An Anemic Novel

Since amateur detective Benjamin January married an Arab woman in Paris, where his mother's protector sent him to study medicine and music, we should have expected Hambly to sooner or later write a novel with the centuries old conflict between Islam and Christianity as a backdrop. She makes an anemic attempt to use the religious conflict in Ran Away, the eleventh novel in her Benjamin January series.

 

A Muslim, known as the Turk in New Orleans, who saved the life of Benjamin’s former wife Ayasha when he lived in Paris, is accused of throwing two of his concubines out of the attic window of his house, allegedly for stealing some gold from him. Benjamin feels obligated to prove the man did not do kill the girls because the Turk saved his wife Ayasha when he lived in Paris.

A little over a third of the novel is the backstory of Benjamin’s time in Paris, where he met his first wife, Ayasha, who died of cholera in 1833, and the circumstances under which he met the Turk, Huseyin Pasha in 1827. Benjamin found that his skills as a musician earned him more money than his surgical skills because, even in enlightened France, no white person would allow a black doctor to work on him or her. The Turks have no such qualms, so Benjamin is called upon to attend Shamira, a young Jewish woman in Huseyin Pasha’s harem. He realizes she has been poisoned but will live, and also that, if he doesn’t get her out of the house before the master arrives, he might lose his life. He need not worry, however, because Jamilla, Huseyin Pasha’s number one wife who called upon his service, helps him escape. The next day she calls upon him again to find Shamira who has run away.

Sabid al-Muzaffar, Huseyin Pasha’s enemy, is also looking for Shamira. Ayasha knows that Shamira is at a convent and hurries to warn her and help her get away before Sabid al-Muzaffar and the police arrive. Unfortunately, Ayasha is caught. Benjamin learns from one of the street urchins who sometime help him that Ayasha is being held in Sabid al-Muzaffar’s house. Huseyin Pasha, believing Sabid al-Muzaffar might have kidnapped Shamira arrives and helps Benjamin free Ayasha. To tell you how would be a spoiler.

Ten Years later in New Orleans, Benjamin has the opportunity to repay the Turk when Oliver Breche, an apothecary, claims he saw him throw the two girls, Karida and Noura, out of the window. His claim, however, is suspect because he was in love with Noura and wants to prevent Jamilla from claiming her body so that he can give Noura a Christian burial in his family crypt. In addition to searching for evidence to clear the Turk, Benjamin must find a way to protect Jamilla and her son from the mob, egged on by Breche, surrounding their house.

The novel is not without merits. It has a red herring that leads the reader and Benjamin down the wrong path, and the identity of the murderer is a true surprise. The backstory gives the reader a more detail history of Benjamin’s time in Paris as a young man. Another merit is the skillful way Hambly keeps the reader guessing about identity and motive of the murderer.

Nevertheless, the novel is a letdown. The plot incidents seem contrived. It reads too much like the author had to fulfill a contract and therefore had to come up with a plot. The subplot involving Pasha and Sabid, after the action shifts to time present in New Orleans, does nothing to advance the main plot and seems designed merely to get Benjamin into another dangerous adventure and to tie up loose ends of the backstory. 

The books I discuss in my blog I buy from online booksellers with my own money. So when I recommend you, dear reader, buy the book, you should chose the seller you prefer.

The Frontier Adventure

In Days of the Dead, the 7^th novel in Barbara Hambly’s Benjamin January series, the amateur detective and his wife ventured into Mexico to rescue their friend and Benjamin’s fellow musician Hannibal Sefton. Since that trip, Benjamin has solved crimes and dodged danger back in his hometown of New Orleans. However, in June 1837, he loses the remainder of the money he had in the Bank of Louisiana when it closes. Since many wealthy citizens of New Orleans also lost money due to the bank failure, Benjamin can no longer find work giving piano lessons to their children or playing the piano for the many balls and operas. Rose’s school also has to close. The loss of income forces him to venture again away from the familiar but perilous streets of New Orleans.

