Chinks in the Armour Rudolf Fisher’s “The Conjure-Man Dies”

CHINKS IN THE ARMOUR
RUDOLPH FISHER’S
“THE CONJURE-MAN DIES”
as a sleuth novel

B. Girija Bai

The title conjures up visions of intriguing mystery; the name of the writer rings no bell. That is Rudolph Fisher and his single detective novel The Conjure - man Dies. Fisher’s name is not chronicled anywhere in the history of detective fiction - either amongst American detective writers or amongst Black American detective writers.

It is generally believed that Chester Himes is the first Black American detective writer. In actuality Fisher’s novel pre-dates Himes, making Fisher truly the first Black American detective novelist. Thus, historically, The Conjure - man Dies is the first detective novel written by a Black American writer.

This, perhaps, is the most valuable aspect of the novel. For, judging it purely by its merits as a work of sleuth fiction, one may tend to receive it with an attitude of reticence, of raised brow and pursed lips. This comment is ventured in spite of the fact that Stanley Ellin has written the introduction to the reprint edition consulted here. This latter seems to have been a due regard to the book’s historical value and to its illuminating focus on Harlem life which throws into stark relief their social attitudes and behaviour.

But before wading into the critical waters, a summary of the story first. The four -storeyed house 13w, 130th in Henley, owned by undertaker Samuel Crouch, is occupied by an African called Frimbo, who seemed to be making a fortune by fortune - telling and, as believed popularly, by turning their fortunes for a consideration. On Saturday, the fifth February, as he was speaking with a client (Jink Jenkins), Frimbo suddenly becomes silent. The bewildered client jumps up to see what was wrong and finds him prone. He chases his friend (Bubber Brown) in the reception to get a doctor, who was fortunately available across the road ­Dr. John Archer. M.D. On examination he finds the man dead and marks of violent attack on his head, and sees that the police is informed. The police detective Perry Dart assigned to the case turns out to be a great pal of the doctor’s. Dart solicits Archer’s (of superior intelligence) help in solving the puzzle, which suits the doc well enough (native curiosity).

By the time they complete investigation of the premises, interrogation of those present, etc, they discover that the corpse had vanished. An hour later after a futile re-inspection of the premises by Dart and company, suddenly Frimbo appears claiming he was dead alright but has come through a special power of his, and insists the murderer be caught and punished deservingly. He also suggests he be allowed to re-construct the scene and identify the criminal by his special methods, forty-eight hours later, Monday night, at eleven. During this period, however, the detectives learn that the dead man was Frimbo’s servitor, and suspect Frimbo, though they could not supply a convincing motive. But Monday night, without allowing Frimbo to continue with his proceedings till end, Dart hastily interrupts and confronts him with this supposed truth and places him under arrest. Instead of lying and denying, Frimbo makes stunning revelations, towards the end of which, right in front of every one present, another murder takes place: Frimbo’s. And if the murderer could not escape, only Frimbo’s ingenuity of arrangements was to be thanked for.

The story begins with a murder and ends with one. The first one swings the whodunnit with a bang; the second is a lark.

The progress of story in a detective novel is actually a race in cerebrating between the reader and the sleuth: who will solve the puzzle first and right? The only advantage of the sleuth lies in the speed and acuity of his rational thinking prowess. And the solution to the puzzle at last should be consequent upon the logical deduction by the sleuth - never to be independent of it.

Therefore, in a crime mystery there is no place for wasteful information. Every minute detail must have a bearing upon the mystery, or else it has no right to be there at all. A hackneyed, invariant, formula plot is tolerable, but not a single piece of irrelevant information.

The sleuth too should be shrewd, efficient, economical and unsparing ­almost ruthlessly so - with a sharp and fast penetrating mind. With this given, yet, sleuthing as such is guided by two fundamental rules: never trust anybody; never take anything for granted. Ignoring these would only mean naivete and may prove costly, regrettable - even fatal - to the sleuth. So a Shakespeare can afford to be slipshod, not a sleuth story-teller.

Fisher’s The Conjure - man Dies transgresses these rule and guidelines. To consider the lapses one by one.

1. Doc Archer examines the dead body before Dart arrives, and again in the presence of Dart, to discover the manner of murder (choking). Having seen the face of the corpse very closely for about five to ten minutes, later, when Frimbo appears claiming to have come from death, Doc Archer could not identify him with certainty.

2. During inspection of the premises the detectives keep running into a dumbwaiter shaft from which the dumbwaiter is missing, with a door leading to it in each floor, some old gears and ropes dangling from its roof. Even after the disappearance of the corpse, this has not been examined with deserving curiosity, where as the reader is restless to operate the switches and crank the levers and see what would happen. Later Frimbo himself would tell them that it had a lift which he was using to commute between floors (172) without attracting attention.  

