African-American authored mystery fiction dates back to the turn of the 19th century. The first known example is Pauline Hopkins’s Hagar’s Daughter (1901-1902), serialized in Colored American Magazine: The story takes place on a Maryland plantation in Washington, DC between 1860-1880 and features a black maid as the detective. Next came John E. Bruce’s Black Sleuth (1907-1909), which McGirt’s Magazine ran in successive editions: In this book the sleuth is a West-African man who travels to the United States and then Europe and, as a professional, works for the International Detective Agency. Both these tales are really proto-mysteries, mixing blatant social commentary into their plots, but they serve as important historical guideposts in the evolution of black mystery fiction. It was not until 1932, during the Harlem Renaissance, the first full-fledged, non-serialized detective novel by an African American was published: Rudolph Fisher’s The Conjure-Man Dies. Fisher, a physician by trade, died two years later, at age 37, but the one mystery novel he left behind is a remarkable work.
