Benjamin January Mysteries pimping post
Oct. 2nd, 2013 11:11 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
brigdhYuletide is starting soon! Do you need another fandom? I mean, four requests and five offers- that's a lot of fandoms, right? Or maybe you just want to hear about some good books, entirely disregarding the whole Yuletide thing. Well, either way, I am here to help! By telling you to request/offer my small fandom, because clearly that’s the solution everyone needs.
The Benjamin January mysteries is a book series by Barbara Hambly, and they are all available as ebooks and extremely easy to find. Set in New Orleans in the 1830s* and focused on the community of free black people, the books use an amazing amount of historical detail in a vivid, compelling way. I love what you might call the world-building: the sense of the setting as a real, detailed, complex place, full of life and people and other stories going on in the background.
*Are you looking forward to the new season of American Horror Story? Enjoying the photos and trailers with Kathy Bates and Angela Bassett? Because their characters are totally also in this series.
There is so much in this series that is exactly the sort of thing I look for in my fandoms:
-Found family / chosen family. THIS SERIES IS MADE OUT OF THIS TROPE. Of course each book has a mystery plot, but the real driving force in the series as a whole is Benjamin January’s need for a family, a community, and how he goes about acquiring and protecting people he cares for. If you like characters being stupidly loyal to one another, these books are for you.
-Us-against-the-world. It is the antebellum South and most of the characters are black people. OBVIOUSLY THE WORLD HERE IS A TERRIBLE PLACE. And yet, they band together, they find what justice they can, what happiness they can, and they save who they can. They have to work on a small scale– none of the characters is single-handedly going to end slavery– but they’re constantly battling to do what they can. These are some Big Damn Heros.
-Competency. Let’s take just one character here as an example. She speaks at least five languages (possibly two more), knows how to shoot rifles, herd cattle, use a microscope, play cards, garden, manage both the teaching and business ends of running a school, and makes her own smoke bombs and fireworks.
-Characters who are geeks. Most of the main characters are over-educated dorks, who have a tendency to quote Shakespeare or ponder about the melting point of wax when someone else might be freaking out over whatever new dramatic development has happened.
-Deadpan snarkers. See above. None of these characters is the sort to have hysterics, no matter what is going on. I really can’t think of a single character who doesn’t get to be funny at least once.
-Women dressing as men to go have adventures!
-Con-men! Okay, so, none of the main characters are actually con-men. But I think if you like this trope, this series will appeal to you, because there is so much picking locks and sneaking around and avoiding police enforcement and pretending to be someone you’re not that it ends up with a similar feel.
-Vague supernatural hints! The series is not fantasy, but every now and then there’s something that hints at not everything being explainable- someone claims to have seen a ghost, or a voodoo curse works just a little too well- and if you wanted to write fic expanding on that, I for one would love it.
-Adults who act like adults. Do you want characters who have emotional trauma but manage to deal with it without acting like 13-year-olds or like they are the only ones to have ever suffered as they have suffered? BECAUSE THAT IS EVERYONE IN THESE BOOKS.
-So much historical awesome: Pirates! Bull-fighting! International spies! Poison! Floods! Alligators! Voodoo! Duels! Hurricanes! Opera! Grave robbers! Edgar Allen Poe! Santa Anna!
-SO MUCH LOVELY DETAIL OF ALL SORTS. Food porn! Clothing porn! Music porn!
There is so much potential fanfic to be set in this world: character studies, a million minor characters who need exploring, world building, gen friendship stories, casefic, romance, and, of course, porn. Did you want a series with diversity? Because we have: tons of women, characters of color, Muslim characters, poor characters, sex-workers who are not looked down upon, gay characters, lesbian characters, a trans character, characters who’ve been raped who are not reduced to victims or someone else’s manpain. Race and color and language and class and gender and the interplay of all of them are a huge part of the series, and– in my opinion, of course– all handled extremely well.
But everyone’s favorite part of fandom is the characters, right? Let me tell you all about the characters!
Benjamin January
He turned his face away, as if the notes before him were a map that would lead him on to a better world.
At the age of ten he’d beaten up three of the quadroon boys from the St. Louis Academy for Young Gentlemen of Color, classmates he’d surprised in the act of drowning a puppy in the gutter. As the darkest boy in the school, January had little patience with those boys anyway– the ones who’d call him bozal and country and cane-patch– and he’d taken a split lip and a swollen eye in defense of the poor little cur, who had promptly slashed his wrist nearly to the bone and run away while its erstwhile tormentors howled with laughter at January’s pain and chagrin. His mother had whipped him, too, for getting his clothes torn.
The dog had been run over in the street by a carriage the following day.
As he’d said to Shaw, he understood that the makers of sublime art were not necessarily sublime themselves. And it was not necessary that they be, he told himself. Only that the art– the passion and the glory of Othello’s unwise love– be permitted to reach out to those whose loves were routinely denigrated, whose passions daily mocked.
(Die Upon a Kiss)
Ben is our main character, which is why he got the series named after him. Ben was born a slave, but was set free when he was 8, when his mother was also freed, in order to become the placee (a sort of mistress/courtesan/secondary wife that was an accepted role for women of color in this time and place) of St.-Denis Janvier, which is where Ben got his last name. Ben is currently in his early 40s, and is newly arrived back in New Orleans, after having spent most of his adult life in Paris, where he studied to be and worked as both a surgeon and a musician (piano, in particular, though he plays several instruments). When Ben’s wife, Ayasha, died in the Paris cholera epidemic of 1832*, Ben heads back to New Orleans to try and find some peace of mind. Ben is a courageous, principled man (HE RESCUES PUPPIES, YOU GUYS, COME ON), who is also funny and sweet and smart (he speaks like seven languages and also can code-switch) and sometimes kind of a giant dork. He is desperately afraid of loss, having experienced it too often, and just wants to keep everyone he loves safe and close to him.
