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.

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.

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.