A former director of the Harlem Writers Guild, Grace F. Edwards published her first novel when she was 55, and her first mystery, featuring a stylish female ex-cop turned sleuth, when she was 64. She died on Feb. 25 at Downstate Hospital in Brooklyn receiving little fanfare according to Penelope Green from the NY Times… Support our news coverage by subscribing to our Kindle Nation Daily Digest. Joining is free right now!
Though she began writing at age 7, Grace F. Edwards waited until she was 55 to publish her first novel. That book, “In the Shadow of the Peacock,” was a lush portrayal of Harlem during World War II, a girl’s coming-of-age story set against the race riots of the time.
It was a placeholder for the six detective stories she would later write, mysteries set in Harlem starring a female cop turned sociologist and accidental sleuth named Mali Anderson, always with a backbeat of jazz. The first of these, “If I Should Die,” was published in 1997, when Ms. Edwards was 64.
She was 87 when she died on Feb. 25 at Downstate Hospital in Brooklyn, her death receiving little notice at the time. Her daughter, Perri Edwards, who confirmed the death, said she had had dementia for three years.
In the late 1960s, Ms. Edwards and a friend ran an Afrocentric dress shop selling dashikis and stylish caftans of their own designs and those of others near West 140th Street and Seventh Avenue (now called Adam Clayton Powell Boulevard). They called the store Neferti, for the African queen (intentionally misspelling the name because another business had taken the correctly rendered one, Nefertiti).
By 1974, Ms. Edwards was a disability analyst in New York State’s social services department, having earned a bachelor’s degree from City College the year before and a master’s of fine arts a few years later.
In her first novel, she wrote of the neighborhood she loved, and its vanished characters:
“The women and the old men gathered for comfort where folks were known to do the most talking: The women drifted into Tootsie’s ‘Twist ‘n’ Snap Beauty Saloon,’ where the air was thick with gossip and fried dixie peach. The men congregated in Bubba’s Barber Shop to listen to orators, smooth as water-washed pebbles, alter history with mile-long lies.”
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