The Conjure-Man Dies

By -
The Conjure-Man Dies, by Rudolph Fisher 

The Classics Club theme for February just happens to be the Harlem Renaissance (plus more), which gave me a good chance to start working on the challenge I signed up for too.  I decided to start with The Conjure-Man Dies, which is a mystery set in early 1930s Harlem.

Dr. John Archer has his medical office across the street from an undertaker and a "psychist" who claims to be able to read faces so well that he can tell you all about yourself and your future.  When the conjure-man is murdered in the middle of a reading, Dr. Archer and the NYPD detective assigned to the case, Perry Dart, team up to solve the mystery.  Then the corpse disappears from a guarded room and walks in, claiming to have revived himself with his special powers--so the two men will need all their expertise to figure out the puzzle.

I enjoyed this mystery so much!  I love a good mystery.  Here we have a seriously excellent puzzle and a cast of great characters.  Everyone has so much personality; you can practically see and hear them.  (Since I sometimes get frustrated by flat, hard-to-differentiate characters in mysteries, I appreciated that.)  There is some very fun stuff along with the serious questions; Fisher is playing around a lot.

If you're a mystery person, The Conjure-Man Dies should go on your list to read.


I've also started reading Langston Hughes' Not Without Laughter, which is very good so far, but there is no way I will finish it by the end of the month.


Comments

  1. EvaMarch 11, 2014 at 4:42 AM

    Oh this sounds like a must-read for me! I've read quite a few Harlem Ren authors but that one is new to me. :)

    ReplyDelete
  2. DesereeJanuary 20, 2015 at 4:41 AM

    I don't get a chance to read many mysteries but I enjoyed this one. Thanks for participating in the challenge.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

I'd love to know what you think, so please comment!

Popular posts from this blog

The Four Ages of Poetry

By -
Image
  "The Four Ages of Poetry," by Thomas Love Peacock I am becoming fond of Thomas Love Peacock.  Besides his unbeatable name, he was a lot of fun.  Peacock was a minor literary figure of the early 19th century; he tried his hand at poetry but mainly succeeded in satire.  I read his short novel Nightmare Abbey last year, but at the time I didn't know that the young hero of the story, Scythrop, was modeled on Peacock's good friend Percy Shelley.  He and Shelley were quite close and Peacock was the executor of Shelley's will. Thomas Love Peacock Percy Bysshe Shelley "The Four Ages of Poetry," a tongue-in-cheek essay on the history and development of poetry, was published in 1820 in a new magazine called Literary Miscellany , which promptly died.  It would probably have been completely obscure and unknown--it nearly is anyway--but for Shelley.  Peacock sent a copy to his friend, who I guess didn't really have much of a sense of
Read more

A few short stories in Urdu

By -
Image
 Back in August, I got hold of a book of Urdu short stories translated into English.  It's a large book, so I wanted to read just the women authors for WIT, and that would still be a good amount.  August got away from me, and I only read one or two stories back then, but I've continued reading them since.  I've now finished all the short stories in the book that were written by women (luckily for me, there are short biographies in an appendix, since I could only tell from the name about half the time).  I'll just highlight a couple: "The Wagon," by Khalida Asghar, is a hallucinatory, apocalyptic story.  The narrator meets three strange men who are watching the evening sky and point out that it has become red.  No one had noticed until they said so, but the sky is now strangely red.  Then a smell arrives, so offensive and sickening that it causes real pain -- but only once it's pointed out.  And finally, a mysterious wagon, which may be the source of the s
Read more

Faerie Queen Readalong I: Redcrosse, the Knight of Holiness

By -
Image
I did it, I read all of Book I!  My minimum requirement was two cantos a day, but I managed three a couple of times.  I'm hoping to read ahead, because I'll be gone for two weeks in the middle of this event and I'd like to be able to prep a post ahead of time...but the schedule is already pretty demanding.  The reading is not terribly difficult, but it is slow.  I keep thinking that I've read a large chunk, only to look back and realize that in fact I have read six verses.  So here we go with analysis... Each book in the Faerie Queene features a knight, and a story, about a particular virtue.  The Redcrosse Knight, to be known as St. George after he accomplishes his feats, is all about Holinesse .  This does not mean that Redcrosse already exemplifies holiness; he doesn't.  Holiness is what he's working towards and struggling with.  His foes symbolize various forms of unholiness, and he falls into their clutches at least as often as he defeats or avoids th
Read more