  

In The Shirt on His Back, the tenth novel in the series, the adventurous amateur detective takes a job helping his friend Lieutenant Abishag Shaw of the New Orleans Guards find the man who killed Shaw’s younger brother Johnny. Into the Oregon Territory go Benjamin, Shaw, and their friend Hannibal. Benjamin carries a notebook to record his observations of the Indians and the flora and fauna for his scientific-minded wife Rose, who can’t accompany him as usual because she is pregnant with their first child.

When the trio reaches Fort Ivy, Shaw’s older brother Tom, the headman, tells him that Johnny was found scalped, but he doesn’t think Indians killed him. He suspects Frank Boden, the former clerk, killed Johnny because he saw the partially contents of a letter containing the name “Hepplewhite” on Boden’s desk. The letter appeared to suggest that Boden wasn’t who he claimed to be and might be up to something nefarious. Tom tells them Boden left a few days ago and might be hiding among the trappers at the rendezvous. The three men set out for the rendezvous where the trappers gather each year to sell their beaver furs to the American Fur Company or the Hudson Bay Company.

The plot involves more than the hunt for Johnny’s killer. Benjamin eventually finds himself having to solve the murder of an old man from Germany and the poisoning of several trappers. When the three man hunters along with Johnny’s killer and his Indian accomplices are captured by Blackfeet, Benjamin has to use his detective skills to prevent the Chief from ordering their deaths by exposing the killer of the old man and the trappers and convincing the chief that he and Shaw must take the killer or killers back to face white man’s justice.

On the frontier, except for one man who shows his prejudice against black folks, Benjamin is treated as an equal once he proves he can shoot and fight and bravely face danger from hostile Indians, bears, and the weather as well as any mountain man.

The narrative voice in The Shirt On His Back, as in Hambly’s other novels in the series, is Benjamin January’s, but the story belongs to Lieutenant Abishag Shaw, a Kentucky mountain man who left the family feuds in his home state and settled in New Orleans. He is one of the most interesting characters in the series and Benjamin’s friend. This lanky Kentucky mountain man is almost as tall as Benjamin, wears dirty clothes, has scraggly hair, and chews tobacco. Since he became a lawman, he rejects the blood feuds of his home state. Thus, wrestling with his conscious, he has to decide whether to kill Johnny’s murderer or bring him in for trial.

As authors in other novels have done, Hambly romanticized the mountain men. Also, she sees the Indians as victims, though she does try to make them more complex—some are villains who are enticed into villainy by white men and a desire for vengeance, and are some good guys. Using Benjamin’s perspective, Hambly does a bit of preaching on a familiar subject, the people responsible for the disappearance of the wilderness:

…the Americans  came . . . Americans wanting beaver skins to sell for hats so they could make money. Americans wanting slaves brought in from Africa so they could grow cotton to sell to make money. Americans wanting land that the Sioux and Shoshone and Cherokee had since time immemorial lived on as hunters and as farmers . . . not so that they could farm themselves, but so they could sell it to other whites for farms, so that they—the sellers—could make money.

If you like tales about the American frontier, you’ll enjoy The Shirt On His Back, a detective-adventure story of detection, murder, and narrow escapes frontier style.

The Wrong Body

I apologize for misnumbering some of the previous novels. Dead Water is the eighth not the ninth novel in Barbara Hambly’s Benjamin January series.

In Dead and Buried, the ninth novel in the series, Hambly inserts a disclaimer of sorts at the end of the book: “It is not the purpose of this novel to explore the origins and ramifications—political, social, and psychological—of race-based chattel slavery in the United States, nor the entangled and tragic system of prejudice and laws that made up the one-drop rule….” Though she doesn’t explore the origins of the rule, she certainly explores the social ramifications it had on individuals and families, and, as a good storyteller should, does so in an entertaining way. To say more about the theme of Dead and Buried might spoil your enjoyment, so I will not discuss the theme, except to say that Hambly handles it very well.

The attendants at the funeral of Rameses Ramilles, a fellow musician of Benjamin January’s, are horrified when the pall bearers drop the coffin and out falls the body of a white man. Hannibal Sefton, another fellow musician, recognizes the dead man as Patrick Derryhick, a friend from his youthful, carefree days in England.

