A Free Man of Color (Benjamin January Series #1)
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Overview
A lush and haunting novel of a city steeped in decadent pleasures...and of a man, proud and defiant, caught in a web of murder and betrayal.
It is 1833. In the midst of Mardi Gras, Benjamin January, a Creole physician and music teacher, is playing piano at the Salle d'Orleans when the evenings festivities are interrupted—by murder.
Ravishing Angelique Crozat, a notorious octoroon who travels in the city's finest company, has been strangled to death. With the authorities reluctant to become involved, Ben begins his own inquiry, which will take him through the seamy haunts of riverboatmen and into the huts of voodoo-worshipping slaves.
But soon the eyes of suspicion turn toward Ben—for, black as the slave who fathered him, this free man of color is still the perfect scapegoat....
Synopsis
Benjamin January has lately returned to New Orleans from Paris, where he's made his home for the last 16 years. In Paris, January was a surgeon; in New Orleans, his life is constrained by a rigid set of rules that control his every move. He is known as a "free man of color," but in 1833, that freedom is tenuous at best.
January has found a position playing piano at the Salle d'Orleans, where the Blue Ribbon Ball of this year's Carnival caps the season's revelry. The Blue Ribbon Ball, in New Orleans's strict caste system, is the quadroon ball, where the light-skinned, beautiful daughters of colored society dance with their white "protectors" -- while their protectors' wives and families are at the subscription ball in the Théâtre next door. From the safety of his piano bench, January is able to watch and comment upon the goings-on. But that detachment doesn't last.
The most beautiful -- and the most poisonous -- belle of the ball, the infamous Angelique Crozat, has infuriated everyone present, from the young suitor whose stutter she has publicly mocked, to the girls whose dresses she has purposefully made somewhat less than beautiful -- including the widow of her late protector, who has violated every caste rule in order to confront her.
When Angelique is discovered, in a parlor of the Salle, strangled to death, January becomes embroiled in a pursuit of the killer -- only to discover that the authorities are investigating him. Now he must run for his life, and find the culprit before he is caught and enslaved -- or hung.
Mystery Magazine Online - J. Ashley
...Hambly puts together a fine story and creates fascinating three-dimensional characters....This novel is less a traditional "whodunit" and more of a historical novel in which a murder occurs....Benjamin January is a wonderful addition to mystery sleuths, and this novel contributes greatly to historical fiction. The characters, setting, plot, weave together to produce a satisfying and thought-provoking read.
Editorials
J. Ashley
...Hambly puts together a fine story and creates fascinating three-dimensional characters....This novel is less a traditional "whodunit" and more of a historical novel in which a murder occurs....Benjamin January is a wonderful addition to mystery sleuths, and this novel contributes greatly to historical fiction. The characters, setting, plot, weave together to produce a satisfying and thought-provoking read.—Mystery Magazine Online
Publishers Weekly -
In her breakout from fantasy and Star Wars novels, Hambly (Mother of Winter) chronicles the adventures of piano teacher and surgeon Ben January, a free man of color. The setting, 1833 New Orleans, is vivid and ornate. Riverboat dandies and roughshod frontiermen rub elbows with dueling gentlemen of the landed aristocracy as their splendidly gowned wives and colored mistresses celebrate Mardi Gras, oblivious to the squalor, fever and plague around them. Social and sexual mores are lax. Racial bigotry is the norm in a society that classifies people according to an elaborate scale of color and bloodline (octoroon, quadroon, musterfino, etc.). The plot is a whodunit involving the murder of Angelique Crozat, a beautiful but grasping octoroon who was the ex-mistress of a recently deceased Creole (white) planter. Back home after 16 years in Paris, January intervenes on behalf of Madeleine Dubonnet, a former piano student recently widowed by Arnaud Trepagier, the murdered woman's former patron. For his trouble, the ebony-skinned January becomes an unwitting scapegoat of the influential white suspects. Menaced by ruthless cutthroats, he must risk his freedom to absolve himself. Hambly pays rich attention to period detailfashion, food, manners, music and voodoo. Her characters, however, speak and think with decidedly modern accents, a departure from period verisimilitude that's easily justified on grounds of rhythm and pace. The tale lacks some of the moral gravity implied by the title, but it works as an escapist entertainment flavored liberally with the sights, textures, sounds and tastes of a decadent city in a distant time. (June)VOYA
