Fisher’s last novel The Conjure Man Dies (1932) plays fast and loose with tradition, urbanity, high and low culture, rationalism and primitivism. This curious novel is the most overlooked of Fisher’s texts, perhaps because there seems so little context for understanding an African American detective novel in this period; perhaps more because its variety of form makes it a difficult text to classify or respond to.

The novel constructs African American urban culture as a series of conversations about the nature of racial being that take place across the divided spaces of Lenox and Seventh Avenue. The formal conventions of the detective novel are both invoked and transgressed as the means to facilitate this spatial movement. The novel draws on competing philosophical and popular traditions; ranging from African myth and African American spiritualism, to American pragmatism, applied determinism, scientific rationalism, psychoanalysis, popular science and vernacular street culture. This rather heady mixture is yoked together through a classic detective plot where the conundrum of an impossible murder resolves itself as down-to-earth revenge for sexual infidelity.

The novel opens with another example of the mapping of the divided dimensions of Harlem’s racial spaces as they run along Seventh, 135th and Lenox Avenue, here more radically subjectivised as Fisher describes the winter cold intensifying and waning in response to the relative energies of the Avenues. We arrive at the house of Samuel Crouch, Undertaker, and N. Frimbo, Psychist. Frimbo – African prince, Harvard philiosopher – has settled in Harlem as the perfect testing ground for his experiments in evading the deterministic force of linear time and history as well the constraints of racial being. There he predicts the future for clients who come to him with problems ranging from luck on the numbers to unfaithful wives and ailing relatives, but his method is less conjure than talking cure as we see him sit in the darkness reading the future from the narratives the clients share with him. It is in Frimbo’s consulting room that the first murder occurs as he predicts the future for Jinx Jenkins, one half of an Amos and Andy style double act who represent Harlem’s Lenox side in the novel. Frimbo is apparently killed and the blame falls on the hapless Jinx, but this proves to be only the beginning as we find that Frimbo returns from the dead to participate in the pursuit of his own murderer. The case is investigated by Sergeant Perry Dart, his friend Dr Archer, whose scientific rationalism is played off against the pragmatism of the down-to-earth Dart, and Jinx Jenkins and Bubber Brown, whose desperation to get work has led them to set up a detective agency specialising in marital infidelity and money suites. The dead body turns out to be that of Frimbo’s servant, which Frimbo must dispose of himself in accordance with the ancient laws of his African tribe. This law is the ‘rite of the gonad’, whereby the history of the tribe and the virility of its male leader are bound together in the ingestion of an extract of the gonad of the tribal ancestors. Frimbo insists, however, that he will indeed die, and though he can predict this occurrence he cannot stop his own murder nor name the perpetrator. His words are fatally borne out when Dart and Archer stage a reconstruction of the night of the murder.

As the novel opens we see a characteristic Fisher trait, the overheard blues refrain on the city street. The blues fragment relays for us the subsequent narrative course as a clue we have to hold in mind even as we are confused and dazzled by the competing sounds of urban experience. The blues tells us:

I’ll be glad when you’re dead, you rascal you
I’ll be glad when you’re dead and gone, you rascal you.
What is it that you’ve got
Makes my wife think you’re so hot?
Oh you dog – I’ll be glad when you’re gone.

(Fisher, 1932, 3)

The song drifts in and out of the text a number of times as ‘the moment’s most popular song’ (Fisher, 1932, 3) and sounds a note to the wise that the apparently complex tale will be revealed as a simple blues refrain of sexual jealousy. The transparency of the blues works subtly against the more complicated ways of solving the crime that are debated as the text moves through a series of deductive and inductive possibilities. The ways in which the crime might be solved are always also the ways in which we are invited to understand the negotiation between and across Harlem’s divided urban locations. Understanding urban African American identity is the true puzzle for the text and reader, as the prescient Frimbo observes about his own apparent murder:

Archer: ‘You don’t think the causes of a mere death a worthy problem?’

Frimbo: ‘The causes of a death? No. The causes of death, yes. The causes of life and death and variation, yes. But what on earth does it really matter who killed Frimbo – except to Frimbo?’…

… ‘The rest of the world would do better to concern itself with why Frimbo was black.’

(Fisher, 1932, 230)

The blues gives us, then, not a simple expression of the truth of the tale so much as one way of reading the urban scene and the puzzle of urban black identity. When we see the fascinating conjure man outwitted by the powerful inevitability of death we come to understand the complexity of the apparently straightforward lyric and appreciate the embedded vernacular histories that music carries in the novel. There are, however, many other forms of urban knowledge that work alongside the bitter-sweet sexual story of the music. The novel is full to the brim with stereotypical urban figures: so we see Pullman porters, undertakers, detectives, numbers runners, religious evangelists, night-club singers and conjure men. Cultural fads vie for position with rather more high-brow modes of cultural authority as conjure work is revealed to be something close to Freudian analysis and Frimbo’s African primitivism is revealed to be the radical relativism of a Harvard-trained philosopher. The novel, at both implicit and explicit levels, takes on board the weighty philosophical issues of the age – the meanings of time and the determination of history, the meanings of racial identity and the origins of man – and poses them as part of the fashionable discussion of what it means to be modern and a city-dweller.

The identity of Frimbo’s murderer is less important in the end than the clash and collaboration between elite and popular culture in Harlem, between ‘dicty’ New Negroes and ordinary ‘rats’, that in the end solves the crime. Each character must face the insufficiency of his mode of understanding the crime and the racial scene that is the novel’s larger topic. Reading the city and the place of race within it depends on the eclectic engagement of these different modes of understanding.

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