Multicultural Detective Fiction

About this book

In the 1971 reissue of Rudolph Fisher's The Conjure-Man Dies (1932), the first detective novel set in an all-black environment, Stanley Ellin claims that Fisher's treatment invests the text "with qualities of a social document," so that the reader is "drawn through the book by its story, but emerges at last with much more than the story in mind" (Introduction).