3. Inside the principal chamber (the murder room) itself, a switch, box carrying a special (x-ray) current is found. Doc Archer is curious why special current was necessary, but it is not further probed. Even which points are connected to the switch - box is not found out.  

4. In Frimbo’s laboratory behind the main room, a small TV receptor and a gleaming black electric motor are found among other apparatus and specimens. These too not been inspected thoroughly.

5. The front room, which is also the psychist’s reception room, is described as consisting of weird decorations and curiosities on the walls, from which the weapon of offence is presumed to have been taken. How could the offender take it from there without provoking curiosity in other clients?

6. An extension light is plugged into one of the hall sockets to supplement and improve the illumination inside the principal room chosen for questioning. When the droplight in the room is snapped out, the extension light too snaps out. Why?

7. While everybody, including the sleuth and his police retinue, are present in the main room, the rear door (found locked during inspection) opens and a man enters the room; no one hears either the lock turn or the door open. When every natural exit is kept guarded, how could he enter without anyone noticing? Even if the room was dark?

8. Doc Archer vouches for Martha Crouch’s (the undertaker’s wife) character and Dart unblinkingly accepts it. Later we would learn she, was the motive behind the murder.

9. On inspecting Frimbo’s bedroom Dart comes to the conclusion that he is a woman-hater and sticks to it. Here if he had needed Archer’s suggestions that he should be a clever paramour entertaining several women parallelly, Dart would have gone ahead, made some inquiries, which, would have revealed some interesting details. But Dart did not heed and Archer was overly concerned about losing Dart’s faith in him rather than pressing a valid point further. Not quite the way of sleuth wisdom.

10. During interrogations too some curious incidents come to light. Jinx, of course, is rightly suspected on account of his attitude towards his handkerchief. Hicks, the dopey, too becomes a suspect because of providing adequate motive though his story is ridiculous. Whether Webb collected the ten bucks from the flunkey or not is not made known.

11. About Crouch. His pecuniary interest is quite in order. His excessively inquisitive curiosity troubles the reader but the police detective is complacent as also the detective associate and wiseguy Archer. Not only does Dart tell him how the murder was committed, which is okay, but he also goes on to explain on what lines the investigation is progressing and what is its future course. Crouch’s suggestion about avoiding finger prints by using a hankey (91) did not provoke their suspicion. Even the comment he volunteers on his ability to change the appearance (91, 92) fails to alert their curiosity while the reader smells rat.

12. Easley Jones, the railroad porter, too is a curious character. (at the end we would learn he is only an alias of Crouch), While others enter the chamber only after being ushered, this man just barges in, yet does not meet with reproof. He is the only one among those on the premises to evince interest in the investigation. He was alone too in over-solicitously coming forward to help the police. Again Dart explains everything to him patiently and obediently. With Hicks, Webb and Jenkins supplying a convincing motive, Dart had mentally marked one of them as the culprit and did not think it necessary to exercise the mind any further. Dart seems to be a man of decisive opinion. To a sleuth everything should look suspicious until proved otherwise; the more, convincingly innocent should only make him the more cautious towards it. His theories and opinions should be plastic and flexible, not watertight. But not so with Perry Dart.

Crouch’s alibi too is not investigated. From nine till he came there, roughly at half-past eleven that is, he claims to have spent at the Forty (88). A thorough probing would have disclosed facts that did not check well. Because, Easley Jones was at Frimbo’s at twenty-past ten; he was ushered in after half-past ten; and the consultation would have lasted at least five minutes. He could not have left without finishing the consultation or else there would have been a different story altogether. So, in all he had spent at least twenty minutes at Frimbo’s. Then he had to go , change his appearance and join the game at the Forty, which would have taken at least fifteen minutes. Likewise, before coming to Frimbo’s he had to leave the Forty and go somewhere (perhaps that landlady’s) to don the makeup of Easley Jones; another fifteen minutes. That is, for about an hour at the minimum, Crouch was away from the Forty.

After the interrogation, taking Hicks and Jenkins into custody, Dart has all others tailed except Crouch, who is not a suspect. Even here nothing curious comes up. The tail on Easley Jones should have met with some perplexing behaviour. But curiously, nothing turns up.

The fingerprint on the weapon of offence to which Dart clings jealously, which was his one solid proof, together with Jenkins’ disowned handkerchief enabled him converge his thought on Jenkins - till Doc Archer took it into his head to falsify it and avert suspicion from Jenkins. The most important point here is, the lone thumb print.

