My Vacation Reading

As you know, in December I take a vacation from reading crime fiction so I can read some literary fiction or popular fiction.

What I’m reading this December: An e-novel, Dark Genesis by A. D. Koboah, which I’m reading on my iPad Mini.

The other two are print books:

As you know, I’m a contributor to the website SleuthSayers. Well, I’ll post my last contribution to the site this month. Beginning January, I’ll devote my time exclusively to this blog because I’ve discovered that, though Black writers are producing much crime fiction, no website is devote to reviewing their books. I wish to change that. I don’t mean to say their books aren’t reviewed. Some are reviewed in the mainstream publications. Walter Mosley, for instance, is sure to be reviewed. 

Anyway, please visit the SleuthSayers blog here and discover how writers of crime and mystery fiction come up with ideas for stories, how they construct their stories, and how they publish them. In addition, you’ll read about how real police work, how real soldiers go about soldiering, and many other subjects not necessarily about writing or books.

Have a Merry Christmas, and I’ll catch you in the New Year.

The Bounty Hunting Bail Bondsman

In the next months, I’ll be discussing the novels of Dr. Robert O. Greer. In an earlier time, Dr. Greer might have been considered a renaissance man. In addition to writing novels, he is a professor of dentistry, dermatology, medicine, and pathology at the University of Colorado and owns a large cattle ranch in Wyoming. I became acquainted with Dr. Greer, the writer, when I read his unpublished short story “Oprah’s Song,” featuring CJ Floyd, in the anthology BLACK NOIR: MYSTERY, CRIME, AND SUSPENSE FICTION BY AFRICAN-AMERICAN WRITERS. The short bio shows he has written several novels featuring CJ Floyd, “a tough, often curmudgeonly, cheroot-smoking African-American bail bondsman and occasional bounty hunter.”

I became acquainted with CJ (Calvin) Floyd In Greer’s first novel, The Devil’s Hatband. Floyd is the only black bail bondsman on Denver’s bails bondsmen row. A Vietnam vet, he is six weeks away from his 45th birthday, worries about being in a middle-aged crisis, and resents the way bailbond business seems rigged against black bondsmen. He has a quick temper that he struggles to control. His trademark dress is a “jet black riverboat gamblers vest" and a stetson straw hat. He owns a "pampered '57 Chevrolet Bel Air.”

Floyd gets his first case as a detective when two well dressed black men enter his office and offer to pay him $150 a day to find and bring back Brenda Mathison, daughter of  federal judge Lewis Mathison, and retrieve some documents she stole from Carson Technologies, Inc., a corporation located in Boston. She is the leader of a radical environmentalist group called The Grand River Tribe. He has 30 days to complete the job if he wants to get paid.

The Brenda is not wanted by the police, there is no warrant out on her, and CJ is not a private investigator. He points out that bringing her back could be considered kidnapping. He wonders why they want to hire a bounty hunter when the case seems to require a private investigator or lawyer. He is suspicious but takes the job because he needs the money.

CJ finds the Brenda in a cabin in the mountains in Wyoming. He can’t bring her back because she is dead. The Sheriff of the county will not allow him to search the cabin, and CJ doesn’t reveal why he wants to search it. Back in Denver, when he reports her death to Judge Mathison, the judge immediately offers to pay him $10,000 to find her killer.

To earn the $10,000, CJ finds himself dealing with a manic, the second in command who became the leader, upon Brenda’s death, of the Grand River Tribe. Unlike Brenda who only wanted to turn the ranchers’s cows loose, Denver Deere, using information stolen from Carson Technologies, has developed a deadly virus he plans to use on the cows and possibly people. As if tracking and stopping Deere weren’t enough, CJ has to deal with a gangbanger named Razor D with him he had a run in when Razor threatened his ex-girlfriend Mavis.

