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The Benjamin January mysteries is a series of historical murder mystery novels by Barbara Hambly. The series is named after the main character of the books.
Contents
The Benjamin January mysteries are set in and around New Orleans during the 1830s, and focus primarily on the free black community which existed at that time and place. The first book was published in 1997, and the series is still on-going. The first eight books in the series were published by Bantam Press, with the subsequent four being published by Severn House Publishers. The second book in the series, Fever Season, was named a New York Times Notable Mystery Book of 1998. Six books in the series (Fever Season, Dead Water, The Shirt on His Back, Ran Away, Good Man Friday, and Crimson Angel) have received starred reviews from Publishers Weekly.
Major recurring characters
Benjamin January: Mixed-race former slave, freed as a child by his mother's lover. He was trained in Paris as a surgeon, but works primarily as a piano player. He is very tall, and very dark-skinned, which is a significant impediment to his medical career in pre-Civil War New Orleans. He lived in France for many years, but returned to New Orleans when his first wife, Ayasha, died.
Rose Vitrac: The mixed-race daughter of a placée, who was raised with the intention of becoming a placée herself. However, Rose was more interested in learning, particularly natural sciences, and eventually managed to secure an education and establish herself as a schoolteacher, in order to assist other free colored girls. She is close friends with both Benjamin and Hannibal, and eventually becomes Benjamin's wife.
Hannibal Sefton: Benjamin's friend and fellow musician (violin). He is Anglo-Irish, and appears to be from a noble or wealthy family, though he refuses to speak about his past and is currently living in poverty. He has tuberculosis, and is addicted to alcohol and laudanum, though he eventually manages to break both habits. Hannibal is one of the few white people in the books willing to socialize with the black community, and as a result is regarded as somewhat degenerate by white society.
Dominique 'Minou' Janvier: Benjamin's younger half-sister, the daughter of his mother and her white protector. Dominique is herself the placée of a wealthy white gentleman, Henri.
Olympe 'Olympia Snakebones' Corbier: Benjamin's younger sister (though older than Dominique). She is a locally prominent Voodoo practitioner, as well as a wife and mother. Both she and Benjamin were fathered by another slave before their mother became a placée. She was freed at the same time as her brother and mother.
Livia Janvier Levesque: The mother of Benjamin, Olympe, and Dominique. She is a former placée, and now a minor land owner. She is half white, and extremely status-conscious. She was born a slave, and was freed along with her children when she became a placée.
Lieutenant Abishag Shaw: A white policeman, originally from Kentucky, who is significantly smarter and better educated than he pretends to be. Unlike many of the other policemen, Shaw is as interested in true justice as the letter of the law, and has often proved sympathetic to Benjamin's concerns. He seems not to support the institution of slavery, but is still careful to obey the expected rules of behavior regarding black-white interactions, at least in public.
Henri Viellard: The man that Dominique is the placée of, and the father of her two children: Charles-Henri (deceased) and Charmian.
Chloe Viellard (née St Chinian): Henri's fiance, later his wife; a young heiress with control of her own property.
Works in the Series
The Benjamin January mysteries series consists of fourteen novels and five short stories to date.
Novels
Short stories
All the short stories are also available for download on Hambly's website.
Book synopses
A Free Man of Color: Newly arrived in New Orleans after spending most of his adult life in Paris, Benjamin is accused of the murder of a placée named Angelique when he is the last known person to see her alive. Benjamin struggles to find the real killer before he is jailed and executed for the murder. He also tries to help the widow of Angelique's former protector, a white woman who may have had her own reasons for wanting Angelique dead.
Fever Season: During a cholera and yellow fever epidemic, Benjamin deals with a runaway slave girl, Cora, who is wanted for poisoning her master, Otis Redfern. He also meets Rose, the head-mistress of a school for free colored girls, when he helps to treat several of the students who have yellow fever. The kidnapping of free blacks to sell them as slaves forms a major subplot to the novel. Delphine LaLaurie is central to the novel's climax.
Graveyard Dust: Benjamin's sister Olympe is accused of murder and Benjamin must find the real killer in order to prevent her from being hanged. Olympe's role as a voodoo practitioner is used against her to raise suspicion, and voodoo plays an important part in the mystery. Marie Laveau is an important secondary character.
Sold Down the River: The white planter who formerly owned Benjamin and his family asks Benjamin to determine the source of a series of violent incidents on his plantation. Benjamin agrees, but must go undercover as a slave, taking along Hannibal to serve as his master. The ruse places Benjamin in a great deal of danger, as well as bringing back unwelcome memories of his childhood as a slave.
