The Conjure-Man Dies

African-American authored mystery fiction dates back to the turn of the 19th century. The first known example is Pauline Hopkins’s Hagar’s Daughter (1901-1902), serialized in Colored American Magazine: The story takes place on a Maryland plantation in Washington, DC between 1860-1880 and features a black maid as the detective. Next came John E. Bruce’s Black Sleuth (1907-1909), which McGirt’s Magazine ran in successive editions: In this book the sleuth is a West-African man who travels to the United States and then Europe and, as a professional, works for the International Detective Agency. Both these tales are really proto-mysteries, mixing blatant social commentary into their plots, but they serve as important historical guideposts in the evolution of black mystery fiction. It was not until 1932, during the Harlem Renaissance, the first full-fledged, non-serialized detective novel by an African American was published: Rudolph Fisher’s The Conjure-Man Dies. Fisher, a physician by trade, died two years later, at age 37, but the one mystery novel he left behind is a remarkable work.

The Conjure-Man Dies reads as a classic detective novel of the Golden Age Era. A mysterious African man named Frimbo works as a fortune-teller in Harlem. Upstairs above a funeral home he has a suite where he receives clients. He has a waiting room and a dimly lit receiving room. One by one clients come to sit in a chair facing him and hear him dispense his wisdom. A client named Jinx Jenkins enters, seats himself opposite Frimbo, and proceeds to talk with the “psychist.” Frimbo dominates the conversation. Suddenly, though, Frimbo says something about “not bein’ able to see” and goes silent. Frightened, Jinx leaps up and turns the one light in the room, shining on him until then, on Frimbo. To his astonishment he finds Frimbo dead. The ensuing investigation quickly reveals Frimbo was murdered, but how could he have been killed before a witness, in the middle of a conversation? It is an impossible crime scenario in line with the era’s English mystery novels—Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, and many others—and the reader quickly recognizes Fisher knew these writers and this brand of detective fiction well. As in an English country house mystery, a large portion of the novel takes place at the crime scene, with the investigators questioning people, including a small circle of suspects. But Fisher’s book is not a mere copy of a then-popular form. Fisher writes an engrossing mystery complete with clues, red herrings, and surprising plot twists, and adapts it to his own concerns as a Harlem Renaissance novelist.

I still remember the first time I read The Conjure-Man Dies: It was assigned by one of my many African-American Literature professors, my third one to be exact (I struggled to finish this course in college, not due to the difficulty of the material or any conflicts with the professors; but since the large number of students in each class created a stagnant atmosphere lacking the intimacy and dialogue I preferred my literature classes to deliver, I rarely attended; each class had strict attendance policies I foolishly kept believing my high marks would supersede). Even though I rarely sat upon their hard, wooden, warped, and sometimes smoothed chair-desks, I always read the material required for each class, because I’ve always inhaled literature like a young boy at his first dance pleasingly breathes in the fragrant air surrounding his more-nervous-than-him date. But when I purchased a copy of this novel, I wasn’t too enthusiastic (I was downright annoyed) to read it because the novel was rather thick (which usually isn’t a deterrent for me), but the bulky pages had almost one and a half inch margins and the text wasn’t single-spaced, but one and half again; this strangely bothered me more than using giant plates for small portions of food.

    Despite my annoyances I plopped down on my bed at around ten thirty one night, turned the knob on my once-mechanical armed desk lamp, now broken and duct-taped to the leg of the table next to my bed, and begrudgingly cracked the cover.

    

    I read to six in the morning. I couldn’t stop.

    

    The novel read like any other mystery novel, revealing clues and new information to keep the reader guessing and wanting-to-know, and ultimately ended with a mind-blowing conclusion I didn’t see coming from the first description of the crime scene. 

    The only thing more upsetting then the novel ending was when I searched for more work from this author, only to discover he passed away two years after this mystery masterpiece, not leaving behind any other stories of this intonation.