Benjamin helps arrange a party to search for Ramilles’s body because the police will not search the swamp for "A black man's corpse, particularly after a week or two in the river….” Seeing how the body of his friend upset Hannibal and wanting to know how Ramilles’s body was removed from the coffin and replaced with Derryhick’s body, Benjamin, with approval of police investigator Lieutenant Abishag Shaw of the New Orleans City Guards, helps with the investigation.  

It doesn’t take long for them to learn that Derryhick was with a party of Englishmen who came to New Orleans so the youngest, Germinus Stuart, the 12^th Viscount Foxford, could pursue the French Creole beauty, Isobel Deschamps, whom he had met in Paris. The other two members of the party are his uncle Diogenes and the business manager of the Stuart estate, Caius Droudge.

The plot turns on the romance between the young lovers, Isobel and Germinus, and involves labyrinthine family secrets of both. They met in Paris while Isobel was visiting relatives and Germinus was vacationing. Something happened that caused Isobel to flee Paris and return to New Orleans. Soon after her return, she leaves the city for Natchitoches Parish.

After items belonging to Derryhick are found in his hotel room, Germinus is arrested and charged with the murder. He refuses to admit he knows Isobel and to say where he was when Derryhick was killed. For Benjamin, the answer to Germinus’s silence lies upriver in Natchitoches Parish, in the St. John Chapel in Cloutieville. So, once again we follow him into danger of being captured and sold into slavery as he travels without either of his safety valves, Hannibal or Shaw. He is sure that what he finds will also provide the motive for the murder of Derryhick, which will lead to the murderer.

In the subplot, Benjamin suspects Martin Quennell, brother of the funeral direct, of embezzling money from the Faurbourg Treme Free Colored Militia and Burial Society of which Benjamin is a board member and Martin the bookkeeper. Martin also may have information about a quarrel between Derryhick and another man before Derryhick was murdered. But before Hannibal can get the information out of him, Martin is killed.

No Benjamin January novel would be complete without Ben’s Catholic belief coming up against his skepticism. He often relies on folk characters to ease his fears. So it is with "Compair Lapin" or Brer Rabbit, the trickster whom he calls upon when he wants to escape danger from white planters or thugs.

Hambly hits two discordant notes in this otherwise neatly plotted mystery. In the funeral scene, Hambly tells us nothing about Pere Eugenius, the only other white man present, and doesn’t mention him again.

The ingenious method the villain uses to replace Ramilles’s body with Derryhick’s stretches plausibility but the novel is still exciting.

To readers who follow my blog: thank you.

River Adventure

Traveling up the Mississippi River on a steamboat in the 19^th century was a dangerous journey. The danger came not only from debris floating in the river and sand bars but also from outlaws prowling the river bank looking for the opportunity to attack. For runaway slaves traveling on the Underground Railroad and free Blacks it was even more dangerous because the runaways would be returned to their masters if caught and the free would be captured and sold into slavery. In Dead Water, the ninth novel in Barbara Hambly’s Benjamin January series, Benjamin, his wife Rose, and their friend Hannibal Sefton face the dangers of river travel when they take on a case of robbery and murder.

  

Hubert Granville, president of the Bank of Louisiana, hires the dynamic trio, Benjamin, Rose, and Hannibal, to recovery four million dollars the bank manager, Oliver Weems, stole from the bank. For Ben and Rose, who naturally will accompanied him, it means going into the cotton country upriver--Mississippi, Tennessee, Missouri—and the danger of being kidnapped and sold into slavery. Since Benjamin and Rose deposited their money in the bank, Ben accepts the job provided that Granville will pay him $500 and agree to buy back him and Rose if they fall into the clutches of slave traders. As a second safe guard against such an eventuality, Hannibal travels with them disguised as their master.

