Omnibus of Crime

THE CONJURE-MAN DIES -- Rudolph Fisher--Covici, Friede.

DEAD HAXDS REACHING--Marion Scott --Macmillan.

KEEPER OF THE KEYS -- Earl Derr Diggers--Bobbs-Merrill.

THE EBOXY BED MURDER--Rufus Gillmore--Mystery League, Inc.

Frimbo, the conjure-man, was a queer one. He lived next to an undertaker and died, apparently, from having a handkerchief stuffed down his throat. It would have been impossible for a normal person to find out who killed him, but not for Dr. Archer, a colored physician almost as erudite as Frimbo himself. Dr. Archer's suggestions proved invaluable to Detective Dart who seated himself in Frimbo's parlor and proceeded to examine suspects: the undertaker; the undertaker's wife ; a Negro porter named Easley Jones; a dope fiend; a "numbers" runner; two light-hearted Negro bucks named Bubber Brown and Jinx Jenkins; a gaunt female Baptist.

Detective stories are based upon the law of improbabilities. To achieve its purpose of shocking readers, every detective story must have, if not a new trick, at least a new combination of old ones. Author Fisher uses two old ones: reanimation and double dual identity. His readers may be able to control their jitters when someone who looks a great deal like poor old Frimbo suddenly enters the proceedings, alive, hearty and verbose. They will be amazed at what reappearing Frimbo has to say about death-rites in the African tribe of which he is king; at what he keeps in the bottles in his medicine chest: at who it was that tried to whack him on the head with a greasy human leg-bone.

Author Fisher is a young Negro physician who lives and practices in Jamaica, L. I. His detective story is one of the first by a Negro and with an all-Negro cast Negroes are suitable for mystery stories because they are hard to see in the dark and because white folk, not knowing much about them, believe them primitively prone to violence. Author Fisher writes much better than most white fictioneers. One of the things that makes his book unusual is highly appropriate local color about Harlem. Bubber Brown and Jinx Jenkins are as funny as Amos & Andy. Says Bubber: ''You won't find nobody black as me that's less suprastitious." Says Jinx: "Just say you won't find anyone as black as you and stop. . . ." The Conjure-Man Dies is also probably the first detective story in which the characters sing an appropriate song: "I'll be glad when you're dead, you rascal you."

The summer is a suitable time for blood & thunder. Detective stories, which normally sell better than any other form of fiction, reach their sales peak in August. Less extraordinary than The Conjure-Man Dies but still appealing, appalling is Dead Hands Reaching in which Dallas Gantry returns to her small-town home of Willow Valley and finds it seething with murder. Her husband, Jurden Keye, is the meanest man in town. He gets the knife before anyone else in town but he is dead by that time anyway. A bullet killed him. A strumpet who thinks Dallas did it is murdered presently. The third victim is Jurden Keye's mean-tempered female housekeeper. Detective Brady -- mild, courteous, less loquacious than most fictional sleuths--has eight suspects to work with. Like Author Scott's readers, he does not think that Dallas did the shooting. . . .

It would be well for sleuths everywhere to model themselves on Detective Charlie Chan. Like all storybook operatives, he avoids catch-as-catch-can methods, has apparently never heard of the third degree. More than this, he exhibits an oriental courtesy that is only a shade less elaborate than his oriental proverbs. Sample: "Even a blind man, if he has been over the road before, may point out the way.'' This time Author Biggers. whose books make better cinemas than most murder stories, has Detective Chan present at a lugubrious houseparty. Present also are four ex-husbands of an egocentric diva named Ellen Landini. She is the one who gets the bullet. All the husbands are suspected. So are a maid, her husband who liked Landini, a jeune fille whose scarf was around Landini's neck, an old Chinese servant who speaks rudely. A peculiar circumstance : on two cigaret boxes of identical shape but different color, the covers have been inter changed. . . .

The respect in which mystery fiction resembles reality most closely is the fact that the culprits are not often punished. In The Ebony Bed Murder, however, the chief investigator is an eccentric advertising tycoon who does better than the whole Manhattan police force did in the some what similar case of Vivian Gordon. At least Griffin Scott finds out who killed Helen Brill Kent. He makes no proverbs and is therefore able to do it in fewer pages than it might have taken Charlie Chan. The Ebony Bed Murder is the July issue of the Mystery League.

Other able detective, murder or mystery stories published within the last fortnight : Killer's Carnival--Temple Field--Farrar & Rinehart.

A Romantic Young Man--Achmed Abdullah--Farrar & Rinehart.

Bulldog Drummond Returns--H. C. McNeile--Crime Club.

Murder in the Basement -- Anthony Berkeley--Crime Club.

Blood on the Heather--Stephen Chalmers--Doubleday, Doran.

The Green Knife--Anthony Wynne-- Lippincott.

The Servant of Death--J. H. Wallis-- Dutton.

Murder of the Ninth Baronet--J. S. Fletcher--Knopf.

Murder at Exbridge--Victor L. Whitechurch--Dodd, Mead.

The Midnight Murder--Paul Herring-- Lippincott.

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