*This is the same epidemic that led to the June Rebellion, Les Mis fans. I'm just saying.
Rose Vitac
Rose Vitrac was in her room above and behind a grocery on Rue de la Victoire, a slim gawky woman dressed neatly in contrast to the assortment of slatterns and market-women occupying the rest of the building. As January’s shadow darkened the doorway, she raised her head from the pile of Latin examinations that had overflowed her small desk onto bed, spare chair, and floor. “Ignorant little toads,” she remarked dispassionately and propped her gold-rimmed spectacles more firmly onto the bridge of her nose. Half a dozen candles burned in a cheap brass branch on the desk, different lengths and colors, bought half-consumed from the servants of the rich. “Why don’t Creoles bother to educate their children? Or make certain they’re actually studying what their tutors are paid to teach? Here’s one who seems to think Cicero was merely something that was served at Roman banquets.”
“I’m sure if Mark Antony could have arranged it he would have been.”
“You have a point. I hope you’ve come to seduce me into dinner at a gumbo stand somewhere along the levee. I think if I read many more of these I shall go out into the street and start killing young boys at random, and such things give one a terrible reputation, even in this part of town.”
Rose Vitrac had owned and taught at her own school for young ladies of color, before a combination of financial ill luck, yellow fever, and the determined enmity of one of her investors over her assistance to a runaway slave had conspired to ruin her. She now eked a kind of living from translating Latin and Greek for a small bookshop on Rue d’Esplanade, and correcting examination papers for two of the boys’ schools in town. “Not much of a living,” she admitted ruefully, as she and January descended the gallery stairs, “but decidedly superior to prostitution or sewing.”
Or marriage, she didn’t add– and she would have, once, January reflected, walking beside her along Rue Marigny.
(Graveyard Dust)
Rose Vitrac is one of Ben's closest friends, though he is more than a bit in love with her. She is also the daughter of a placee, though she grew up in the rural islands south of New Orleans, where she was a tomboy as a child, despite her parents’ efforts to raise her to be a placee herself. Rose instead demanded (and eventually, despite a lot of opposition, achieved) a full school education, and as an adult has tried to help other girls who are interested in learning by opening her own school. She’s most interested in natural science and chemistry, though she’s perfectly capable of discussing poetry or history or other subjects as well.
Rose is a private person, and is extremely slow to trust people, due to a lifetime spent constantly having to fight for her independence. She’s quite cynical, more or less an atheist or Deist (though she occasionally attends Mass with Ben, who is devoutly Catholic, for the sake of appearances), and has a cool, sarcastic sense of humor. Rose is logical, straight-forward, and not at all given to outward displays of emotion, though she is very devoted to and fiercely protective of her friends and family.
Hannibal Sefton
In addition to this, there were the usual wagers among the orchestra as to the number of challenges to duels which would be issued during the evening: two, with some discussion as to whether to count the confrontation between the Reverend Micajah Dunk and the newly-arrived Baptist preacher the Reverend Doctor Emmanuel Promise over the attention of the Widow Redfern.
“Dunk did say that Satan would sweep Promise into the ovens of Hell with a Great Broom,” pointed out Hannibal, who had bet on three challenges. (The other two were perfectly routine quarrels: a Royaliste planter whose sister had been asked to dance by a Napoleoniste, and two American lawyers whose mutual accusations of graft, bastardy, Whiggery and unnatural appetites had begun in the courtroom last month and had been continued in the ‘Letters to the Editor’ columns of the True American ever since.)
From the doorway of the kitchen, to which the musicians had been suffered to retreat for ten minutes between sets, January could see the lights and carriages at the front of the house and hear voices raised in furious altercation: “Damn it, Swathmore, you got the goddamned sand to come to me to issue a challenge for Butler? After you closed down the Trade an’ Enterprise Bank an’ ruined a thousand good men in this city?”
“Don’t tell me their seconds are going to challenge each other to a duel also,” January murmured, and Hannibal said instantly:
“In that case *that* makes three challenges-”
“That makes four,” pointed out Cochon Gardinier, the second violinist, perched corpulent and sweating on a corner of the kitchen table– he’d wagered on four– “if Preacher Promise calling on God to blast that glittering Lucifer Dunk with His Holy Light counts.”
“If we’re counting name-calling,” objected Jacques, “we’re up to about fifty!”
And the Trulove servants– trotting back and forth from the house with trays laden with Anne Trulove’s two hundred and ten settings of blue-and-yellow Bow china and enough silver spoons to armor a regiment– all clamored in agreement or dissent, like a cut-rate Greek chorus. They’d all had money on the possibility of duels as well.
“A specific call for God to blast a creeping minion of Evil,” Hannibal said, quoting Promise, whose gentle manners and ascetic beauty– like a martyr in a Bible illustration– had clearly entranced Mrs Redfern, “counts as a weapon, if it comes from the lips of a Man of God. Ye shall be able to quench all the fiery darts of the wicked, God has promised his saints... And the Reverend Dunk responded in kind, you recall, with a very clear demand that God burst Promise’s guts asunder and devour him with worms, as God so obligingly did with Herod Agrippa in Acts. Possunt quia posse videntur...”
He got to his feet and coughed, one hand pressed to his side in a way that January didn’t like. In the red glow of the hearth where the wash-up water heated, the fiddler’s eyebrows stood out very dark in a face chalky with strain, and despite the heat of the kitchen he shivered. If opium had made Hannibal a slave for half his life, January reflected grimly, at least it had kept the pain of his illness at bay.
