"Ruthless Reverence for Reality:" Rudolph Fisher’s Use of Detective Fiction to Portray the Diversity of Black Harlem in 1932 in The Conjure-Man Dies
Creators: name: Gray, Alison T.
Publisher: name: Stanford Digital Repository
Year: 2024
Subjects: subject: Harlem Renaissance
subject: Jazz Age
subject: Detective fiction
subject: Hard-boiled detective fiction
subject: Classical detective fiction
subject: Fisher, Rudolph, 1897-1934
subject: Fisher, Bud, 1897-1934
subject: Amos 'n' Andy (Radio program)
subject: Armstrong, Louis, 1901-1971
subject: Chesnutt, Charles W. (Charles Waddell), 1858-1932
subject: Chinn, May Edward, 1896-1980
subject: Cohen, Octavus Roy, 1891-1959
subject: Davis, Aaron (artist)
subject: Doyle, Arthur Conan, 1859-1930
subject: DuBois, W. E. B. (William Edward Burghardt), 1868-1963
subject: Eliot, T. S. (Thomas Stearns), 1888-1965
subject: Hammett, Samuel Dashiell, 1894-1961
subject: Heyward, Edwin DuBose, 1885-1940
subject: Hughes, Langston, 1902-1967
subject: Johnson, James Weldon, 1871-1938
subject: Knox, Ronald A. (Ronald Arbuthnott), 1888-1957
subject: Locke, Alain LeRoy, 1885-1954
subject: Poe, Edgar Allen, 1809-1849
subject: Pollard, Fritz
subject: Robeson, Paul, 1898-1976
subject: Thurman, Wallace, 1902-1934
subject: Van Dine, S. S.
subject: Van Vechten, Carl, 1880-1964
subject: Walker, George, 1873-1911
subject: White, Walter Francis, 1893-1955
subject: Williams, Bert, 1874-1922
subject: Conjure-Man Dies, The (Fisher, Rudolphl)
subject: Conjure Man Dies, The (Fisher, Rudoph)
subject: Conjure Woman (Chesnutt, Charles W.)
subject: Infants of the Spring (Thurman, Wallace)
subject: Maltese Falcon, The (Hammett, Dashiell)
subject: Porgy (Heyward, DuBose)
subject: Walls of Jericho, The (Fisher, Rudolph)
subject: City of Refuge (Fisher, Rudolph)
subject: Caucasian Storms Harlem, The (Fisher, Rudolph)
subject: John Archer's Nose (Fisher, Rudolph)
subject: Fire! Magazine
subject: New Negro: Voices of the Harlem Renaissance (anthology)
subject: Covici, Friede Inc.
subject: International Hospital (Harlem)
subject: Carlton YMCA

description: Rudolph Fisher is the forgotten literary “genius” of the Harlem Renaissance.  Fisher’s genius has been overlooked for two reasons: because he died young at the age of 37 in 1934, and because his master work is a detective novel.  Fisher’s detective novel, The Conjure-Man Dies: A Mystery Tale of Dark Harlem, uses the forms of that genre –– both classical and hard-boiled –– to portray the ongoing historical reality of life in Harlem in 1932.  Fisher both uses and plays with the structures of detective fiction to elucidate the fundamental literary debate of the era: whether the portrayal of Black Americans should be realistic or propagandistic, including issues such which socio-economic class to depict, the use of “Negro dialect,” and even humor.  Informed by his career as a physician, The Conjure-Man Dies embodies Fisher’s ethos of writing realistically about Black American life in Harlem amid the pressure of the Harlem Renaissance, when writers were encouraged to use literature as propaganda for racial advancement or, as it was called then, racial uplift.  Fisher rejected calls to use his art as racial propaganda, opting instead for acutely observing the reality of Harlem.  While Fisher chose realism, his use of genre offered that realistic portrayal to a wider audience by containing it within the familiar structure of detective fiction.  He used the formal structure of the classic style to provide his readers the safety of traditional detective fiction, while adapting the hardboiled style’s use of real places, vernacular, and unromanticized characters to build his realistic portrayal.  The Conjure-Man Dies offers the reader Fisher’s vivid vision of the diversity that animated Black Harlem in 1932.