(1979), and A Chocolate Soldier (1988)—Colter,
whose favorite novel is Crime and Punishment and
whose favorite philosophers are Thomas Hobbes
and B. F. Skinner, prefers to avoid racial themes
and social issues in his work. Instead, he is inter-
ested in more existential and deterministic expe-
riences: the condition of merely being a human
being. When asked by John O’Brien if he felt his
art “must be used in some way to effect changes
in society,” Colter candidly responded, “I can’t say
that I do.... What I am trying to do when I’m
writing is to get down on paper what I see and feel,
and it’s very possible that it has no social value at
all. I’m not sure, and I really don’t care too much
actually” (21).
Like Camus’s Sisyphus, Colter’s characters are
caught in situations over which they have no real
control. They are determined. Colter explains his
view of the human condition: “we are here as ef-
fects of certain causes about which we have noth-
ing to do, and that these causes determine what
we are and what we shall be.... We are caught in
this bind, and we go inexorably down this course
which is willed for us by these causes that we
had no control of ” (22). This is true of Mary in
“Mary’s Convert,” Mildred in “The Lookout,” and
Verna in “A Man in the House,” who are all unable
to change their lot, circumstances, class, or envi-
ronment. None of these characters can control or
determine the outcome of their lived experiences.
This is also true of Elijah of “The Beach Umbrella,”
whose desperate search for love and human com-
passion remains untenable.
Although the characters in the 14 stories in The
Beach Umbrella are black, the personal stories are
all deterministic; race plays little or no significant
role in the characters’ experiences which include
stories about guilt, loneliness, love, alienation, and
a lack of communication. These themes also char-
acterize Colter’s novels. For example, in his tragedy
The Rivers of Eros, Clotilde Pilgrim, a grandmother
who thinks she has done everything to protect her
16-year-old granddaughter from making the same
mistakes she has made, learns that her grand-
daughter is involved in an affair with a married
man. Driven by guilt and fear, Clotilde kills her
granddaughter to avoid seeing history repeat itself.
When he received the Iowa Prize for short fiction,
Colter was described as “what a writer is and al-
ways has been—a man with stories to tell.” Colter
has lived up to this description for more than four
decades.BIBLIOGRAPHY
O’Brien, John. Interviews with Black Writers. New
York, Liveright. 1973.
Wilfred D. SamuelsConjure-Man Dies: A Mystery Tale of
Dark Harlem, The Rudolph Fisher
(1932)
The Conjure-Man Dies, RUDOLPH FISHER’s second
novel, holds the distinction of being the first Afri-
can-American detective novel and, for some crit-
ics, psychological thriller. When Harvard-educated
N’Gana Frimbo, an African “conjure man” who
plies his trade in Harlem, turns up dead, Harlem’s
Detective Perry Dart and Dr. John Archer, a physi-
cian who assists homicide detectives, are called in
to help solve the case. In the end, however, Frimbo,
who it is discovered is very much alive, helps solve
the mystery and find his would-be killer.
The novel’s strength is Fisher’s complex charac-
ters. Frimbo, besides being an intelligent Harvard
graduate and student of philosophy, is also an Af-
rican king who suffers from paranoia and, as con-
jurer, seeks to “escape the set pattern of cause and
effect” (268). Frimbo engages John Archer, a medi-
cal doctor who is incapable of using language that
falls outside his medical profession, so his speech
is esoteric and archaic. Perry Dart, “the newly ap-
pointed champion of the law” (98), is Harlem’s
first black patrolman to be promoted to detective.
According to the narrator, Dart has been chosen
because “his generously pigmented skin rendered
him invisible in the dark, a conceivable great ad-
vantage to a detective who did most of his work at
night” (14). This description of Dart gives insight
into the humor Fisher successfully weaves into
his entire text. Fisher juxtaposes his more intelli-
gent characters—perhaps representatives of ALAIN
LOCKE’s class of “thinking Negro”—with stereo-114 Conjure-Man Dies: A Mystery Tale of Dark Harlem, The