A club used for clobbering someone on the head would have been gripped securely by wrapping the fingers tightly around the non-hitting end of it; which would leave either the prints of all five fingers or the other four fingers but not of thumb. Supposing as Crouch pointed out, the culprit had used a hankey; there would have been no prints left; or, supposing he had taken care to wipe the prints, then he would not leave a thumb mark just for sample. Even supposing someone handled it out of mere curiosity, he could not have lifted it with thumb alone, nor would he have worried about fingerprints. Looked at any way, this lone thumb print to which Dart clings as to his dear life, is an obvious decoy and Dart cuts a pathetic figure swallowing it, while the reader watches incredulously. It is amazing that a trained police detective is not aware of the transfer trick demonstrated by Archer, a medicine man.

Even a clownish fellow like Brown, whose main interest was to get his pal Jenkins out, had the ingenuity to think of searching the premises. Dart the sleuth, with a murder on hand and burdened with the responsibility of smoking out a vanished corpse, does not even consider it. The only bit of what can be legitimately called investigation that he had done during the forty-eight hour interval was the tracking down of the owner of the false teeth: Frimbo’s servitor (the vanished corpse).

Now to the focal person of the mystery - Frimbo, the psychist. Only after the disappearance of the corpse we meet Frimbo, identified by Martha Crouch. Till then his acquaintance is only through hearsay - through his landlord Samuel Crouch and the six persons who came to see him on business. The image that emerges for the reader is that of an extremely orderly person, intelligent as well as smart and, undoubtedly of an extraordinarily high mental order. This last is very important. Because, the wise and the all-knowing doc Archer, of native curiosity and of his active neurons of the pallium, first thinks he is a charlatan, then wonders if he was a seer and a prophet, next decides him to be a paranoiac, finally settles down to calling him a murderer. Here, the data which Fisher selects to present during the first meeting of Frimbo and Doc Archer is not quite relevant. The Doc suggests, now: that he (Frimbo) has mastered the western ways of thinking to the extent of making original contributions, he can go and live like the king that he is instead of being a nobody in America. To which Frimbo replies, “No. There are things one never forgets”, and goes twenty years to relate the Buwongo rite of procreation. Though colourful and entertaining, this has no true bearing on the central story not even on his true personality. If the rite of procreation was the thing that he could never forget, then Frimbo had more reason to go than to stay behind. After that, their conversation shifts to his childhood, education, coming to America and the problems he had to face in the process, we are told. All this was disposed of in one breath, with a mere wave of the hand. Fisher could have more helpfully described what kind of hardships he faced in getting admitted into the Harvard. With more and revealing information on this the reader would be equipped with as much insight into Frimbo’s ground as Doc Archer and be competent to consider the homicidal paranoiac theory.

As it is, the sleuth is given advantage over the reader by being allowed to possess more information about a vital aspect. The reader, with the information made available to him, has every reason to repudiate the paranoiac theory, find it prejudicious, an indicator of Archer’s sense of superiority offended. So far he had been the acknowledged cerebral superior; even the official sleuth had admitted it. Here comes a black African, in whom the doc without hesitation recognizes his superior, and to crown it, he had a finely tuned inner harmony which gives him his special powers of prediction and insight. We do not swallow the gag of murdered Frimbo coming to life, etc. We are well aware that Frimbo is somehow connected with the disappearance of the corpse, but it is not sufficient to pin a murder charge on him. Even Brown’s discovery of his burning down the body is not sufficient for a murder rap. He might have burnt the body for the same reasons that made him hide it. Or he might have done so because he had mutilated the body to procure material for his unspecified biological experiments. He is and must be one of the suspects till the mystery is unraveled, no more, no less. The moment the identity of the false teeth is established, Frimbo’s guilt is almost decided in the minds of the sleuths. They do not, for a moment, even consider other possibilities after that, only working to confirm that one theory. Yet, there is no possible motive except doc Archer’s strange and far-fetching paranoiac theory.

The paranoiac theory would hold if the murdered had been a white man ­symbol of the cause of his hardships and humiliations. This victim is not even his equal or, as successful. There is absolutely no comparison. Alternatively, if we accept that Frimbo had murdered the flunkey because he discovered the fellow cheating him in the number game or conspiring to murder him (Frimbo), the paranoiac theory fails.

Even conceding Frimbo’s guilt, a man of his ingenuity and lifestyle, with his goofy setup, could have done it on the quiet and got rid of the body exactly as he did without calling anybody’s attention to it. In fact Frimbo himself brought the murder to his Client’s notice. However we may look at it, Frimbo does not fill the suspect bill unless it was an accident. With so many loose tags jumbling up the plot, there is not enough ground for accident theory. But quite to the reader’s amusement, the flunkey’s murder was a kind of accident, as it would later become clear, though not committed by Frimbo.

