Detective Fiction As Time Travel Transcript

Caroline: I've always loved writing that can immerse me in another place and time, especially one very different to my own. There are lots of types of books that do this — historical fiction, science fiction, literary fiction, even some non-fiction. But for me, one type of book does this better than any other.

Crime writers during the interwar period weren't writing for me, a century in the future. As they put pen to paper, they were thinking about the readers who would pick their book up just weeks or months after they finished writing it. This was a genre written to be of its moment and then disposed of. And so its references are unselfconscious, and the version of the past it can show us is unmediated by any wondering about what might be interesting to an imagined person of the future. The fashion, politics, media, class dynamics and settings are frozen in time, as the writer wanted to show them to people to whom they were already familiar.

That's why, over the years, detective fiction has emerged as my favourite way to time travel.

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Welcome to Shedunnit. I'm Caroline Crampton.

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Reading detective fiction for the history it brings to life works with any title from the past that has a strong sense of place and atmosphere to it. But for today, I wanted to look closely at one particular book that transported me to a very specific moment and neighbourhood.

The Conjure-Man Dies by Rudolph Fisher was first published in 1932 and vividly renders the neighbourhood of New York where he worked as a hospital doctor: Harlem. Its clever plot brings together people from different class backgrounds and walks of life in a fortune-teller's waiting room and then holds them there as a murder is investigated. Fisher uses sensory descriptions and rich dialogue to place the reader there with the characters on the streets of Harlem in the early 1930s.

As far as I've been able to discern, this was the first crime novel to have both a black detective and a full cast of black characters. Fisher has been hailed as the "most gifted short-story writer of the Harlem Renaissance", that being the African-American cultural and intellectual movement that was centred on New York City during the interwar years. His turn to crime fiction in the early 1930s seems to have derived at least in part from his own enthusiasm for the genre, and he had plans to return to the detecting duo that he introduced in The Conjure-Man Dies. However, it was not to be: he died just two years later at the far too young age of 37. A writer's biography always affects how we interpret a text, even if we try not to let it influence us, and the skill and promise in Rudolph Fisher's only work of crime fiction makes it all the more interesting to me as a single snapshot of a place that was exploding with ideas and creativity.

My production assistant Leandra Griffith is joining me for this conversation, providing very useful expertise as a crime fiction critic from the other side of the Atlantic. Rest assured that while we are going to talk about the plot of this book, there will be no major spoilers on the level of whodunnit or who might have done it in this conversation, so you can safely listen and then still be surprised when you read The Conjure-Man Dies afterwards. Which I hope you will — for your own time travel excursion.

We actually recorded this back in early 2025, when the Shedunnit Book Club was reading The Conjure-Man Dies as its chosen book for the month, so members have already heard a longer, more in depth version of this discussion. Leandra and I make a monthly conversational series that is just for members where we do a deep dive into each book club pick, so if you like us talking about books, you might want to consider becoming a member so you can hear more of it. Find out more and sign up at shedunnitbookclub.com/join.

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Caroline: What was your experience like reading this book? What did you expect versus how was it?

Leandra: I wasn't sure how similar it was going to be to our own experiences with Golden Age Detective Fiction, those tropes, that tonal expectation, or if it was going to lean more American noir because being published in the 1930s, it could go either way. We had Americans who were replicating the British Golden Age, but we also had Americans who, especially in like urban settings, making a bit grittier, making it darker. And so I wasn't sure what kind of tone we were going to get, but I ended up being really pleasantly surprised.

I enjoyed the conversations that we were having with the characters. I loved that we had this closed group of suspects and also a very small window of opportunity. So it must have been them. And the fact that I think all of them were strangers until they got into the room besides the two friends who discover the dead body. So that added a level of intrigue.

I love that the doctor who just happened to be, I believe he was just across the street or he was at least very nearby, he gets roped in. So then he ends up being the unofficial partner of the detective who comes on the scene. I did appreciate that for the most part, we were having discussions and investigations in one area.

Even though we did get to move about Harlem, that was quite nice, and the setting was just super rich. I was very pleasantly surprised by this narrative structure. How about you?

Caroline: Same. Actually, one of the notes I made while I was reading this book was, did Fisher write drama? Did he write for the stage? Because this felt a very well unified plot in terms of both time and setting. It isn't one of those books that you might say completely observes the two unities. It doesn't all happen in real time, and it doesn't all happen in exactly the same place, but it's pretty close because we have most of the action taking place in the conjure-man, Frimbo's, consulting room, or his waiting room or that building.