“If them curses was weapons,” inquired old Uncle Bichet, and he sipped the beer Mr Trulove’s butler had provided for the musicians’ refreshment, “how come both those execrable shapes– like they called each other– wasn’t blasted out of their shoes then an’ there in the ballroom?”
“They both missed,” replied Hannibal at once. “Their aim was terrible.”
(Ran Away)
Hannibal Sefton is Ben’s other closest friend, and is one of Rose’s as well. He and Ben work together as musicians (Hannibal plays the violin), while he and Rose met while buying books, and continue to share and trade volumes. Unlike Ben and Rose, Hannibal is white, which places him in quite a different position in New Orleans, though he’s also known for being the one white man in town who will eat publicly with black people. His background is mysterious (since he refuses to discuss it with anyone), but he’s clearly Anglo-Irish and comes from some sort of wealthy or aristocratic family. He speaks even more languages than Ben, occasionally mentions that he studied at Trinity and Oxford, and is always ridiculously polite and courteous. However, he’s currently penniless, more or less homeless, seriously ill with consumption (TB), and has a thoroughly unhealthy relationship with alcohol and opium. He’s also the series’s resident damsel in distress, with Ben and Rose having to rescue him from hangings, stabbings, gunfire, poisonings, floods, and his own bad habits.
Despite all that, Hannibal is light-hearted, cheerful, and eccentric, spending most of his time reciting poetry or Shakespeare, flirting with every woman he meets, or playing music. He’s very self-deprecating about his own reliability and trustworthiness, though in fact he’s incredibly loyal and willing to do anything for his friends.
Lt. Abishag Shaw
“Nice shooting, in this light from over in the trees.” Shaw considered January for a moment, the ragged osnaburg shirt hanging open over his chest and his trousers, boots, flesh smudged thick with the damp earth of the fields and the wet grass and leaves from beneath the trees around the house. “My men tell me they found another of these fellers with his neck broke six or ten rods yonder from the house. You happen to see how either of them events happened? As a free man of color, of course your testimony’ll be wanted before the coroner’s court.”
“Oh, eh bien!” said Dominique hotly. “And what if my brother had killed them? Those American salauds try to murder us, and because Benjamin has black skin he would not be allowed to–”
“He’s allowed to testify,” Shaw cut her off, and fixed her with his mild gray eye. The constables moved away, bearing Albert toward the overseer’s empty cottage. “Courts do frown on it, Miss Janvier, should a colored man kill a white.”
“Bah! And I suppose defending oneself and one’s loved ones becomes more acceptable the lighter a man’s skin is?”
The deep-set gaze moved back to January again. “Well,” said Shaw gently, “I guess in some parts it do.”
“I shot him,” said Augustus, Hannibal, and Madeleine, almost in chorus. Then they looked at each other in some embarrassment, while Shaw contemplated their almost completely unmuddied boots and seemed to consider at length the fact that Hannibal at this point was not even capable of sitting up.
“I shot Trepagier,” said Augustus again. “Or maybe it was one of his own men. I forget.” His white shirt hung open at the throat and soot and blood striped his gaudy waistcoat, the yellow firelight in his eyes gave him the feral look of something out of a play by Euripides.
“One of his own men, looks like,” remarked Shaw, and scratched his jaw. “Seein’ as how he were shot from behind. Ain’t likely we’d catch ‘em all. And that feller in the field, looks like he just fell and broke his neck. You better get them boots of your’n clean, Maestro,” he added to January.
(A Free Man of Color)
Abishag Shaw is a white man, a lieutenant in the New Orleans police, and an “American”– that is, not a Creole of the good French and Spanish families of the city, but a new-comer, one of those uncouth Kentuckians who have recently flooded into the city since its acquisition by the US in 1803. Shaw and Ben start out with a very uneasy relationship, neither sure they can trust the other, and with the racial and cultural politics of New Orleans providing a lot of barriers to overcome. However, over the series they work around to a place of respect and friendship.
Shaw is scarily good at fighting, shooting, and tracking, as well as being very clever and an extremely talented detective. He struggles with speaking French and with literacy in general, but often plays up these traits in order to take advantage of others’ perception of him as a backwoods farmboy. Shaw is fairly isolated, not part of the Creole high society yet not really part of the violent, amoral American part of town, either. Though he doesn’t speak much of them, he also seems to be cut off from his family and the place he grew up.
Shaw is an intensely private, quiet person, generally keeping all of his suspicions and thoughts to himself. He’s fiercely dedicated to justice, despite being surrounded by people who are usually more interested in playing politics. Although he always obeys the letter of the law, he’s not above smudging it a little for the sake of fairness.
Dominique Janvier
“She knows about the revolt, you see.” Dominique's voice sank to a whisper, and she glanced around the room as if she thought her maid might somehow be concealed under the bed or inside the armoire– which January wouldn't have put past Therese at that. “I mean, it was Olympe I heard of it from– overheard it,” she admitted as January stared. “When I came into town to buy stockings– and, p'tit, that harpy at the Golden Rose on Rue Chartres charges sixty-five cents a pair! I was never so shocked.... Well, I went to see Olympe, and she let me in and said she was seeing someone in the parlor, and I thought it was someone just having their fortune told or buying a gris-gris.... Which I've told Phlosine a hundred times to buy from Olympe rather than go to that dreadful Queen Regine on Rue Claiborne– and of course, poor Phlosine is being driven just distracted by her friend, who hasn't been with her but a few days this summer and everyone in town is saying he's been flirting with this dreadful little hussy–”
“Did you see who was in the parlor?” interposed January, aware from long experience that Dominique's conversations frequently required skilled piloting in order to achieve their destinations.
[...]
