- Mass Market Paperback: 432 pages
- Publisher: Bantam Books; Reprint edition (July 1998)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0553575260
- ISBN-13: 978-0553575262
- Product Dimensions: 10.8 x 2.9 x 17.4 cm
- Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 921,952 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
A Free Man of Color: Benjamin January Series, Book 1
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Product Description
Product Description
A lush and haunting novel of a city steeped in decadent pleasures...and of a man, proud and defiant, caught in a web of murder and betrayal.
It is 1833. In the midst of Mardi Gras, Benjamin January, a Creole physician and music teacher, is playing piano at the Salle d'Orleans when the evenings festivities are interrupted--by murder.
Ravishing Angelique Crozat, a notorious octoroon who travels in the city's finest company, has been strangled to death. With the authorities reluctant to become involved, Ben begins his own inquiry, which will take him through the seamy haunts of riverboatmen and into the huts of voodoo-worshipping slaves.
But soon the eyes of suspicion turn toward Ben—for, black as the slave who fathered him, this free man of color is still the perfect scapegoat....
It is 1833. In the midst of Mardi Gras, Benjamin January, a Creole physician and music teacher, is playing piano at the Salle d'Orleans when the evenings festivities are interrupted--by murder.
Ravishing Angelique Crozat, a notorious octoroon who travels in the city's finest company, has been strangled to death. With the authorities reluctant to become involved, Ben begins his own inquiry, which will take him through the seamy haunts of riverboatmen and into the huts of voodoo-worshipping slaves.
But soon the eyes of suspicion turn toward Ben—for, black as the slave who fathered him, this free man of color is still the perfect scapegoat....
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
At first, it is difficult to understand what Barbara Hambly was attempting with "A Free Man of Color". Typically, when an author chooses an historical setting, he or she is doing one of two things, bringing light to the past through the artifice of fiction or revealing the present through the veil of the past. If Hambly was doing the former, she did a fine job of evoking old New Orleans.
The book takes place during a time when The City That Care Forgot was losing her tenuous grip on her past and becoming a unique product of American industrialism and European traditions. The Civil War was still thirty years in the future and New Orleans, for all the destruction and disease she had seen, for all the blood spilled in her streets still had an air of innocence. This is the story of Benjamin Janvier, recently widowed and returning to New Orleans after 16 years in Paris. This places Benjamin in the unique position of being able to contrast Paris, with it's lack of color distinctions, and New Orleans, with it's infamous "Code Noir" - the well-defined laws governing the behavior of "colored" people and their interaction with the French settlers, or Creoles. This also places the reader in the position of comparing the treatment of blacks in Janvier's day and their treatment today, which makes this something of the latter of the above kinds of novels. Is Hambly trying to tell an engaging and accurately detailed story set in the past? Or is she trying to poignantly underline current wrongs by speaking to us through the past? I'm not sure she is certain which story she wants to tell, which puts the reader in the awkward position of trying to figure it out for themselves.
Ben, a surgeon in Paris but, due to prejudice, unable to practice medicine in New Orleans, makes his living as a pianist. On his way to play at an octaroon ball, he runs into one of his former students, Mistress Trepagier, a creole widow who is sneaking into the ball in disguise, desperate to speak with her late husband's mistress. When the mistress is later strangled, Ben, due to his color, seems a likely scapegoat - the victim was a woman of color, the murderer a man of color. Let's hang him and get on with our lives. Thinking he will get no consideration from the police, Benjamin looks into the murder on his own. Hambly seems to have difficulty finding the rhythm in her narrative, like a drummer only slightly out of step with the rest of the marching band. The overall effect is nice, but you keep suspecting her hitching a step in order to catch up. Once she gets in step, however, the effect is mesmerising; the language becomes more fluid, the characters more honest to themselves. From an historical perspective, I fully expected to have Marie Laveau pop up, at least in mention, and I was not disappointed; the greater treat was a cameo by Madame LaLaurie, the famous New Orleans civil rights activist (I'm kidding, of course).
Although I had to struggle to get comfortable with this book, it won me over in the end. I am looking forward to the next story in the Benjamin Janvier chronicles.
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful
Format:Mass Market Paperback
Barbara Hambly brilliantly recreates the world of free blacks in Louisiana in the 1830s--a unique, dangerous society. Her hero, Benjamin January, a free man of color returned from Paris, lives a cat-and-mouse existence, constantly threatened with enslavement. His sister and her friends make their living as placées, socially recognized concubines. Murder is a complication none of them can afford. Hambly, well-known as a fantasy writer, turns this real-life background into something rich, strange, and haunting. You will not forget this book.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
An unusual subject for Barbara Hambly - at least for someone who had read only her Darwath and Sunwolf books before.
She seems to have a good grasp of the social and political divides of the time she has chosen, and I was intrigued to learn about a whole area of American culture / sub-culture of which I had known nothing before.
Well written and a gripping storyline.
She seems to have a good grasp of the social and political divides of the time she has chosen, and I was intrigued to learn about a whole area of American culture / sub-culture of which I had known nothing before.
Well written and a gripping storyline.
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