Once a detective takes a case, he is expect to complete all phases of it. In the wrap up, Greer fails to explain why CJ didn’t find the documents and the reason for the time limit for finding the killer. The significance of the title escaped me. There is a hat band in the last chapter, but it doesn’t belong to any of the villains. It is a gift from one of CJ’s friends to Mavis. But the title has a nice ring to it, and invites you to read the novel.

Greer effectively uses the two conventions of detective fiction. He introduces a dead body in the first chapter, which will keep the reader reading to discover who did it. He delays until the penultimate chapter to reveal the identity of the super villain.

The promise Greer shows in this first novel encouraged me to read the others, and I expect to have fun doing so because I like the bounty hunting bails bondsman and sometime detective.

A Novel and A Detective Story

This blog is devoted to crime and mystery fiction, but the novel I wish to discuss this month is not a mystery. The Bondwoman’s Narrative is the story of one woman’s escape from slavery. The discovery of the novel and the efforts of several scholars to identify the author is a literary detective story as exciting as the novel.

Discussion of this fascinating novel is difficult because it requires close reading to examine the strengths and weaknesses of plot and characterization and the historical context. So, I discuss it only briefly. Furthermore, the effort of scholars to verify the author’s identity is a literary detective story deserving its own critical analysis. For an in-depth discussion of the book, read Paul Berman’s brilliant and illuminating essay “The True Story of American’s First Black Female Slave Novelist” on the New Republic website.

The Bondwoman’s Narrative was published in 2002 by Warner Books and edited with introduction by Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. chair of the Afro-American Studies Department at Harvard University. His discovery of the unpublished manuscript in the Swann Galleries catalogue was exciting because “Holograph, or handwritten, manuscripts by blacks in the nineteenth century are exceedingly rare….” The manuscript had never been edited by a professional editor or mediated by a white person as many of the fictional and nonfictional slave narratives were. If he could authenticate the manuscript and confirm the author’s identity, The Bondwoman’s Narrative would prove to be the first novel written by a former female slave in the United States.

The Bondwoman’s Narrative by Hannah Crafts: A Fugitive Slave Recently Escaped from North Carolina is the full handwritten title on the first page of this important black sentimental novel. As does many fictional and nonfictional slave narratives, it depicts the evils of slavery. Hannah, the literate narrator/ protagonist, tells the story of her escape from a plantation in Virginia, her capture and resale to the Wheelers in North Carolina, and finally her escape to New Jersey. Aunt Hetty an old white woman who lived near the plantation where Hannah grew up defied the law and taught her to read. Like many slaves who learned to read and write, Hannah knows the Bible and begins each chapter with a biblical epigraph.

Hannah seemingly accepts her condition as a slave: “’I am a slave’ thus my thoughts would run. ‘I can never be great; I cannot hold an elevated position, but I can do my duty, and be kind in the sure and certain hope of eternal reward.[‘]”.  She is also a perceptive observer of people:  “Instead of books,” she “studied faces and characters, and arrived at conclusions by a sort of sagacity that closely approximated to the unerring certainty of animal instinct.” This talent for wearing the masks to conceal her feelings and thoughts from the masters, which many slaves learned, allows her to adjust to the different circumstances in which she finds herself. When the mask no longer works, she realizes it’s time to again make a try for freedom.

annah hHhHHHHhhhhhhh

The former slave clearly mastered the techniques of novel writing that made her an outstanding storyteller. She reveals the effects of slavery on master and slave, especially how supposedly kind masters supported the peculiar institution. In the preface she asks, “Have I succeeded in showing how it blights the happiness of the white as well as the black race?” My reply is a resounding yes.

Experts in ink and paper helped Professor Gates establish that the novel was written in the 1850s. His examination of the prose showed that the author was familiar with and borrowed from Jane Eyre and Bleak House. Unfortunately, he was unable to establish her identity. The story of the discovery of the novel is in itself as exciting as the novel, but even more exciting is the mystery of the author’s identity. Once the novel was authenticated, the literary detectives went to work to solve the mystery: who was Hannah Crafts?