And January saw– as clearly as if he were watching a play at the American Theater in town– that Dominique's reaction to No would be Oh, very well, p'tit, I'll be on my way back to town then.... And Scene Two, Act One would be Dominique, heavily pregnant, poling a pirogue through a swamp somewhere trying to make it to Bois d'Argent herself.
(Wet Grave)
Dominique Janvier is Ben’s younger half-sister, only 19 at the start of the series, and the only child of their mother’s white protector. As such, Dominique (who often goes by Minou) was raised as a spoiled, pampered princess, always in the expectation that she would become a placee herself. Which she has, finding herself a protector in Henri Viellard, one of the wealthiest planters in New Orleans. Dominique is extremely good at being a placee: she’s beautiful, fashionable, popular, charming, and devoted to Henri, and if there are a few hints that this is not the life she might have chosen for herself, well, she is too agreeable to let anyone notice or concern themselves. Despite her apparent shallowness, Dominique is very clever, brave, and strong-willed. She and Hannibal have a flirtatious friendship, and she and Ben have become very close since his return from Paris, since he left when she was still a small child.
Olympe Corbier
“Why did you run away?”
Olympe, sitting in the rude chair Lieutenant Shaw had dragged over into the corner of the Cabildo’s stone-flagged watch room for her, glanced up with a twist of scorn to her mouth, black eyes jeering. For an instant January was eighteen years old again, seeing her in the firelight of the brickyard. Her face hadn’t changed much in the intervening years, except to lose what girlish roundness it had ever possessed. The wry quirk of her mouth was the same, over the slightly prominent front teeth; the sharp little chin had the same way of tucking sideways with the thrust of her jaw.
“Someday some white man’s gonna sell you the whole city of Philadelphia, the Russian Crown Jewels thrown in for lagniappe,” she said. “You are the most trusting man I ever did meet and worrying after you keeps me awake all night.” And as she spoke she raised her arm from her lap and made the manacle chain jangle with a single mocking flick of her wrist.
“Where have you been?”
“Poisoning Isaak Jumon,” she retorted, her eyes not leaving his. January looked away in shame. Her mouth softened a little– which it wouldn’t have, back when she was sixteen– and she added, “Or maybe helping a friend. Which do you think?”
January grinned and replied, “Poisoning Isaak Jumon,” and though the joke probably wasn’t very funny Olympe burst out laughing, showing where childbirth had cost her two of her side teeth. Paul Corbier, standing behind her with his hands on her shoulders, looked shocked.
(Graveyard Dust)
Olympe Corbier (who also goes by Olympia Snakebones) is Ben’s other sister, younger than him by two years, and like him born into slavery, both of them the children of a man who was not freed with the rest of the family. As a child, Olympe resented their mother’s efforts to make them into proper, respectable gens de couleur libres, seeing it as a denial of the reality of who they were. At 16, she ran away from home to become the apprentice of a voodooienne, and since then she and her mother have refused to acknowledge one another. She and Ben are slowly working back to the closeness they had as children, after not speaking to one another for many years, and she and Dominique have only just begun to build a relationship. Olympe currently works as a voodooienne herself (which is more like being a midwife and a nurse than raising zombies), and is married to Paul Corbier, with whom she has four children.
Olympe is angry, fierce, and hard, extremely cynical about the society she lives in and the overwhelming reality of prejudice, whether it’s related to race, class, gender, or religion. Unlike Ben, she usually works to help people outside the system of official justice. She cares for her family deeply and is very protective of them.
“Okay,” you say, “I’m convinced! But I can’t read the whole series before Yuletide!” Don’t worry! Here’s what I would recommend:
Start with Graveyard Dust. It’s only the third in the series, so you haven’t missed much set-up, but more importantly it’s the book that features major appearances by every single main character. You can get a good sense of the world and the people in it with just this one book. And if you like it, have time, or want more you can go on to read the rest. Of course, if you don't care about Yuletide, you could just start at the beginning, with A Free Man of Color. That's good, too.
The Benjamin January mysteries is a book series by Barbara Hambly, and they are all available as ebooks and extremely easy to find. Set in New Orleans in the 1830s* and focused on the community of free black people, the books use an amazing amount of historical detail in a vivid, compelling way. I love what you might call the world-building: the sense of the setting as a real, detailed, complex place, full of life and people and other stories going on in the background.
*Are you looking forward to the new season of American Horror Story? Enjoying the photos and trailers with Kathy Bates and Angela Bassett? Because their characters are totally also in this series.
There is so much in this series that is exactly the sort of thing I look for in my fandoms:
-Found family / chosen family. THIS SERIES IS MADE OUT OF THIS TROPE. Of course each book has a mystery plot, but the real driving force in the series as a whole is Benjamin January’s need for a family, a community, and how he goes about acquiring and protecting people he cares for. If you like characters being stupidly loyal to one another, these books are for you.
-Us-against-the-world. It is the antebellum South and most of the characters are black people. OBVIOUSLY THE WORLD HERE IS A TERRIBLE PLACE. And yet, they band together, they find what justice they can, what happiness they can, and they save who they can. They have to work on a small scale– none of the characters is single-handedly going to end slavery– but they’re constantly battling to do what they can. These are some Big Damn Heros.
-Competency. Let’s take just one character here as an example. She speaks at least five languages (possibly two more), knows how to shoot rifles, herd cattle, use a microscope, play cards, garden, manage both the teaching and business ends of running a school, and makes her own smoke bombs and fireworks.
-Characters who are geeks. Most of the main characters are over-educated dorks, who have a tendency to quote Shakespeare or ponder about the melting point of wax when someone else might be freaking out over whatever new dramatic development has happened.
-Deadpan snarkers. See above. None of these characters is the sort to have hysterics, no matter what is going on. I really can’t think of a single character who doesn’t get to be funny at least once.
