In Good
Man Friday, the 12th and most recent novel in her Benjamin
January series, Barbara Hambly skillfully puts together a fascinating plot
involving a missing person, a closed-door mystery, and a number puzzle.
The amateur sleuth’s next adventure takes him to
Washington City when Chloe Viellard, the young woman we met in Wet Grave, and her husband Henri,
Dominique’s protector, hire him to find Chloe’s friend the Englishman Selwyn
Singletary, a self-made mathematical genius and an accountant for several
European banks with whom she had been corresponding about mathematical theories.
Washington City, the capital of the United
States of America in 1838, was little more than a cow town as seen through the
eyes of Benjamin January’s younger sister Dominique January:
…Minou gazed
around her at the vacant fields. Cows grazed peacefully between
widely-scattered houses, pigs rooted in roadside ditches. Even this close to
the center of Washington—a roughly built-up rectangle that stretched from the
President's House to a bit beyond the Capitol two miles away—the houses were
countrified, set back from the unpaved streets and surrounded by chicken coops,
cow barns, vegetable gardens and orchards.
Benjamin again finds himself in financial difficulty
after a white planter who lost $10,000 on a slave boxing match blames him and persuades
his friends not to hire Benjamin during the height of the carnival season. Abishag
Shaw, Benjamin’s police friend, has no work for him. He is therefore forced to
take the job that again will take him away from his wife and son. In one of his
letters Singletary told Chloe that he was coming to America to take a teaching
position at the University of Virginia. Once he reached Washington City, he disappeared.
Benjamin’s fellow sleuths helping him matches
wits against a very clever spy and thief are Henri, Chloe, and Dominique. Edgar
Allan Poe happens to be staying in the same boarding house as Benjamin and
Dominique, a boarding house owned and operated by a free couple of color. In
adding Poe, Hambly did something very difficult: inserting a real historical
figure in the story and making him or her believable. Poe is instrumental in
helping Benjamin solve a number puzzle in a notebook that, before he
disappeared, Singletary left with the only person he trusted, a slave named
Ganymede Tyler.
Ganymede’s owner is his half-brother, Luke Bray,
who calls him his “Good Man Friday.” Ganymede doesn’t understand the numbers
but feels the notebook is important and gives it to Benjamin. Benjamin and Poe
spend a great deal of time trying to solve the puzzle that might help them find
Singletary and explain why he disappeared and also lead to the person who broke
into his locked room and killed “Good Man Friday.”
As in all the Benjamin January novels, the amateur
detective must avoid capture by slave stealers and traders. However, his sister
Dominique and her daughter Charmian are captured, and it is up to Benjamin and
Poe, along with the a few of the free men of color living in the boarding
house, to free them before they are sold south. Hambly makes the adventure an
essential part of the and not incidental to the plot.
Except for the clumsiness of the prologue, which
is used to set up Benjamin’s negative financial situation, the narrative is
tightly controlled with no wasted scenes or characters. The subplot provides
the social context for the main plot and shows the precarious position of free
men and women of color in a slave society that proclaims all men are created
equal. It involves the game of Town Ball, a form of cricket. Although the free
colored men aren’t technically allowed to play the game, they have formed teams
and play outside the city limits without interference from the sheriff because
he wins money betting on the best team to win. When the best colored team beats
a French team, which had beaten the American team of white men, there is a
clamor for the white American team to play the colored team. What will happen
to the colored players if they win?
A Free Man of Color is the best of Hambly’s
Benjamin January novels. A Good Man
Friday is the second best. All the Benjamin January novels tell one story:
the survival of an intelligent black man in a society determined to, if not
kill him, then bring him low.
The Benjamin January novels are not only
enjoyable but also educational. They depict an accurate picture of slavery during
the 19th century in the United States.