And a lot of the book, probably more than half happens the night that the body is discovered. And then I think we have a jump forward three days to the reconstruction and the denouement of the book. And that's it. Those are the two scenes. So it almost felt like two acts all happening in the same place with a couple of little excursions off campus as it were when the characters go and collect some other suspects and ask some other questions and that's it. So I found that very satisfying actually. There was no long rambling journeys. I also read this book immediately after I'd read a Freeman Wills Crofts novel, Mystery in the Channel, in which Inspector French travels so much distance that he crosses between England and France about five times in that book. He spends a lot of time testing the speed of different boats up and down the channel so that they can be sure who could have been on the scene at particular times.

And it's just very much a book in motion. So by contrast, I really enjoyed the staticness of this one. It's also very dramatic in atmosphere, I thought. The conjure-man occupies this role, It seemed to be something in between sort of psychoanalyst and fortune teller. I have to admit, I don't know very much about the role of the conjure-man in the culture of this time, but that's how it came across on the page.

So he has clients who wait to see him in a waiting room. They pay for his services, they tell him what they want to know about their future and he accesses some kind of psychic or telepathic or magical talent and tells them. The way he does this is clearly very professional in a sense that he's got a lighting set up with a very dramatic downlight on him, and the rest of the room is cast in darkness, and he has this switch where he can turn all the lights on and off and all of this kind of stuff, which obviously gives great effect to clients and I'm sure helps with the belief necessary to make that kind of transaction work. And then that dramatic setup is reused by the police when they're questioning suspects. Detective sits in the chair lit by this dramatic light and then some of the witnesses come in and they don't even realize that Frimbo is dead yet because they don't know and they think he's still speaking to them.

So all of that together felt very theatrical, very dramatic and very assured, given that this was Fisher's first and sadly only full length detective novel because he died not long after this was published. I really think he had a talent for this.

Leandra: Yeah, I was quite disappointed to see how he ended up dying, I think about two years after he published this book, but I love that you mention the drama, the atmosphere.

This is a book of atmosphere in so many ways because we have the necessary atmosphere for telling one's fortune or providing some type of analytical advice. It's very interesting how Frimbo describes it because he argues that it really isn't necessarily magic or isn't him telling the future that he's just reading the face that's in front of him. And so by the end of the book, you're wondering, is it magic, is it not? Is it this old tradition? And I love that we never get full on confirmation of what it is beyond what he tells you. And the question is, is can we ever trust this character Frimbo?

Because we never really know him and he has lied before. And even the atmosphere of him appearing when he does and then disappearing, I think it all just lends to the fact that we're dealing with things that are unknown to us that we don't understand, and will we get those answers? And even the atmosphere that starts off the book, I'm going to read the first paragraph because I felt like it got me in the right mood and the right mindset to be a part of this Harlem experience. So the book opens.

"Encountering the bright lighted gaity of Harlem's Seventh Avenue, the frigid midwinter night seemed to relent a little. She had given Battery Park a chilly stare, and she would undoubtedly freeze the Bronx. But here in this mid realm of rhythm and laughter, she seemed to grow warmer and friendlier, observing perhaps that those who dwelled here were mysteriously dark like herself."

I loved that opening. I thought it was beautiful. The personification of the frigid midwinter night. That she is going about the city to various boroughs, to various neighborhoods and freezing everyone. But she pauses at the rhythm and the laughter of Harlem and the fact that she finds the people within Harlem to be a kindred spirit to her.

And obviously this speaks to the fact that she's witnessing a black community being together on this cold night. I think that that sets it up really well for what we're going to have, which is an entirely black cast of characters who are trying to figure out the crime that has happened within their community. It's just really interesting. I loved the opening of it.

Caroline: Yes, and I think Fisher's work generally, all of his literary work, as far as I can tell, all explores that community and the issues arise from it. He had another novel The Walls of Jericho is not a detective novel, a few years before, which from the summaries that I've read, seems to be about class differences within the black community in Harlem, which I feel like you get a bit of in this novel as well.

