if those who entered here were warned beforehand
not to speak above a whisper” (4).
Customers sit with N’Gana Frimbo, the
conjure-man who advertises himself as a “psy-
chist,” in a “chamber” that is kept “almost entirely
in darkness” by “black velvet drapes” that hang
from the ceiling to the floor. The only light in the
room comes from a “single strange source... a de-
vice which hung low over a chair behind a large
desk-like table” that shines directly upon patrons
but shrouds the conjure-man in shadows (6). The
novel becomes a murder mystery when one patron
discovers that the conjure-man to whom he is di-
recting his questions is dead. Over the course of
the novel, Archer begins working with Perry Dart,
a NEWYORKCITYpolice detective assigned to the
homicide. Dart represents a new era in the crimi-
nal justice system; he is the highest-ranking
African-American officer and one of only 10 men
of color who serve on the Harlem force. A “Man-
hattanite by birth,” he has a good knowledge of the
city, and “having himself grown up with the black
colony, knew Harlem from lowest dive to loftiest
temple” (14).
The novel takes on a new twist when Frimbo’s
body goes missing from the mortuary. As the detec-
tives deal with that news, they encounter yet an-
other mystery. Frimbo comes back to life in the
midst of an interrogation that is being staged in
what was believed to be the murder scene. Detec-
tive Dart, Martha Crouch, and others stare “with
utterly unbelieving eyes at the figure that sat in the
chair from which the dead body had been re-
moved: a black man wearing a black robe and a
black silk head-band; a man with fine, almost deli-
cate features, gleaming, deep-set black eyes, and
an expression of supreme intelligence and tranquil-
ity” (169). Frimbo insists that this is not the first
time that he has “outwitted death” and insinuates
himself into the murder investigation. The stalwart
Harlem detectives, however, suspect that Frimbo
may be guilty of murdering his own servant,
N’Ogo. The real villain is ultimately revealed, and
it is Stanley Crouch, a cuckolded man who suc-
ceeds in striking again, killing N’Gana Frimbo,
who has seduced Martha, his wife.
Fisher maintains an absorbing narrative, one
that, according to one of his contemporary re-
viewers, “takes on such varied aspects as time goes
on that the reader is kept busy wondering who, if
anybody, has been murdered—to say nothing of
the how and the why” (Anderson, BR 13). As
scholar Adrienne Gosselin notes, Fisher success-
fully creates a character inspired by the legendary
detective Sherlock Holmes and one who even
outdoes the classic detective created by Sir Arthur
Conan Doyle. In addition, suggests Gosselin,
Fisher uses the novel to examine the evolving
African-American middle class, one that is “[n]o
longer grounded in equal marriage or moral recti-
tude” but rather “increasingly materialist, having
fully appropriated the values of the petit bour-
geois” (Gosselin, 614–615).
Reviewer Isaac Anderson celebrated the novel
and was encouraged by the fact that Fisher did
“not make the mistake, so common with Cau-
casian authors, of making all his Negroes comic”
(Anderson, BR13). Fisher’s innovative modernist
text appeared six years after The Haunting Handby
Walter Roberts, which is recognized as the first
non-serialized African-American detective novel.
Pauline Hopkins, an accomplished editor at the
Colored American Magazineand author of Hagar’s
Daughter(1901–1902), published the earliest seri-
alized African-American mystery novel. Fisher’s
work renewed interest in the mystery novel and
demonstrated yet another multifaceted version of
life in Harlem.
Recent productions of Conjure-Man Diesin-
clude January 2001 performances at the New Fed-
eral Theatre in Manhattan and by the Kuntu
Repertory Theatre of the University of Pittsburgh,
which ended its 2001–2002 season with a presen-
tation of Fisher’s work. Recently optioned by the
well-known actor Morgan Freeman, the novel may
also become a major feature film.Bibliography
Anderson, Isaac. “New Mystery Stories.” New York
Times,31 July 1932, BR 13.
Fisher, Rudolph. The Conjure-Man Dies, a Mystery Tale of
Dark Harlem.1932, reprint, New York: Arno Press,
1971.
Gosselin, Adrienne. “The World Would Do Better to
Ask Why Is Frimbo Sherlock Holmes?: Investigat-
ing Liminality in Rudolph Fisher’s The Conjure-
Man Dies.” African American Review 32, no. 4.
(winter 1998): 607–619.Conjure-Man Dies, The: A Mystery Tale of Dark Harlem 93