Boubacar

Created by Tochi Onyebuchi
(1987-)

“Fortune always left whatever room I walked into, which is why I don’t leave my place much these days…”

Merde!

In  Harmattan Season (2025) by Tochi Onyebuchi, we meet hard luck West African BOUBACAR who’s been a “chercher” (a finder of lost persons) for a long time.

Maybe too long?

He’s slowly being ground down; the only luck he has seems to be all bad. His business is failing, the bills are piling up, and the nation is being torn apart in the endless clash between the French colonizers and the increasingly rebellious indigenous dugulen, while Harmattan season is just around the corner; threatening everyone in the country with a relentless, months-long assault of choking dust storms that make the Santa Anas in Chandler’s fabled “Red Wind” look like wimps.

War, children, it’s just a shot away…

In the first pages of a novel that’s being billed as fantasy, noir, historical and retro speculative fiction, possibly taking place in an alternative Mali around the turn of the last century, it’s not enough that a “profusely bleeding” woman comes crashing into Boubacar’s doorway — she has to disappear just as quickly, only to reappear moments later, floating in the sky.

Yeah. Floating.

People float here. Doncha just hate when that happens?

Boubacar assures us (in a tough, terse first-person that Shamus Game fans will instantly recognize), “I certainly don’t need trouble,” but of course we all know he’s going to get it

Harmattan Season (2025) is  a standalone by the award-winning American science fiction/fantasy writer (and former civil rights lawyer) Onyebuchi, and it’s drawing more than its fair share of comparisons to Chandler, so buckle your seat belts.

UNDER OATH

• “Blending elements of classic noir fiction (including a Chandleresque narrative voice) and fantastic acts of terroristic martyrdom, Onyebuchi crafts an equally heady and page-turning narrative. This is an unforgettable portrait of a place and a person trapped between two worlds and two cultures.”
  — Publishers Weekly (starred review)
• “Onyebuchi (Goliath) writes a compelling mystery, adds corrupt politics, a feet-on-the-ground exploration of postcolonialism that isn’t all that ‘post,’ and a jaundiced discussion of the supposed good old days, all told through the eyes of a Raymond Chandler–style detective…. [A] highly recommended hardboiled fantasy mystery.”
  — Library Journal (starred review)