Collins Crime Club
an imprint of
HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
This eBook edition 2017
First published by Covici-Friede, New York 1932
‘John Archer’s Nose’ first published in The Metropolitan by Meeks Publishing Co. 1935 Introduction first published by Arno Press Inc. 1971
Cover design by Mike Topping © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2020 Cover photographs © Shutterstock.com
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780008216450
Ebook Edition © January 2017 ISBN: 9780008216467
Version: 2020-09-28
Contents
John Archer’s Nose
THE CONJURE-MAN DIES is, first and foremost, highly readable, wholly entertaining.
This should go without saying, since the book is a mystery novel of merit, and the sole function of any mystery story is to entertain. Of all types of fiction, it is probably the least pretentious, which is all in its favour at a time when the novel is so often used by authors as sugar coating for indigestible messes of philosophy or polemics calculated to make the reading of fiction a duty rather than a pleasure. Or for self-indulgent exercises in Beautiful Writing by poets manqués which make it neither a duty nor a pleasure.
This is not to deny that the formal mystery story does have its limitations, nor that too many of its practitioners, adopting these limitations as a rule book, tend to turn out a sort of mechanically contrived product, one cheapjack job after another rolling off the production line, each similar to the other beneath its coat of paint.
But it is a fact that a writer of authentic talent can and will create within the genre a novel which, while staying in bounds, offers a good example of that talent. Rudolph Fisher was such a writer, and the one mystery novel he wrote, The Conjure-Man Dies, originally published in 1932, offers striking evidence of it, especially when viewed in the light of its times. Its success on publication was great enough to carry it into production as a play by the Federal Theater Project in 1936. Its rediscovery, and appearance in this edition, are no more than proper tributes to both its readability and its