Gone Quietly

Details are sketchy, and the news media don’t seem to have any confirmation of this yet, but Chicago author Libby Fischer Hellmann dropped the following note into the DorothyL listserv earlier today:

I’m sorry to pass along the news that Eleanor Taylor Bland passed away this afternoon. She had been ill for a long time. I don’t know any of the arrangements yet, but will post them when I do.

The 65-year-old Bland was born in Boston, Massachusetts, but was living most recently in Waukegan, Illinois, on Lake Michigan north of Chicago. According to Wikipedia, she was “diagnosed with cancer in the 1970s and given two years to live, [but] she overcame the disease.” She later worked as an accountant. Bland was the author of 13 police procedurals--beginning with Dead Time (1992), and concluding with A Dark and Deadly Deception (2005)--that featured African-American Chicago police homicide detective Marti MacAlister. Synopses of most of her books can be found here.

(Hat tip to Bill Crider’s Pop Culture Magazine.)

UPDATE I: Although the Chicago Tribune gets her age wrong (she was born on December 31, 1944, so could only have been 65), it at least confirms the news that Bland has passed away.

UPDATE II: According to The Gumshoe Site, author Bland passed away “after a long battle with cancer.”

READ MORE: “Eleanor Taylor Bland, 1944-2010,” by Libby Fischer Hellmann (The Outfit); “A Glimpse of Eleanor Taylor Bland,” by Elizabeth Foxwell (The Bunburyist); “Marti MacAlister: Good Cop, Bad Cop--Fact vs. Fiction,” by Eleanor Taylor Bland (Mystery Readers Journal).