-Women dressing as men to go have adventures!
-Con-men! Okay, so, none of the main characters are actually con-men. But I think if you like this trope, this series will appeal to you, because there is so much picking locks and sneaking around and avoiding police enforcement and pretending to be someone you’re not that it ends up with a similar feel.
-Vague supernatural hints! The series is not fantasy, but every now and then there’s something that hints at not everything being explainable- someone claims to have seen a ghost, or a voodoo curse works just a little too well- and if you wanted to write fic expanding on that, I for one would love it.
-Adults who act like adults. Do you want characters who have emotional trauma but manage to deal with it without acting like 13-year-olds or like they are the only ones to have ever suffered as they have suffered? BECAUSE THAT IS EVERYONE IN THESE BOOKS.
-So much historical awesome: Pirates! Bull-fighting! International spies! Poison! Floods! Alligators! Voodoo! Duels! Hurricanes! Opera! Grave robbers! Edgar Allen Poe! Santa Anna!
-SO MUCH LOVELY DETAIL OF ALL SORTS. Food porn! Clothing porn! Music porn!
There is so much potential fanfic to be set in this world: character studies, a million minor characters who need exploring, world building, gen friendship stories, casefic, romance, and, of course, porn. Did you want a series with diversity? Because we have: tons of women, characters of color, Muslim characters, poor characters, sex-workers who are not looked down upon, gay characters, lesbian characters, a trans character, characters who’ve been raped who are not reduced to victims or someone else’s manpain. Race and color and language and class and gender and the interplay of all of them are a huge part of the series, and– in my opinion, of course– all handled extremely well.
But everyone’s favorite part of fandom is the characters, right? Let me tell you all about the characters!
Benjamin January
He turned his face away, as if the notes before him were a map that would lead him on to a better world.
At the age of ten he’d beaten up three of the quadroon boys from the St. Louis Academy for Young Gentlemen of Color, classmates he’d surprised in the act of drowning a puppy in the gutter. As the darkest boy in the school, January had little patience with those boys anyway– the ones who’d call him bozal and country and cane-patch– and he’d taken a split lip and a swollen eye in defense of the poor little cur, who had promptly slashed his wrist nearly to the bone and run away while its erstwhile tormentors howled with laughter at January’s pain and chagrin. His mother had whipped him, too, for getting his clothes torn.
The dog had been run over in the street by a carriage the following day.
As he’d said to Shaw, he understood that the makers of sublime art were not necessarily sublime themselves. And it was not necessary that they be, he told himself. Only that the art– the passion and the glory of Othello’s unwise love– be permitted to reach out to those whose loves were routinely denigrated, whose passions daily mocked.
(Die Upon a Kiss)
Ben is our main character, which is why he got the series named after him. Ben was born a slave, but was set free when he was 8, when his mother was also freed, in order to become the placee (a sort of mistress/courtesan/secondary wife that was an accepted role for women of color in this time and place) of St.-Denis Janvier, which is where Ben got his last name. Ben is currently in his early 40s, and is newly arrived back in New Orleans, after having spent most of his adult life in Paris, where he studied to be and worked as both a surgeon and a musician (piano, in particular, though he plays several instruments). When Ben’s wife, Ayasha, died in the Paris cholera epidemic of 1832*, Ben heads back to New Orleans to try and find some peace of mind. Ben is a courageous, principled man (HE RESCUES PUPPIES, YOU GUYS, COME ON), who is also funny and sweet and smart (he speaks like seven languages and also can code-switch) and sometimes kind of a giant dork. He is desperately afraid of loss, having experienced it too often, and just wants to keep everyone he loves safe and close to him.
*This is the same epidemic that led to the June Rebellion, Les Mis fans. I'm just saying.
Rose Vitac
Rose Vitrac was in her room above and behind a grocery on Rue de la Victoire, a slim gawky woman dressed neatly in contrast to the assortment of slatterns and market-women occupying the rest of the building. As January’s shadow darkened the doorway, she raised her head from the pile of Latin examinations that had overflowed her small desk onto bed, spare chair, and floor. “Ignorant little toads,” she remarked dispassionately and propped her gold-rimmed spectacles more firmly onto the bridge of her nose. Half a dozen candles burned in a cheap brass branch on the desk, different lengths and colors, bought half-consumed from the servants of the rich. “Why don’t Creoles bother to educate their children? Or make certain they’re actually studying what their tutors are paid to teach? Here’s one who seems to think Cicero was merely something that was served at Roman banquets.”
“I’m sure if Mark Antony could have arranged it he would have been.”
“You have a point. I hope you’ve come to seduce me into dinner at a gumbo stand somewhere along the levee. I think if I read many more of these I shall go out into the street and start killing young boys at random, and such things give one a terrible reputation, even in this part of town.”
Rose Vitrac had owned and taught at her own school for young ladies of color, before a combination of financial ill luck, yellow fever, and the determined enmity of one of her investors over her assistance to a runaway slave had conspired to ruin her. She now eked a kind of living from translating Latin and Greek for a small bookshop on Rue d’Esplanade, and correcting examination papers for two of the boys’ schools in town. “Not much of a living,” she admitted ruefully, as she and January descended the gallery stairs, “but decidedly superior to prostitution or sewing.”
Or marriage, she didn’t add– and she would have, once, January reflected, walking beside her along Rue Marigny.
(Graveyard Dust)
Rose Vitrac is one of Ben's closest friends, though he is more than a bit in love with her. She is also the daughter of a placee, though she grew up in the rural islands south of New Orleans, where she was a tomboy as a child, despite her parents’ efforts to raise her to be a placee herself. Rose instead demanded (and eventually, despite a lot of opposition, achieved) a full school education, and as an adult has tried to help other girls who are interested in learning by opening her own school. She’s most interested in natural science and chemistry, though she’s perfectly capable of discussing poetry or history or other subjects as well.
