56 pages • 1 hour read
Rudolph FisherThe Conjure Man Dies: A Mystery Tale of Dark Harlem
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1932A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Authorial Context: Rudolph Fisher
Fisher’s extensive knowledge of biology and human anatomy plays a central role in the medical analysis and forensics Dr. Archer uses in the novel. Fisher earned his BA and MA degrees from Brown University in 1919 and 1920, respectively. He then attended Howard Medical School, graduating with honors in 1924. He became a radiologist and began research on the use of ultraviolet rays to treat viruses. He died from intestinal cancer in 1934 at age 37. It is believed that Fisher’s experimentation with ultraviolet rays contributed to his death.
In the novel, Dr. Archer’s phenomenal scientific knowledge is essential to Detective Dart’ solving the murder case. Dr. Archer gives detailed explanations of serums in blood tests, blood typing, and different serums’ ability to manipulate blood samples in the form of “agglutination” in Chapter 18. Furthermore, Fisher displays his knowledge of biology and forensics in Dr. Archer’s explanation of the killer’s ability to copy Jinx’s thumbprint using powders and pastes in Chapter 22. Fisher’s knowledge of science also allows him to write believable explanations of Frimbo’s biological and technological techniques that reflect the character’s proficiency in the natural sciences.
However, it is not only Fisher’s scientific background that shapes the novel’s plot. Fisher was also a jazz musician who once toured with Paul Robeson. In the novel, a jazz song plays throughout the novel, the chorus of which goes, “I’ll be glad when you’re dead, you rascal you” (1, 78, 241). The song’s lyrics and style throughout the novel show Fisher’s love and talent for writing music, especially jazz music. Call and response and recurring musical motifs are also components of jazz music, and this repeated lyric helps build the narrative’s structure and tension.
Socio-Historical Context: The Harlem Renaissance
The Harlem Renaissance was an important Black American cultural movement that took place in Harlem during the 1920s and 1930s. The Harlem Renaissance saw a promotion and celebration of Black culture, including literature, music, art, and religion. The movement also sought to empower the Black community in Harlem and unite them as a race. This call for unification would help build the civil rights movement in the coming decades. Rudolph Fisher was a significant writer in the Harlem Renaissance and helped shape Black literature with his works, including his two novels, The Walls of Jericho and The Conjure-Man Dies.
His second novel, The Conjure-Man Dies, is revolutionary in that the novel consists only of Black characters. It also features not only a Black detective but also a Black physician, whose knowledge and observational skills help the police solve the crime, and an African fortune teller who is a skilled scientist and inventor, holds a psychology degree from Harvard, and follows the philosophical theory of determinism. Linguist Stanley Ellis asserts in the introduction that Fisher was likely “intrigued by the idea of presenting Harlem, from top to bottom” and did this by creating characters from a wide range of personal backgrounds and giving them realistic personalities and dialogue (viii). In an era where many white authors flattened Black characters into stereotypes, Fisher presents a wide variety of Black characters to highlight the Black community’s humanity. Additionally, his depiction of Frimbo subverts stereotypes about African healers, validating his spiritual practices by placing them alongside his philosophical and medical qualifications.
Fisher also incorporates his interest in Pan-Africanism and support for Black unity into the novel. One example is when Frimbo connects Dr. Archer’s struggles as a Black man in America with the dangerous environment and rituals of his native Buwongo. He tells Dr. Archer that he “omitted the drama” of his father’s “struggle to educate” him, his “desperate helpless, facing the probability of not being able to go into medicine; the impending alternative of teaching school in some Negro academy,” and his struggles through menial jobs and “orders from your inferiors, both white and black” (172). Frimbo’s comparison of his and Dr. Archer’s lives presents the idea that while his and Dr. Archer’s struggles were different, those struggles shaped their lives as Black men.
Literary Context: Detective Fiction
Detective fiction began with Edgar Allan Poe’s creation of C. Auguste Dupin in his 1841 short story “The Murders in the Rue Morgue.” Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes novels and other stories made detective fiction a popular and well-loved genre, and detective fiction became especially popular in the 1920s and 1930s. In these decades, Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple novel series and Dashiell Hammett’s 1930 novel The Maltese Falcon became staples of the genre.
For the first several decades after its formation, nearly all detective fiction authors were white. When Rudolph Fisher published The Conjure-Man Dies in 1932, he was one of the first African American authors to write a detective novel. Fisher added diversity to the detective fiction genre by making not only his detective Black but also the rest of the cast. By focusing on the Black community, Fisher used detective fiction to tackle struggles in 1920s and 1930s Harlem and present Pan-Africanism and Harlem’s Black community’s fight for equality and progress. In his introduction to the novel, Stanley Ellis explains the following:
Since the 1860s, when Metta Victor in America and Wilkie Collins in England produced the first formal mystery novels, there had been no Black writer who utilized this technique as a means of literary expression until Fisher came along (vi).
Fisher adds Black representation to the detective genre and gives his Black detective and physician the inquisitiveness and cleverness that define fictional detectives. As a result, The Conjure-Man Dies has helped bring more racial diversity and other forms of diversity to the detective fiction genre.