Set in early nineteenth-century New Orleans, this murder mystery follows Benjamin Janvier, musician and free man of color, as he seeks the murder of Angelique, mistress of the husband of a white pupil he fondly remembers. Unfortunately, his search is slow and mostly devoid of the suspense suggested by the jacket illustration. The only thing that happens quickly in this novel is the introduction of the characters: fourteen in the first chapter, sixteen more in the second. Most of them remain names. The only two who come alive, police lieutenant Abishag Shaw and Benjamin's mother Livia, are in too few scenes. Hambly, a writer of intelligence, is fascinated by this world of kept women (placées) and its refined racial distinctions. The atmosphere is rich but marred by an excess of writerly writing: "the primal ocean of her hair," "pomegranate with rage," "the long fjords of his retreating hair line." Only especially interested young readers who read well will stay with this book. Even the jacket, title, and type will have little appeal for our audience. This novel is for adults with lots of time who need a new mystery romance with an unusual twist. VOYA Codes: 2Q 2P S (Better editing or work by the author might have warranted a 3Q, For the YA with a special interest in the subject, Senior High-defined as grades 10 to 12).Library Journal
With this historical novel, Hambly departs from her usual work in the sf/fantasy genre (e.g., Traveling with the Dead, LJ 8/95). Her new work is set in 19th-century Louisiana Creole society, where it was customary for a man to have a wife and also to keep a mistress in her own house. Benjamin January, a free Creole with dark brown skin, has returned to this society after living in Paris for more than a decade. He is trained as a surgeon, but in Louisiana, he makes his living playing the piano. Soon he is the main suspect in the death of a wealthy man's young mistress, found murdered at a ball. January spends the rest of the book gathering evidence in his defense with the help of his sisters and a host of other colorful characters he encounters on the run. The result is a complicated mystery that could have used more romantic involvement. Recommended for larger libraries.Shirley Coleman, Ann Arbor Dist. Lib., Mich.Kirkus Reviews
Once again exercising her talent for goldstained description, Hambly moves from a stylish fin de siècle tale of Continental vampirism (Traveling with the Dead, 1995) to an equally stylish romantic suspenser set in New Orleans.The author focuses on the delicate, twilit world of color in New Orleans in the 1830s, striving to capture both the city's exotic strangeness and an absolute sense of physical reality. Despite rapt storytelling, though, Hambly's prose shows less care than her research, being replete with tired phrases ("crimson with rage," etc.). After 16 years abroad, widower Benjamin January, a very dark Creole, returns from Paris having earned his degree as a physician and, for Carnival, takes up playing piano in the band for the Blue Ribbon Ball at the Salle d'Orleans. This is the ball at which white gentlemen meet their mistresses of various skin shades, having parked their wives at the nearby Théâtre d'Orleans. When Benjamin spots a former piano student, the virtuous, newly widowed, pure white Madame Madeleine Trepagier (née Dubonnet), at the wrong ball, he tries to save her from disgrace. She's there to recover her family jewels from the city's worst, most malicious woman of color, Angelique Crozat, mistress of the late Armand Trepagier. But Angelique is strangled, robbed, and stuffed into a closet before Madeleine can talk with her. The murder investigation plunges us into the tangled nature of race relations in New Orleans, made even more complex by the fact that the free colored folk there now have to deal with the recently arrived imperial Americans, who don't recognize (as the French, the founders of the city, did) a colored entitlement to civil rights. What does it mean that the dead Angelique was wearing Madeleine's own handsewn white dress when she died?
A sharp portrait of curiously nuanced class divisions transforms Hambly's latest into something far more than the modest melodrama it might otherwise have been.