we have made, collectively, to mystery fiction is the development of the extended family; the permanence of spouses and significant others, most of whom don't die in the first three chapters or by the end of the novel; children who are complex, wanted, and loved; and even pets." And while some of the 22 stories in this excellent anthology are as hard as nails and as noir as a night in Thompsonville (such as Gary Phillips's "Beginner's Luck," which stars Chainey, his no-nonsense former Las Vegas stripper, and Walter Mosley's short, pungent "Bombardier"), most of them do have a strong sense of family. Bland's own "Murder on the Southwest Chief," written with her 15-year-old son, Anthony, has her suburban Chicago cop Marti MacAlister using her sons' journals to solve a crime. Frankie Y. Bailey's "Since You Went Away" is another corking railroad yarn, featuring Lizzie Stuart's grandfather, a Pullman porter, in a tale of jealousy and sexual repression in 1946. The feeling of extended family includes a tribute to the late Hugh Holton, a Chicago police captain and prolific mystery writer, by historian Lerone Bennett Jr., even though Holton's own entry, "The Werewolf File," is a dark and rather bloody tale. Some of the other contributors' names may be new to casual mystery readers, but part of the pleasure of this wide-ranging volume is welcoming them to the family. <br />Copyright  Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
zlib_text: About the Author
  
  
  ![image](../images/author.jpeg)
  
  
  Eleanor Kuhns won the 2011 Minotaur Books/Mystery Writers of America First
  Crime Novel Competition. She lives in New York, received her master’s in
  Library Science from Columbia University, and is currently the Assistant
  Director at the Goshen Public Library in Orange County, New York.
  
  
  Acknowledgments
  
  
  Thanks to my agent, Mitchell S. Waters, and to Elizabeth Lacks, my
  collaborators in the writing process. This would be a much poorer book without
  their help.
  
  
  ALSO BY ELEANOR KUHNS
  
  
  Death of a Dyer
  
  
  A Simple Murder
  
  
  Author’s Note
  
  
  How much of the information about the Poor Relief Laws and warning out is
  true? Unfortunately, all of it. Many town selectmen did exactly as described:
  decided which people would receive help and which would not. Many people who’d
  spent their entire lives in a town would be warned out, to travel the roads
  searching for shelter and food. Or, sometimes, they would be transported to
  the town of their bir