It's very rich in that way, and you get some little prejudices and affinities, all of that coming out. And I also find it very interesting because Frimbo is not from America. He is from I'm not sure that we even get the country named. He's from an African country and he's from a kind of hereditary royalty there, and he's come to America to study and now to run his business and that makes him an outsider, even though he is a black man, he's an outsider in Harlem.

He is not of them. He's different and I found it interesting to read in Rudolph Fisher's biography that he was very interested in Pan-Africanism in this early 20th century movement about trying to bring people of African origin around the world closer together again. And a bit of that interest comes through in this book in the way that he brings in some tribal traditions from Frimbo's homeland, and the way that they've been interpreted by him now that he lives in America. Absolutely fascinating. If you read detective fiction, as I, at least in part do for of greater understanding of social history and contemporary attitudes in the moment that it's written, this book is wonderful for that.

He was apparently working on more detective fiction. In the paperback edition I have, it says, apparently he had three more planned and they were all going to feature Dr Archer and Detective Dart. And the next one was going to be called, Thus Spake The Prophet. So he really did have the Golden Age aspiration to write a series featuring a pair of characters in that way, but unfortunately his health declined and he couldn't do it.

Leandra: To go back on Frimbo as a character. I did have footnotes in my version, and it did say that the African country that was mentioned was actually made up by Rudolph Fisher. It makes sense, especially with the backstory he wanted to create for Frimbo, and he didn't want it to be attributed to any true culture or background so that he could have a bit more flexibility. I agree with you that I think that the action came in peaks, we had this spike of intrigue and then suddenly we'd be plodding again, which honestly is probably more realistic when it comes to investigating any type of crime. But when we're in literature, we want the intrigue to keep us the entire time.

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Caroline: I think my enjoyment actually was quite bound up in the fact that I listened to this as an audiobook most of the way through and I've forgotten the reader's name, but he was really good and it also really helped, I think he was very good at the different voices and the sort of accents and so on. He was an American reader. I enjoyed that a lot. And it made the cliffhangers and the revelations, as you say, the peaks and troughs come across a bit better. What did you think of the medical aspects of this book? Because I think in some senses you could say that this is a medical mystery and Fisher was himself by profession a doctor.

Leandra: You know what was so fun is I love when we have an author who includes his own background. Obviously being a doctor, he should have—

Caroline: I think he's Dr Archer.

Leandra: I, that's what I was going to say. Yeah. I think that he clearly placed himself in the perspective of Dr Archer, which was really lovely because it feels as though we're in conversation with Rudolph Fisher.

Sometimes I feel like it can be heavy handed when an author clearly puts themself in a book and I'm like, this is what you think of yourself. I really enjoyed Dr Archer's perspective on the page. I loved how he acted as almost a different perspective through his medical knowledge and his analytical brain compared to Detective Dart, who I also liked that character.

I also liked our detective, but he seemed to be more of the brawn versus, you know, being the brain. Actually, I found their dynamic to remind me of Ellery Queen and his father because his father's a detective and he's a bit more rough and a bit more go-getter action first. Whereas Ellery Queen likes to pause, think, and be in the shoes of other people, and I feel as though that was the dynamic between Dart and Archer.

There were a few elements that I wasn't expecting. For instance, them analyzing the bridge. And how that was so particular.

Caroline: Yes. The teeth.

Leandra: Yes, the teeth they found by the body and they were thinking, okay, it must be Frimbo's. And it's almost like a fingerprint, but within someone's mouth and him going to that expert and asking for favors. I also think it made sense that Dr Archer would be going around to his doctor friends or to people that he could rely on in the medical field, and they could have a full on discussion about it.

Caroline: Yes. And there are two other medical techniques as well that are important to the plot. There's the possible transference of a fingerprint in order to throw suspicion onto an entirely innocent character. And then there's also this question of the blood types and the blood serum .

I can't pretend that I totally followed that because not only am I not at all medically trained, this is also the medicine of 1932 and so it's quite hard to compare with what you know of that kind of test today versus what they would have known then. But in this one, I was quite happy to just sit back and be like, Fisher is telling me what it is. I'm just going to listen to him. He knew, and for the purposes of this plot, I know all that I need to know.

Sometimes in medical mysteries to this period, I do think it's worth interrogating these things more closely. But in this one, for whatever reason, I just didn't feel like it in the same way that he was going to tell me that the streets of Harlem looked a particular way, and I just accept that, I was just going to accept it.

