The Conjure-Man Dies is billed as the first detective/mystery novel with a black lead and an all-black cast, set in the Harlem renaissance’s hustle and bustle. The book delivers a taught if slightly bloated mystery that’s more interesting as a time capsule rather than an out-and-out mystery. Perhaps the most intriguing part of the novel is the author himself, Rudolph Fisher. Rudolph was a physician based in Harlem in the 20s and 30s who wrote this novel and a few short stories on the side extensively, and slowly became something like Harlem’s resident Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, but with a much more acute ear to the streets.

The novel tells the story of N’Gana Frimbo the Conjure-Man, a mysterious mystic, whose trade is telling people’s fortunes with acute and unnerving accuracy. But one day, during a telling he was mysteriously struck on the head and killed. No one saw the murder take place in the darkroom. The only evidence is a small gash on the back of his head, and the only suspects are three clients in the waiting room and two hoodlums, Bubber Brown and Jinx Jinkins, who are in way over the heads.

Detective Perry Dart is called to the scene to solve this mystery (the only black detective on the police force and one of only 10 black officers in total). With the help of next-door Physician Dr. Archer, they hope to get to the bottom of this bizarre case. The book is a lively read once you get past the first 5 pages of setup filled with somewhat droll descriptions. The novel is filled with slang and cutting-edge (for the time) medical science. The book offers an excellent sense of the two types of Harlemites that inhabit the borough, the highly educated and articulate Dr. Archer and Detective Perry Dart and the street inhabitants like Jinx Jenkins and Bubber Brown. This gives the book not just a sense of tapestry with the different types of people in Harlem, it also gives Fisher a reason to split the story from a by the numbers mystery at Frimbos residence. Dart and Archer’s rapport resembles a looser Watson Sherlock relationship with Dart’s straightforward, yet jokey, demeanor contrasted by Archer’s more clinical/concise approach to the matters at hand. They’re by no means the greatest literary duo, but I’d be lying if I said they didn’t get the job done with their own style.

The book periodically switches to a much more street-level detective story with Bubber Brown (he fancies himself a detective) whenever the story needs a shift in perspective to keep the momentum going. This stops the book from being a stuffy chamber play to something all encompassing, really making the world Fisher sets up vibrant and alive. You get a real sense that these characters have lives outside of the page. As a result, you get the feeling that this book is just a small piece of their otherwise full lives. Perhaps one of the more exciting aspects of the novel is its stance on race. Yes, there is a bit of “colorful language” between characters, but that just functions as witty banter. The characters are all black making the relatively few yet venomously harsh words tempered because the inherent malice isn’t there. Because of this, you can take the coarse language as a sort of seasoning to the book’s dialogue instead of something offensive and cruel. The characters never make a stink about Dart being a detective (there’s only one offhand comment), and no one ever utters a word about Archer being a Physician. As if these characters are black in both high-level and low-level positions is a bold enough statement in itself.

Although the book has many undeniably great qualities, it’s far from faultless. It can sometimes come off a little too bloated with occasional descriptions of locals or the methods in which evidence was unearthed, taking up a few pages at a time. Sure it’s all in the service of detail, which is admittedly vital for a mystery novel, but at times it comes off a bit much. And perhaps this is just the nature of the mystery novel, but at times it seems like the book is no more than an extensive interrogation from character to character, which gets rather tiresome at a point. Perhaps this isn’t so much of an adequate critique, yet another sticking point of the mystery novel. Still, it’s more concerned with atmosphere than character. You’re not going to get a deep dive into the inner workings of any character’s psychology. The most you’ll get is rather in-depth descriptions of scientific methods that were new for the time. However, take these detractors with a grain of salt, seeing how this book fits snuggly between Sir Conan Doyle and Agatha Christie’s works. The groundwork for the modern-day mystery/detective novel is very much still in development here, so it’s hard to mark any perceived missteps too harshly since this is indeed a pioneering work.

However, the book’s most disappointing aspect is that Ralph Fisher only got to write one novel in this genre (he died at the age of 37 due to radiation exposure). I believe that given more time to hone his skills, he would have rivaled other genre luminaries like Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett. His untapped potential makes his death all the more heartbreaking.

The Conjuring Man isn’t so much a perfect book as it is an important one. An unmistakable footstep that undoubtedly opened the door for such writers as Chester Himes and Walter Mosley to add their respective creations to the great American canon of hardboiled detectives. Although it is a shame that detective Perry Dart and this novel have been lost to the annals of history. It still begs the question, “is it better to be remembered and have minimal impact, or be forgotten even though doing so you kicked the door down so others in the future could thrive where you couldn’t?