A rare opportunity for mystery fans to view life in depression era Harlem from the perspective of a black author. Rudolph Fisher was a doctor whose own experiments in “Roentgenology” probably led to his early death from cancer two years after the publication of this book; he was only 37. This book was his only full length mystery work, although he did author at least one mystery novelette, “John Archer’s Nose”, which happily is included in this Collins Detective Club publication.
Perry Dart, a black NYPD detective and John Archer, a black detective, investigate the murder of a “conjure-man” named Frimbo who dispenses advice for a living to Harlem clients. As a mystery, this work will generate comparisons to early mystery practitioners, but all binning aside, we have a basic police procedural made more complex by the fact that detective Perry Dart has much of his legwork done for him by private detective wannabe Bubber Brown and most of his meaningful deduction done by Dr. Archer. Dart interviews suspects, supervises the investigation and acts as devil’s advocate to Dr. Archer’s theories on the crime. The crime itself is made more interesting by the fact that the victim, Frimbo, is not actually the initial murder victim and appears to have resurrected himself from the dead.
If read purely as mystery entertainment, this book may seem quite ordinary in the genre. There is some clever manipulation of the plot elements, but essentially, I believe, Fisher wrote this book to further explore a theme that pervades his other works, that of black people exploring identity issues regarding their role(s) in American society. Fisher’s portrait of Harlem is clearly that of a virtually hermetically sealed environment, but this environment contains individuals who are striving to establish themselves as fully accredited members of their chosen professions and for conjure-man Frimbo, a man who is attempting to create a black man who can reconcile his ancestry and his present condition to embody an entirely new human.
Fisher may have chosen the mystery genre to explore these identity issues, because by its nature a mystery of course involves elements of exploration, rational thinking and resolution to a central issue. In this work the central issue is not the crime and its perpetrator, but the elements required to establish one’s self in a world so clearly by its nature hostile to the creation of something new and different. As an African immigrant of royal descent working various rackets in Harlem, Frimbo is an alien presence to both his neighbors and himself. How Frimbo and his adversaries adapt and remold their chosen roles and how they strive to resolve their issues of self in relation to these roles form the true backbone of this work. More notable as a social document than as a mystery, THE CONJURE-MAN DIES is nonetheless a very entertaining and varied read, including elements of light comedy, mystic philosophy, criminal shenanigans and insights into the psyches of principal and minor characters alike.
The relationship between Dart and Dr. Archer is one of mutual respect and their growing relationship is developed quite skillfully and is accompanied by an amusing badinage usually lacking in the more conventional partner pairings in the genre which are often of the master & stooge variety. The main suspect in the crime (whom no one is convinced is actually convinced is guilty, but somebody has to be locked up), Jim Jenkins, presents a figure that today would might be regarded as a stereotype by SJWs, but Fisher has drawn a character that is more than merely a passive woebegone victim. He plays a key role in the contributions provided by borderline scamster and opportunist Bubba Brown to the solution of the mystery.
This edition includes an introduction by Stanley Ellin which provides some background on Fisher’s life and attempts to force some connections with Fisher’s mystery writer contemporaries. Ellin also provides an assessment of Fisher’s place in mystery fiction, but the essay seems beside the point. Written in 1971, one regrets that the publisher deemed this work unworthy of a current essay that might have provided the reader with criticism more germane to Fisher’s purpose and motivations for writing this book.
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Reviews with images
Great Writing, Until the End!
It’s 1932, and America is suffering through the first half of the Great Depression. In Harlem, NYC, this means some people need to reinvent themselves. Jinx Jenkins, for example, has decided to set up shop as a private detective.Jinx has quite the abundance of confidence, but to put the seal on this new endeavor, he decides to check his prospects with “N. Frimbo, Psychist,” as it says on his sign. Will he be successful, Jinx wants to know? Unfortunately, the Great Frimbo is in the middle of Jinx’s reading, when Frimbo is murdered, still sitting in his conjuring chair. Lucky for Jinx, now Prime Suspect No. 1, Inspector Perry Dart is the NYPD Detective on the case.As one of the nice things about the (to me) newly discovered Library of Congress Crime Classics, “The Conjure-Man Dies” has great footnotes throughout. For example, I’ve always heard the phrase “numbers runner”, but I didn’t really know what it meant. Thanks to a footnote to this book, I now know!This edition also includes two addenda: A. a 5-page “About the Author” and B. a 4-page “Some Memories of ‘Bud’, “ by Laurel Fisher, granddaughter of the author.But the star of this book is the writing. It is smart and quick. My favorite was “The utter unexpectedness of his own incrimination, and the detective’s startling insistence upon it, almost robbed Bubber of speech, a function which he rarely relinquished.”Runner up, this description of a dancer in a bar: “With extraordinary ease and grace, this young lady was proving beyond question the error of reserving legs for mere locomotion, and no one who believed that the chief function of the hips was to support the torso could long have maintained so ridiculous a notion against the argument of her eloquent gestures.”Unfortunately, this is a mystery, and its denouement, about 32 pages worth, was a let-down. Dart and the doctor hash out who the murderer is, how and why, in a long and boring exposition.But I loved the pace and the language of the murder up to the end = 4 stars.Happy Reader
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More interesting as a historical portrait than as a mystery, but you'll still have a lot of fun here
Reviewed in the United States on February 26, 2021