It didn't feel important that I question it. Speaking of the streets of Harlem, what did you think of the little excursions we do get outside of Frimbo's apartment? We have a character with police escort goes to various clubs and so on to pick up different alibis and witnesses.

Leandra: So that character, Bubber Brown, was one of my favourites. I actually really enjoyed following his perspective because he is very different from, especially our lead detectives, our sleuth that are a doctor and a detective. Both of them are well educated and Bubber is educated as far as Harlem culture, him being on the streets, him knowing everyone.

I think that was the fun element to him because he would jump in conversation and he would know the different clubs, the different locations that people might be. He even strikes up this conversation with Easley, that main character who was supposedly from Chicago and he knew where he was. I enjoyed seeing Harlem through his eyes.

In addition to, we saw some altercations that didn't necessarily have anything to do with the major plot. I think he was walking along the street and witnesses these two men fighting. There is a woman who may have been in the mix and I believe one man kills the other and you see everyone on the street scattering, everyone getting away as soon as possible.

And I felt as though that was very realistic in just acknowledging that this isn't everyday life, this type of crime to be seen, but at the same time that it is something to be expected in a city. I thought that there was an interesting balance between these darker moments.

And then we also see them joking around and laughing, because Bubber is a very pivotal character where he is in the centre of the drama, but he is also kind of the comic relief. There are moments where I laughed when he was having odd conversations with people, and at the same time, he's part of this magic.

Because he was talking about the full moon and how it, what was it? It was something to the effect where if you see this certain type of moon you are going to see three deaths. And so it's a very odd additional subplot that we had going.

Caroline: But he does, that's I think part of the spell that Fisher casts on the reader is that he, especially through Archer as his proxy, he very much presents what Frimbo is doing is not actually magic. It's the Sherlock Holmes trick, right? It's just very, very keen observation and deduction. That's how he's deducing that people have got money troubles, or that they're worried that their wife's going to leave them or whatever it is they've come to seem about, and it feels like magic and the setting that he's created encourages this kind of belief, and that's why he's successful at what he does.

I think the narratorial voice of this book is a bit removed from that and gives you this slight skepticism that, oh, you know, he's just a good trickster, the best, sort of thing. But then actually Bubber's prediction or his portent, whatever you call it, he sees this moon and then he does see three deaths. And so I suppose he leaves that question hanging of how magical was Frimbo really.

Leandra: Yeah. I feel as though what's fun about it is everything can be explained away. Whereas Bubber believing that he's going to see three deaths, it's the idea of expectation causes...is a causation? You know, he expects to see three deaths. Yeah, he.

Caroline: He gets the confirmation because he's looking for it.

Leandra: Yeah, exactly. So he wouldn't have like batted an eye if he didn't have this idea in his head. There's also some tech being used, which I feel like we need to touch upon, that was very briefly glazed over because it probably isn't something that was actually existing at the time.

Caroline: Yes, exactly. I think we get an interesting glimpse in this book into the newness of technology and policing because there are a few different elements where he includes quite a long explanation, for instance, of how fingerprints work as part of crime and how blood type testing works because I think it was just very new and you couldn't presume that either readers or characters in a book would know this, but I think he saves that from becoming too didactic by incorporating it into the drama. So I just wanted to read a little bit where the revelation of a fingerprint is used to great effect, even though we've just been treated to quite a long discussion of how he used the ink pad and that kind of thing to take the fingerprints in the first place.

Oh, and we should say that Tynes is the police constable who's doing this work.

"It appeared that Tynes was making two separate piles, one of which presumably contained cases dismissed as out of the question, the other of which contained cases to be further studied and narrowed down. The long moments hung unrelaxed.

The observer stared with the same fascinated expectancy that might have characterized their watching of a burning fuse, whose spark too slowly, too surely approached some fatal explosive. Yet Tynes's work was proceeding very rapidly, facilitated by the fortunate accident that the original print belonged to one of the simpler categories.

In an apparent eternity, which was actually, but a few minutes, he had reduced the final number to two papers. One of these, he laid decisively aside for a short reinspection. The other he examined at one point long and carefully. He nodded his head affirmatively once or twice, drew a deep breath, put down his hand glass, and straightened up. He handed the paper to Detective Perry Dart, standing behind the table.

'This is it, Perry, right thumb, exactly like the photograph.'