Rose is a private person, and is extremely slow to trust people, due to a lifetime spent constantly having to fight for her independence. She’s quite cynical, more or less an atheist or Deist (though she occasionally attends Mass with Ben, who is devoutly Catholic, for the sake of appearances), and has a cool, sarcastic sense of humor. Rose is logical, straight-forward, and not at all given to outward displays of emotion, though she is very devoted to and fiercely protective of her friends and family.
Hannibal Sefton
In addition to this, there were the usual wagers among the orchestra as to the number of challenges to duels which would be issued during the evening: two, with some discussion as to whether to count the confrontation between the Reverend Micajah Dunk and the newly-arrived Baptist preacher the Reverend Doctor Emmanuel Promise over the attention of the Widow Redfern.
“Dunk did say that Satan would sweep Promise into the ovens of Hell with a Great Broom,” pointed out Hannibal, who had bet on three challenges. (The other two were perfectly routine quarrels: a Royaliste planter whose sister had been asked to dance by a Napoleoniste, and two American lawyers whose mutual accusations of graft, bastardy, Whiggery and unnatural appetites had begun in the courtroom last month and had been continued in the ‘Letters to the Editor’ columns of the True American ever since.)
From the doorway of the kitchen, to which the musicians had been suffered to retreat for ten minutes between sets, January could see the lights and carriages at the front of the house and hear voices raised in furious altercation: “Damn it, Swathmore, you got the goddamned sand to come to me to issue a challenge for Butler? After you closed down the Trade an’ Enterprise Bank an’ ruined a thousand good men in this city?”
“Don’t tell me their seconds are going to challenge each other to a duel also,” January murmured, and Hannibal said instantly:
“In that case *that* makes three challenges-”
“That makes four,” pointed out Cochon Gardinier, the second violinist, perched corpulent and sweating on a corner of the kitchen table– he’d wagered on four– “if Preacher Promise calling on God to blast that glittering Lucifer Dunk with His Holy Light counts.”
“If we’re counting name-calling,” objected Jacques, “we’re up to about fifty!”
And the Trulove servants– trotting back and forth from the house with trays laden with Anne Trulove’s two hundred and ten settings of blue-and-yellow Bow china and enough silver spoons to armor a regiment– all clamored in agreement or dissent, like a cut-rate Greek chorus. They’d all had money on the possibility of duels as well.
“A specific call for God to blast a creeping minion of Evil,” Hannibal said, quoting Promise, whose gentle manners and ascetic beauty– like a martyr in a Bible illustration– had clearly entranced Mrs Redfern, “counts as a weapon, if it comes from the lips of a Man of God. Ye shall be able to quench all the fiery darts of the wicked, God has promised his saints... And the Reverend Dunk responded in kind, you recall, with a very clear demand that God burst Promise’s guts asunder and devour him with worms, as God so obligingly did with Herod Agrippa in Acts. Possunt quia posse videntur...”
He got to his feet and coughed, one hand pressed to his side in a way that January didn’t like. In the red glow of the hearth where the wash-up water heated, the fiddler’s eyebrows stood out very dark in a face chalky with strain, and despite the heat of the kitchen he shivered. If opium had made Hannibal a slave for half his life, January reflected grimly, at least it had kept the pain of his illness at bay.
“If them curses was weapons,” inquired old Uncle Bichet, and he sipped the beer Mr Trulove’s butler had provided for the musicians’ refreshment, “how come both those execrable shapes– like they called each other– wasn’t blasted out of their shoes then an’ there in the ballroom?”
“They both missed,” replied Hannibal at once. “Their aim was terrible.”
(Ran Away)
Hannibal Sefton is Ben’s other closest friend, and is one of Rose’s as well. He and Ben work together as musicians (Hannibal plays the violin), while he and Rose met while buying books, and continue to share and trade volumes. Unlike Ben and Rose, Hannibal is white, which places him in quite a different position in New Orleans, though he’s also known for being the one white man in town who will eat publicly with black people. His background is mysterious (since he refuses to discuss it with anyone), but he’s clearly Anglo-Irish and comes from some sort of wealthy or aristocratic family. He speaks even more languages than Ben, occasionally mentions that he studied at Trinity and Oxford, and is always ridiculously polite and courteous. However, he’s currently penniless, more or less homeless, seriously ill with consumption (TB), and has a thoroughly unhealthy relationship with alcohol and opium. He’s also the series’s resident damsel in distress, with Ben and Rose having to rescue him from hangings, stabbings, gunfire, poisonings, floods, and his own bad habits.
Despite all that, Hannibal is light-hearted, cheerful, and eccentric, spending most of his time reciting poetry or Shakespeare, flirting with every woman he meets, or playing music. He’s very self-deprecating about his own reliability and trustworthiness, though in fact he’s incredibly loyal and willing to do anything for his friends.
Lt. Abishag Shaw
“Nice shooting, in this light from over in the trees.” Shaw considered January for a moment, the ragged osnaburg shirt hanging open over his chest and his trousers, boots, flesh smudged thick with the damp earth of the fields and the wet grass and leaves from beneath the trees around the house. “My men tell me they found another of these fellers with his neck broke six or ten rods yonder from the house. You happen to see how either of them events happened? As a free man of color, of course your testimony’ll be wanted before the coroner’s court.”
“Oh, eh bien!” said Dominique hotly. “And what if my brother had killed them? Those American salauds try to murder us, and because Benjamin has black skin he would not be allowed to–”
“He’s allowed to testify,” Shaw cut her off, and fixed her with his mild gray eye. The constables moved away, bearing Albert toward the overseer’s empty cottage. “Courts do frown on it, Miss Janvier, should a colored man kill a white.”