The information provided on Frimbo’s exceptional powers also has been completely ignored.

Of what the clients had narrated of Frimbo’s revelations, and what Archer’s own experience of his first interview revealed to him, not the least heed has been given to these details though they were compulsively calling for attention. That there was nothing fraudulent about Frimbo’s extraordinarily sharp insight must have become clear to doc Archer, just as the blood test he demonstrated was a fraud. In fact Frimbo tells Archer in so many words that he might cease to exist beyond Monday night. While seeing Jenkins’s future suddenly he meets with darkness after Monday night, which is an indicator of his death. None of this extraordinary future-seeing gift of the man Archer takes into consideration. It would be seen later that Frimbo’s prediction comes true Monday night. Certainly, a man cannot be branded a homicidal paranoiac because he expresses some bitterness at the negative experiences he had? Would not all of us react cynically and bitterly meeting with negative experiences?

Frimbo himself suggests his special method be permitted only as a counter-check. Quite obviously he was in no hurry to run away into hiding, and he could not have escaped anyway since the house was guarded. Nor was he aiming to violate the law, at least apparently. But Dart - whether he was advised / supported by Archer in this is not known - was in too much of a haste to allow the demonstration till its completion, and amack in front of the police, an avoidable murder takes place. Frimbo had to pay with his life for Dart’s sloppy and inept handling. He did not even bother to frisk those present for a weapon - as a general measure of caution - before assembling. The possibility of another murder did not occur at all to this police detective.

With all these glaring deficiencies, Fisher’s book naturally fails as a satisfying detective novel. His detectives are clownish, lacking the sharp sixth sense and the finely-honed instinct that are so vital to the success and survival of a sleuth. They cannot stand competition with the reader in the battle of wits, in ratiocination, in logical deduction, in plowing through, the maze, in finding the solution. For, Martha Crouch and Easley Jones and the dumbwaiter Shaft appear false and suspicious to the reader right from the beginning. Clearly these sleuths do not belong to the hard-boiled school. They are only poor imitations of the classic, scientific ratiocinative school.

Having selected a novel plot and an interesting central character like Frimbo, with careful and clever handling of sleuthing aspects and skillful manipulation of clues, ‘The Conjure-man Dies’ would have made a gripping story.

Though little information is available as to the popularity of this novel at the time of its first publication in 1928, a Fisher bibliography does indicate its having been reviewed in ten magazines. The blurbs proclaim it to be a first rate detective thriller with humour and clever plot. Besides apparently it had merited a reprint edition, and no less a person than Stanley Ellin, an eminence in his own right in the field of sleuth fiction, had found it worth introducing. Yet, this is the first book so far encountered by this author where the answer to the whodunnit becomes known incidentally and not as a consequence of the sleuth’s clever investigation.

Apart from this single novel, Fisher wrote one other sleuth story, John Archer’s Nose, a short story featuring the same Dart-Archer detective team. Apparently he was intending to produce a series of detective stories - novels or short stories - featuring this team. Unfortunately, his early death defeated his intentions. The short story is; however, better constructed as far as sleuthing aspects go.

From the short publisher’s note and introductions to his book it can be gathered that Fisher, a student of extraordinary brilliance at - the university, a doctor (physician and roentegenologist), died young like his sharp-psyched hero (Frimbo alone is the true hero of Conjure-man) Frimbo. He published another novel, The Walls of Jericho, a non-detective; about fifteen short stories, and some professional essays; was a powerful writer; and here is the rub - he used to write with his left hand while he practised with his right. Well, certainly looks like he could have used his right hand while writing sleuth fiction.

NOTES AND REFERENCES

1. Editor’s note to John Archer’s Nose. in Margaret Perry, ed., The Short Fiction of Rudolph Fisher, Greenwood Press,   Inc., Connecticut, 1987, P. 176.

2. Frimbo himself declares his powers of prediction and invision a result of acute concentration. Even the mystery of his servitor’s murder he calls a problem in logic and perfectly calculable (230).

3. Corroboratd by his clients Jenkins and Jones (Alias Crouch). Jones actually tells the detectives that Frimbo during consultation, “had seen murder in my heart for somebody” 9129). Even that did not provoke their curiosity.

4. “.........the abrupt termination which cut off my vision could be either his (Jenkins) or mine.” (276).

5. Bibliography section. The short fiction of Rudolph Fisher.

6. Editor’s note to John Archer’s nose. ibidem.

7. Foreword to The Walls of Jericho, New York Arno Press and The New York Times, 1969, Afro-American Cultural Series.

8. Notes on the fly-leaf of The Conjure-Man Dies, New York: Arno Press and The New York Times, 1971.