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THE MAROON TIGER
Page 11
I : 9C SMarks c&he Spot
Hail! Hail! The Negro Author enters the field of the
Detective-Murder-Mystery. Shades of Sherlock Holmes
be still! Take heed ye Christie and Fletcher and Rine
hart and Van Dyne. Gather round this dusky sleuth
as he delves into gruesome mystery in the heart of dark
Harlem. ‘’Quick. Watson! My needle!
Say the Critics to White, Fauset. DuBois and the
rest: “A our novels show too much concern with the
Race Problem. In the main vou have been interested
in preaching the gospel of Social Injustice and Preju
dice; your plots have been weak and poorly developed.
You have neglected much of the colorful material in
your folk-life, out of which truly valuable works might
be produced. White writers as DuBose Heywood, Ju
lia Peterkin, and Paul Green have won marked suc
cess with the use of such material. As yet you have
produced a few outstanding works of fiction but not
one great one.”
“And here,” says Rudolph Fisher, “here is my bid
in a new field.”
The mystery story enjoys a widespread popularity
today. But in this great mass of ever-increasing fic
tion, there is an abundance of second-rate works. The
stuff stares at you from every drug-store window. Clubs
are formed to disseminate the trash. It is a wonder how
America is able to sleep with such an appetite for
murder and crime. Lustful for excitement, not satiated
by her hectic, racking days of toilsome existence, she
must needs stimulate herself further with skulls and
corpses and creeping terrors. Dizzy detectives exhib
it amazing shrewdness in the solution of problems that
would baffle the layman. ( Tis a pity we can’t send
a Craig Kennedy or a Philo Vance to Congress). Not
withstanding all this, The Conjure-Man Dies is a cork
ing good thriller in its class and all who like this type
of story will certainly enjoy it.
Harlem (happy heaven of Afro-Americans and over
worked setting for Negro novelists) furnishes the scenes
for the activities of our good sleuth, Perry Dart, ca
pable in a way but sometimes a little thick-headed.
(No unusual qualification for police detectives.) He
is ably assisted on the murder case by a young medico
who combines his knowledge of anatomy with some
practical reasoning thereby greatly accelerating the work
of one minion of the law, namely Detective Dart.
Frimbo, Harlem’s fortune-teller and “hoodoo” artist,
is the “murderee.” When his body is found there are
several professional callers, awaiting their turns to con
sult the man, all of whom are held as suspects. With
Detective Dart and Doctor Archer presiding, the in
vestigation begins amid the weird atmosphere of the
conjure-man’s apartment and the ghostly stillness of the
undertaking establishment below. Br-r-r-r!
Just at the height of the inquiry when the two are
about to pat themselves on the back, in walks the con-
jure-man himself, casual like and announces his pres
ence. Yes, he says, he had been murdered physically
but mentally, well—he had been in a state ot suspend
ed animation. Alas, sighs Detective Dart, there goes
my murder case, for who ever heard of a murder case
without a corpse. Oh, I am a corpse all right, all
right, here is the wound that the doctor examined, etc.,
etc.
Well, retorts the wily detective, if a murder has been
committed, we will hold you as a suspect in your own
murder case. ((Quick, Watson, the smelling salts!)
Thus complication follows complication in which a
tale is woven around the career of a brilliant man whose
life had been sought by three people—a policy runner,
a drug addict, and an outraged husband. The multi-fold
threads of his existence which lead back to the Dark
Continent, break suddenly, ending at his mysterious
Harlem home in a tensely dramatic scene.
For keen zest and absorbing entertainment you will
not read another book like this one in a long time. Mr.
Fisher has taken his basic materials from Negro life
and has handled them skillfully. The plot is strong;
it is creditable despite the conventional things for such
fiction—disappearing corpses, missing witnesses, evidence
pointing at every suspect but the right one, and the
finale a re-enactment of the death scene in the pres
ence of all concerned.
The humor of the book would make it interesting
even if the story were a complete flop. Negro humor
—x the genuine, next-to-nature product — is truly the
most original of any other group of people. It is in
a class by itself. To read The Conjure-Man Dies is to
laugh heartily and frequently for it abounds in dia
logues that are real classics in their wit and merri
ment.
—James A. Hulbert, ’33.
LIBRARY NOTES
The new Atlanta University Library, under the di
rectorship of Miss Charlotte Templeton, is rapidly as
suming preeminence as one of the South's most pro
gressive and influential school libraries. It directly serves
Atlanta University, Morehouse College, Spelman Col
lege, and the Atlanta School of Social Work; Clark
University, Gammon Theological Seminary, Morris
Brown College, and Turner Theological Seminary have
absolute privileges for the use of all of the facilities
of the library.
Perhaps the most important steps in the immediate
advancement of the library are the organization of the
librarians of Atlanta and the transference of the library
of the Atlanta School of Social Work to the Atlanta Uni
versity Library. These moves indicate unusual progress
since, firstly, they bring about the harmonious coopera
tion of the librarians of the city and; secondly, they fur
ther the centralization of the university-library-level ac
comodations of Atlanta.
The book collection of the library is rapidly increas
ing due to the purchase of many additional volumes.
Besides, the reclassification of the book collections of
the institutions of the affiliation is moving forward in
an encouraging manner under the supervision of Miss
Wilhelmina Carothers. In fine, the Atlanta University
Library is advancing successfully and all indications
point to a continuance of this present trend of growth.