“Bah! And I suppose defending oneself and one’s loved ones becomes more acceptable the lighter a man’s skin is?”
The deep-set gaze moved back to January again. “Well,” said Shaw gently, “I guess in some parts it do.”
“I shot him,” said Augustus, Hannibal, and Madeleine, almost in chorus. Then they looked at each other in some embarrassment, while Shaw contemplated their almost completely unmuddied boots and seemed to consider at length the fact that Hannibal at this point was not even capable of sitting up.
“I shot Trepagier,” said Augustus again. “Or maybe it was one of his own men. I forget.” His white shirt hung open at the throat and soot and blood striped his gaudy waistcoat, the yellow firelight in his eyes gave him the feral look of something out of a play by Euripides.
“One of his own men, looks like,” remarked Shaw, and scratched his jaw. “Seein’ as how he were shot from behind. Ain’t likely we’d catch ‘em all. And that feller in the field, looks like he just fell and broke his neck. You better get them boots of your’n clean, Maestro,” he added to January.
(A Free Man of Color)
Abishag Shaw is a white man, a lieutenant in the New Orleans police, and an “American”– that is, not a Creole of the good French and Spanish families of the city, but a new-comer, one of those uncouth Kentuckians who have recently flooded into the city since its acquisition by the US in 1803. Shaw and Ben start out with a very uneasy relationship, neither sure they can trust the other, and with the racial and cultural politics of New Orleans providing a lot of barriers to overcome. However, over the series they work around to a place of respect and friendship.
Shaw is scarily good at fighting, shooting, and tracking, as well as being very clever and an extremely talented detective. He struggles with speaking French and with literacy in general, but often plays up these traits in order to take advantage of others’ perception of him as a backwoods farmboy. Shaw is fairly isolated, not part of the Creole high society yet not really part of the violent, amoral American part of town, either. Though he doesn’t speak much of them, he also seems to be cut off from his family and the place he grew up.
Shaw is an intensely private, quiet person, generally keeping all of his suspicions and thoughts to himself. He’s fiercely dedicated to justice, despite being surrounded by people who are usually more interested in playing politics. Although he always obeys the letter of the law, he’s not above smudging it a little for the sake of fairness.
Dominique Janvier
“She knows about the revolt, you see.” Dominique's voice sank to a whisper, and she glanced around the room as if she thought her maid might somehow be concealed under the bed or inside the armoire– which January wouldn't have put past Therese at that. “I mean, it was Olympe I heard of it from– overheard it,” she admitted as January stared. “When I came into town to buy stockings– and, p'tit, that harpy at the Golden Rose on Rue Chartres charges sixty-five cents a pair! I was never so shocked.... Well, I went to see Olympe, and she let me in and said she was seeing someone in the parlor, and I thought it was someone just having their fortune told or buying a gris-gris.... Which I've told Phlosine a hundred times to buy from Olympe rather than go to that dreadful Queen Regine on Rue Claiborne– and of course, poor Phlosine is being driven just distracted by her friend, who hasn't been with her but a few days this summer and everyone in town is saying he's been flirting with this dreadful little hussy–”
“Did you see who was in the parlor?” interposed January, aware from long experience that Dominique's conversations frequently required skilled piloting in order to achieve their destinations.
[...]
And January saw– as clearly as if he were watching a play at the American Theater in town– that Dominique's reaction to No would be Oh, very well, p'tit, I'll be on my way back to town then.... And Scene Two, Act One would be Dominique, heavily pregnant, poling a pirogue through a swamp somewhere trying to make it to Bois d'Argent herself.
(Wet Grave)
Dominique Janvier is Ben’s younger half-sister, only 19 at the start of the series, and the only child of their mother’s white protector. As such, Dominique (who often goes by Minou) was raised as a spoiled, pampered princess, always in the expectation that she would become a placee herself. Which she has, finding herself a protector in Henri Viellard, one of the wealthiest planters in New Orleans. Dominique is extremely good at being a placee: she’s beautiful, fashionable, popular, charming, and devoted to Henri, and if there are a few hints that this is not the life she might have chosen for herself, well, she is too agreeable to let anyone notice or concern themselves. Despite her apparent shallowness, Dominique is very clever, brave, and strong-willed. She and Hannibal have a flirtatious friendship, and she and Ben have become very close since his return from Paris, since he left when she was still a small child.
Olympe Corbier
“Why did you run away?”
Olympe, sitting in the rude chair Lieutenant Shaw had dragged over into the corner of the Cabildo’s stone-flagged watch room for her, glanced up with a twist of scorn to her mouth, black eyes jeering. For an instant January was eighteen years old again, seeing her in the firelight of the brickyard. Her face hadn’t changed much in the intervening years, except to lose what girlish roundness it had ever possessed. The wry quirk of her mouth was the same, over the slightly prominent front teeth; the sharp little chin had the same way of tucking sideways with the thrust of her jaw.
“Someday some white man’s gonna sell you the whole city of Philadelphia, the Russian Crown Jewels thrown in for lagniappe,” she said. “You are the most trusting man I ever did meet and worrying after you keeps me awake all night.” And as she spoke she raised her arm from her lap and made the manacle chain jangle with a single mocking flick of her wrist.
“Where have you been?”
“Poisoning Isaak Jumon,” she retorted, her eyes not leaving his. January looked away in shame. Her mouth softened a little– which it wouldn’t have, back when she was sixteen– and she added, “Or maybe helping a friend. Which do you think?”
January grinned and replied, “Poisoning Isaak Jumon,” and though the joke probably wasn’t very funny Olympe burst out laughing, showing where childbirth had cost her two of her side teeth. Paul Corbier, standing behind her with his hands on her shoulders, looked shocked.