The three travel upriver toward Memphis on the steamboat “Silver Moon.” Also on board are Weems, his mistress and partner in crime Mrs. Fischer, and two rival slave traders, Ned Gleet and Jubal Cain with their gangs of slaves—men and women chained together on deck. When the boat docks in Vicksburg, Rose remains on the boat while Ben and Hannibal follow Weems and Mrs. Fischer when they disembark along with the three trunks. After Hannibal gets a look at what’s in the trunks, he returns to the boat, leaving Ben to watch the two thieves. Ben knows he is in trouble when the thieves elude him, and he returns to the dock only to discover the boat has left. He faces the daunting task of making his way through the swamp along the river bank to spot where the boat will be near enough for him to swim to it. In addition to avoiding alligators, he must also watch out for the outlaw Levi Christmas and his gang who are searching for an opportunity to attack the “Silver Moon.”

Murder is not necessary for a good detective story, but it certainly makes a good story better and more interesting. I will not spoil Dead Water by revealing the name of the murdered character. Ben and Hannibal, in addition for searching for the three trunks full of gold, securities, and cash, must prove they are not the murderers. Luckily for them, they have Colonel Jefferson Davis (yes, that Jefferson Davis) who takes over the investigation and accepts Ben’s help, taking advantage of his medical and detection skills when a dead body is found on the boats big wheel.

Three elements in Dead Water made the novel more enjoyable for me. The first is the strong female villains and heroines. No damsels in distress.

The second is, in addition facing physical dangers, Ben also faces

the psychological demon that always seems to follow him. Although he is a devout Catholic and a skeptic when it comes to voodooism, he, nevertheless, often looks over his shoulder after confronting a voodoo priestess. Queen Regine puts a curse on Ben after he warns her to stay away from one of Rose’s students. Despite his skepticism about voodoo and his Catholic faith, Ben, feels Queen Regine’s presence every time he runs into obstacles that put his life in danger.

The third element is the motif of the Underground Railroad.

If you like reading crime fiction, you might enjoy reading blog posts by some crime fiction writers on the blog SleuthSayers.

Redemption

Hambly may have faltered a little in her last novel Wet Grave, but she redeems herself in her latest novel in the Benjamin January series in which she uses Aztec mythology to construct a locked room murder mystery set in 19^th century Mexico City. The events in Days of the Day, the seventh novel in the series, are played out against the background of Santa Anna preparing an army to fight the Texans.

 

The buried treasure they recovered during their last adventure allowed amateur detective Benjamin January and his new wife Rose to become moderately wealthy. Thus, when they receive a letter requesting help from their friend Hannibal Sefton, they can afford to travel to Mexico City to rescue him. He is a consumptive Irishman who self-medicates with whiskey laudanum, plays the violin with Ben at the balls in New Orleans, and is fond of quoting Shakespeare and other European poets. When the opera he and Benjamin were playing for in Wet Grave ended, he left New Orleans with the ballerina Consuela Montero, one of the daughters of the powerful, Don Prospero de Castellon, for Mexico City.

Hannibal, who was the last person seen with the mad Don Prosperos’s only living son Fernando and appeared to be handing him a drink, is accused of murdering him. The Mad Don is holding Hannibal a virtual prisoner until he can visit his son’s grave during the “Days of the Dead” festival and learn from Fernando who killed him. Hannibal also faces a threat from Captain Francisco Ylario of the civil guards who wants to capture and hang him without any prove other than everyone believes Hannibal is the murderer.

When Benjamin is accused of killing the Mad Don’s cook, he knows he is getting close to exposing the murderer. But to continue his investigation, he has to remain alive. An enraged Don Prosperos comes after him with a shotgun. Benjamin escapes from the Don’s vaqueros and hides in the Pyramid of the Dead. Rose joins him later, and they, or rather Benjamin, concocts a plan based on his knowledge of voodoo that he hopes will influence Don Prosperos’s decision on Hannibal when the Don comes to the Pyramid on the Day of the Dead festival to talk with his dead son.

As always, Hambly’s research is thorough and comprehensive. Combining the mystery genre, the thriller genre, and the historical genre is her major strength. In Days of the Day, the three genres come together in a story that holds the interest right up to the end.

For me, though not for Benjamin and Rose considering the dangers they face in Mexico, getting out of the heat and filth of New Orleans was a relief, especially since it afforded me the opportunity to learn about a different culture.