Dart took the paper, held it up, looked at it, lowered it again, his bright black eyes swept the waiting circle, halted. Jenkins, he said quietly, you are under arrest."

I think that's so good, so dramatic. That's the end of a chapter as well. That could absolutely be like curtain down on the first act of a play.

That is in some sense is very procedural because what you've got there is a police officer sorting through a load of fingerprint samples that he's taken, comparing them to a photograph of the print that they've taken from the supposed murder weapon and he is just sorting through them in front of everybody whose fingerprints they are until he is going like, it's this one, arrest this guy!? I think that's great combination of sort of technology and personal drama.

Leandra: It's really impressive because realistically, when you're thinking of certain types of clinical, scientific checking, it's kind of boring, right? He's probably in a room more often than not just looking through things. He doesn't have an audience, but it adds to the drama when all of the suspects are around you waiting to see whose thumb you're actually going to be pointing at. And I am impressed by the fact that we can have very technical language. Again, this is a more of a mental exercise, that puzzle, but it's steeped in drama.

And like you said, this idea that it could be on the stage, people gasping, people looking to see are they going to be the next person that we're suspecting of murder. I love that he's able to add that because it ends up keeping us gripped emotionally, but also we're gripped mentally because we're dealing with a puzzle and these people's lives and the passions that are within it. I'm impressed when an author can do both.

Caroline: Absolutely. That's the conclusion I came to as well, that I think Fisher would have developed into an author who could do both. And we know because he did other literary work that's very highly regarded.

He wasn't a writer for very long, if you look at the dates, but he had short stories published in The Atlantic and other really prestigious publications. So he was definitely someone who was on his way to becoming an impressive literary figure. And then also in this book, he showed that he could command the tropes of detective stories, so I think he could have been someone who was on the same path as Dorothy L. Sayers, for instance, trying to combine more literary aspects into the detective genre. As we come to the end of this discussion, I think I feel slightly frustrated. It's no one's fault having discovered this author now, that there isn't anything else to go away and read. He died when he was 37. He died so, so young.

Leandra: Yeah, it's true that I think that he definitely wins the worst award, the award that no one wants to win, in having the least amount of literature that we are able to gain from him, specifically in detective fiction. It's one of those things where you just have to live with it. You've got to move on. And what's lovely for those of you enjoy doing this, you can always reread.

I know that there are people who refuse to reread mysteries. because once you know the solution, what is there to do next? But for those of us who do enjoy rereading, at least we can come back to this, come back to these characters and find the nuggets that we didn't see the first time because I guarantee that with this book and how much we've already tried to cover about it in this time, there are things we missed. There are things that we haven't been able to talk about, lines that we didn't get to say. So I definitely plan on rereading this book in the future at some point.

Caroline: I also bought the paperback edition of it from Collins and there's a short story called John Archer's Nose, which has Detective Dart and Dr Archer in it again, which I think was probably commissioned after this book was published and an editor enjoyed it. So if that isn't in the copy that you are reading, it might be possible to track that down online. So there is one other little mini adventure between the two of them. But yeah, that is sadly it, and it does prompt the question actually.

That clearly is a factor in being a lesser known author, isn't it? Just having fewer books out there in the world that people can discover, and it makes me realize all the more how lucky the British Library have been with E.C.R. Lorac, that here was an author who was much neglected and forgotten, but she had what, like 80 books or something.

So yeah, you can see why that's become a publishing phenomenon in a way that an author with just sadly one, albeit very good book, couldn't or can't.

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This episode of Shedunnit was produced and hosted by me, Caroline Crampton. My guest was my production assistant Leandra Griffith, who makes videos about books at her Youtube channel, Leandra the TBR Zero. You can find links to all the books and sources we referenced in the episode description and at shedunnitshow.com/detectivefictionastimetravel. I publish transcripts of every episode including this one; find them all at shedunnitshow.com/transcripts.
I hope you are keen to read The Conjure-Man Dies now. To help you find copies of this book, I've made a page on the Shedunnit website that links to all the various retailers where you can buy it, and that's linked in the episode description too. Buying a book via that page will also benefit the podcast through commission, so it's a great way to make a little donation to the show while buying something that you were going to buy anyway.

Shedunnit is edited by Euan McAleece and production assistance came from Leandra Griffith.

Thanks for listening.