6 June, 2004
A Free Man of Color, Barbara Hambly (311 pp, HC, 1997)
Benjamin January is a "free man of color" (i.e. he's black, but not a slave) living in New Orleans in 1830. He has recently returned to the country and city of his birth after living in Paris for something like 16 years, and he is having a difficult time readjusting to life in a place where he's regarded as a third-class citizen. Although he is trained as a surgeon, he makes his living through music (both performing and giving lessons).
Trouble arises when the "colored" (i.e. part-black) mistress of a recently-dead upper-class Creole is murdered at a Mardi Gras ball. The prime suspects are the dead woman's new lover (rich and white), the upper-class Creole's widow (white and upper-class, but not rich), and January himself (black and middle-class). Society being what it was, and most of the police being more interested in closing the case than actually discovering the truth, January feels that he has to find out who the murderer is before the authorities decide to go with the easiest-to-prosecute option (himself).
It's pure coincidence, but I seem to be reading a lot of genre-mixing books lately, and this is no exception. It's one part hard-boiled novel, one part historical fiction. January himself is not particularly hard-boiled--he's no Sam Spade--but the plot follows the conventions of that tradition, what with the protagonist getting beat up, back-stabbed, suspected of murder, and so forth, and solving the mystery through legwork, rather than elegant deduction.
As for the historical stuff, I know next to nothing about the setting, but Hambly's presentation made a definite impression on this ignorant reader. Perhaps a bit too definite--I actually had a hard time getting through the book, because the society depicted therein is absolutely horrible, and it is depicted very effectively. What with the slavery, the institutionalized racism, the institutionalized sexism, the hypocrisy, the fact that a man's wife can be little better off than his slaves, and worse off than his mistress. It's a thoroughly unpleasant setting.