(Graveyard Dust)
Olympe Corbier (who also goes by Olympia Snakebones) is Ben’s other sister, younger than him by two years, and like him born into slavery, both of them the children of a man who was not freed with the rest of the family. As a child, Olympe resented their mother’s efforts to make them into proper, respectable gens de couleur libres, seeing it as a denial of the reality of who they were. At 16, she ran away from home to become the apprentice of a voodooienne, and since then she and her mother have refused to acknowledge one another. She and Ben are slowly working back to the closeness they had as children, after not speaking to one another for many years, and she and Dominique have only just begun to build a relationship. Olympe currently works as a voodooienne herself (which is more like being a midwife and a nurse than raising zombies), and is married to Paul Corbier, with whom she has four children.
Olympe is angry, fierce, and hard, extremely cynical about the society she lives in and the overwhelming reality of prejudice, whether it’s related to race, class, gender, or religion. Unlike Ben, she usually works to help people outside the system of official justice. She cares for her family deeply and is very protective of them.
“Okay,” you say, “I’m convinced! But I can’t read the whole series before Yuletide!” Don’t worry! Here’s what I would recommend:
Start with Graveyard Dust. It’s only the third in the series, so you haven’t missed much set-up, but more importantly it’s the book that features major appearances by every single main character. You can get a good sense of the world and the people in it with just this one book. And if you like it, have time, or want more you can go on to read the rest. Of course, if you don't care about Yuletide, you could just start at the beginning, with A Free Man of Color. That's good, too.
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Date: 2013-10-02 03:39 pm (UTC)(is your polybigbang, by chance, a hambly fic? because if so, YES PLEASE).
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Date: 2013-10-02 06:12 pm (UTC)(It totally is!)
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Date: 2013-10-02 05:53 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-10-02 06:10 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-10-02 07:23 pm (UTC)*This is the same epidemic that led to the June Rebellion, Les Mis fans. I'm just saying.
you are seriously my favourite.
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Date: 2013-10-02 08:18 pm (UTC)I'm still trying to get someone to write me that crossover fic with Les Mis.
Or, alternatively, looking at some of the Joly/Bousset/Musichetta fanart and pretending it's Hambly characters.no subject
Date: 2013-10-02 08:26 pm (UTC)(I started watching a weird movie the other night, which was set in the 1830s, only because I wanted to figure out why Ben was quite so opposed to modern fashions. Then there was Mormonism, I think? And graphic childbirth, and I fell asleep.)
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Date: 2013-10-02 08:39 pm (UTC)Look at this one (http://pilferingapples.tumblr.com/post/48631867664/litoste-mazeltoph-requested)!
Or this one! (http://rrueplumet.tumblr.com/post/44966321388)
There are even modern AU gifsets! (http://dinolaur.tumblr.com/post/51802246413/joly-x-musichetta-x-bossuet)
Sometimes it only kind of works and Hannibal is blond (http://hawberries.tumblr.com/image/52792793006) or Rose is too pale (http://vulcanyounot.tumblr.com/post/50567257261/bossuet-musichetta-and-joly-as-requested-by), but it's generally fairly successful.
(Haha, that sounds like a very strange movie. But I have to side with Ben, some of these sleeves (http://www.thefashionhistorian.com/2011/03/gigot-sleeves.html) are RIDIC.)
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Date: 2013-10-04 11:49 am (UTC)Do you recognise any of the actors in the modern!AU gifset? I think the woman in the third row MIGHT be Ruth Negga - or at least she has Ruth's lovely eyes and eyebrows - and the guy on the bottom is that guy from House? But I'd love to know about the man in the first row on the left, because he looks familiar (also v. hot) but I can't think who he might be!
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Date: 2013-10-04 05:25 pm (UTC)I did find this other super-cute fanart (http://kironomi.deviantart.com/art/Three-in-the-Afternoon-361318397), though!
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Date: 2013-10-02 09:36 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-10-02 09:57 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-10-03 02:15 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-10-03 02:26 am (UTC)Good Man Friday is the only one of the series that's been made into an audiobook (though I'm hoping for some others, since I really like audiobooks too). I liked the reader a lot, though the format makes the mystery kind of hard to follow (it centers around long strings of numbers used as codes, which is hard to express aurally.) On the other hand, if you don't actually care that much about solving the mystery for yourself and are more into the characters, it's all fine!
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Date: 2013-10-03 02:37 am (UTC)(So many books to read. augh.)
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Date: 2013-10-03 02:55 am (UTC)(Yeah, I'm having that problem at the moment too! On the other hand, too many books is a much better problem than "I can't find anything good, ugh", which is the problem I was having all last year.)
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Date: 2013-10-03 01:40 pm (UTC)I love the Ben January mysteries! I think I would be too intimidated to try and write fic for them though without doing loads of research I don't have time to do. The books just feel so accurate and well-researched, as well as the characters being made of win. I can never decide whether Hannibal or Rose is my favourite character ♥
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Date: 2013-10-03 05:10 pm (UTC)Well, I for one would still be very happy to read fic even if it did not have that much research or world-building. Besides, you could always just set it inside someone's house: no need to figure out what's going on outside!
I love pretty much EVERY SINGLE CHARACTER and they are all so fantastic, but I have to admit that I think Hannibal is my favorite. But– Rose! And Ben! And Minou! I really want someone to write a Hannibal/Dominique friendship fic where they are just hanging out, flirting and gossiping and eating pastries.
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Date: 2013-10-31 11:05 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-11-01 10:06 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-11-02 04:02 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-11-02 05:40 pm (UTC)And honestly, a distraction from my epic poly fic would be very welcome at the moment!