Die upon a Kiss: An opera troupe, composed mostly of Italians, arrives in New Orleans, and Benjamin and Hannibal are hired to play in the orchestra. However, after the director and several other members of the troupe are attacked, Benjamin investigates to find out the cause, which he suspects is related to an attempt to censor production of an operatic version of Othello, due to racist anger over the central black/white romance. In a subplot, Dominique finds herself pregnant and struggles with the decision to keep the child. The smuggling of slaves from Cuba and Africa into America, despite the 1808 Act Prohibiting Importation of Slaves, is another important plot thread.
Wet Grave: The aging former placée of a pirate is killed under mysterious circumstances, and Benjamin and Rose find themselves caught up in the workings of someone else's plot, on the run in the bayous and marshes. Historical events involving pirates, including Jean Lafitte, are relevant to the plot, as well as slave rebellions, leprosy, and hurricanes. Henri and Chloe marry, putting Henri and Dominique's relationship in peril. Benjamin and Rose marry at the end of the book.
Days of the Dead: In Mexico City, Hannibal has been falsely accused of poisoning the son of a prominent local landowner. Benjamin and Rose, at his request, come to find the true murderer amid a complicated tangle of relationships and suspects, and to rescue Hannibal both from legal execution and from being held in captivity by a rich madman. Santa Anna plays a minor role in the plot.
Dead Water: A great deal of money has been embezzled from the bank where Benjamin and his wife Rose keep their money. To prevent the bank's collapse, and thus save Rose's school for colored girls, Benjamin, Rose, and Hannibal follow the embezzler on a steamboat to recover the stolen money. The embezzler's murder complicates matters greatly. The Underground Railroad appears for the first time in the series, and Benjamin agrees to join, allowing use of his home as a safe house. This will form a background detail in many of the subsequent novels.
Dead and Buried: At a friend's funeral, Benjamin discovers a different body in the coffin— that of a white man that Hannibal recognizes. Hannibal's history, which he has long kept a secret, proves relevant to the mystery. The issue of 'passing' plays an important part in the novel.
The Shirt on His Back: Lieutenant Shaw's younger brother was murdered while working as part of a fur trading company in the Rocky Mountains. Shaw, Benjamin, and a newly-sober Hannibal travel to a trade rendezvous to find the killer. At the end of the book, Rose gives birth to her and Benjamin's first child, John.
Ran Away: A former Turkish ambassador moves to New Orleans, but is the first suspect when two of his concubines are murdered. Nearly half the book takes place in a flashback to Paris, 1827, where Benjamin had met the Turkish man previously. Benjamin's relationship with his first wife, Ayasha, is given greater detail.
Good Man Friday: A friend of Chloe and Henri Viellard disappears while traveling in Washington DC. Chloe, Henri, Dominique, and Benjamin go to the capital to investigate, becoming involved in subplots with early baseball, slave-stealers, mathematical codes, and Edgar Allan Poe.
Crimson Angel: Rose's white half-brother is murdered as part of a plot to recover the Vitrac family's long-lost treasure (as well as secrets hidden with the money) from their former sugar plantation on Haiti. After an attempt on Rose's life, she and Benjamin retreat to the rural countryside of southern Louisiana. When the killers follow them there, Rose, Benjamin, and Hannibal head to Cuba to investigate before eventually reaching Haiti itself.
Analysis
The series, beginning with A Free Man of Color, follows Benjamin January, a brilliant, classically educated free colored surgeon and musician living in New Orleans during the belle epoque of the 1830s, when New Orleans had a large and prosperous free colored demimonde. January was born a slave but freed as a young child and provided with an excellent education; he is fluent in several classical and modern languages and thoroughly versed in the whole of classical Western learning and arts. Although trained in Paris as a surgeon, he has returned to Louisiana to escape the memory of his dead Parisian wife. As he is a very dark-skinned black man, in Louisiana he cannot find work as a surgeon. Instead, he earns a modest living by his exceptional talent and skill as a musician.
Each title is an entertaining murder mystery with a complex plot and well-developed characters, and each explores many aspects of French Creole society. However, most tend to emphasize some particular element of antebellum Louisiana life, such as Voodoo religion (Graveyard Dust), opera and music (Die Upon a Kiss), the annual epidemics of yellow fever and malaria (Fever Season), fear of miscegenation (Dead and Buried), or the harsh nature of commercial sugar production (Sold Down the River).
Important themes running throughout the series are 1) the cultural clash between the rising Protestant English-speaking Anglo-Americans on the one hand and the declining Catholic, French-speaking Creoles on the other, 2) the extreme regard of Creole society for "how" colored a person is (quite alien to modern readers), 3) January's bitterness at the many forms of racial injustice he observes, 4) the complex, partially race-based sexual politics of colonial French society, and 5) January's ongoing attempts to balance the primal, open, and frank African outlook acquired in his early childhood with the more restrained and rational European worldview he now holds. This last theme occurs most often with respect to music, spirituality, and respect for law and social custom.