An article in the New York Times dated September 18, 2013, claims that, 12 years after Professor Gates found the novel, Professor Gregg Hecimovich, chairman of the English Department at Winthrop University in Rock Hill South Carolina, had found additional evidence that revealed the author was named Hannah Bond, a slave on the plantation of John Hill Wheeler in North Carolina. Professor Hecimovich planned to publish his discovery in a book titled The Life and Times of Hannah Crafts.

If you are interested in African American literature, read The Bondwoman’s Narrative and the efforts to identify the author. You will not be disappointed.

The novel is certainly not a mystery, but the subject, slavery, was a national crime.

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.

A Slight Misstep

“You know what they say of white men in Louisiana…They come here seeking fortune, but all they find is a wet grave”

Should a critic confess that he can’t pin point why a novel by a novelist he has praised in the past is disappointing? Yes, and I so confess. No matter how good a storyteller a writer is, if she is also prolific and her main character is a series protagonist, the quality of her novels will, at some point, drop. Such is the case with the sixth novel in Barbara Hambly’s Benjamin January series.

In Wet Grave amateur detective Benjamin January and his friend Rose Vitrac, the deceptively beautiful and scholarly former girl’s school teacher, investigate two murders.

Benjamin’s sister Olympe summons him to view the body of an old, drunken Black woman. He immediately recognizes Hesione LeGros whom he last saw 23 years ago when he was 16 and playing the piano at a party for Jean Lafitte’s band of pirates. The two of them had hidden behind the piano when a fight broke out among the guests. In her younger days, she was the mistress of one of Lafitte’s pirate captains.

Knowing that the authorities will not come and take away the body or investigate the murder of an old free Black woman, an angry Ben with his friend Rose decides to find out who killed Hesione and why. The investigation leads them to one of Jean Lafitte’s former pirate captains named Cut-Nose Chighizola, who might tell them more about the dead woman.

The failure of the authorities to investigate Hesione’s death causes Ben to direct his anger at the one White policeman friend he has, the Kaintuck, Lieutenant Abishag Shaw. “Anger flared up in” Ben “briefly, like kindling. It ignited a bigger log, an anger that did not leap and glare but that burned slow and deep and hot.” But he knows it isn’t Shaw’s fault because, he says to Shaw, you are “doing your duty, and going where you’re sent.” In the subplot, Shaw is sent to the Avocet plantation to investigate the alleged killing of Guifford Avocet by his brother Robert.

Ben’s anger is further stoked when he and Rose learn that 16-year-old Artois St. Chinian, an octoroon Rose was tutoring, is killed because he mistakenly received a box containing guns instead of the vacuum pump he had ordered.

The investigation of the two murders propel Ben and Rose into a battle against rebelling slaves, criminals hunting for Jean Lafitte’s buried treasure, and a hurricane that brings ashore alligators and snakes.

Wet Grave is not filled with as much action as the preceding novels. The romance between Ben and Rose, though expected and necessary, slows the pace of the action somewhat. Furthermore, despite the danger in which Benjamin and Rose find themselves, I didn’t feel the tension the situation should generate and, consequently, I had no sense of relief once the danger had passed.

The slow pace is due primarily to a problem with all serial novels: the author has to repeat the backstory of the protagonist so that the novel stands alone, even though it is one in a series. At the same time, the author must provide continuity with the other novels in terms of setting and especially the serial protagonist.

A few days after finishing the novel, something still kept nagging at me in the back of my mind, clamoring that something was wrong. What’s wrong is the Avocet subplot does not fit. Hambly does a good job of completing the plot within itself, but, despite the need for it as a plot device, it often tends to distract from rather than advance the main plot.

Despite the flaws, Wet Grave is still readable due to the magic of Hambly’s storytelling. In this novel, Hambly is like a person climbing stairs and misses a step; she stumbles but rights herself and continues.