The Moon Don't Lie
On "The Conjure-Man Dies" by Rudolph Fisher, and "Human Voices" by Penelope Fitzgerald
I. I Am a Creature of Another Order
Author Never Read: Rudolph Fisher
Book Read: The Conjure-Man Dies
In a wide-ranging 1970 interview with Chester Himes (which can be found in Conversations with Chester Himes, University Press of Mississippi, 1995), the interviewer, writer John A. Williams, asks Himes about the Harlem Renaissance:
Williams: Chester, how about the Harlem Renaissance? You were just arriving in New York when it was…
Himes: It was on the wane when I got there. I knew a lot of people involved in it. There was Bud Fisher…
Williams: He was a doctor or a radiologist, wasn’t he?
Himes: I don’t know what Bud Fisher was. I only know he was a writer.
And that’s it, as far as references in the book to Rudolph “Bud” Fisher go. I confess I was hoping for more. Himes, of course, as I briefly got into last time, is most famous as the author of a series of detective novels known collectively as either the Harlem Cycle or the Harlem Detective series, and for reasons that will soon become apparent, I thought that Himes, of all writers, might have had much to say about Fisher, his predecessor in that field, but I guess they didn’t know each other that well (the paucity of references to Fisher in Lawrence P. Jackson’s Chester B. Himes: A Biography would seem to bear that out, at least as far as I’m able to determine). In any case, Williams and Himes were both right: Rudolph Fisher (he preferred “Bud”) was a doctor, and a radiologist, and a writer. Fisher died at just 37, from cancer possibly caused by the radiology he experimented with, in the early days of that technology, before the full extent of the dangers were known. And yes, he was a writer, of essays, short stories, and two novels: The Walls of Jericho from 1928, and from 1932, just two years before his death, The Conjure-Man Dies, the first detective novel to feature not only a black detective (there are in fact several detectives in the novel, which is one of its unique features), but an all-black cast of characters.