Atmosphere
Superstition hangs over the story with a pervasively ominous potential to threaten harm. It is the willingness to entrust life or death situations to practitioners of the magical arts of conjuring which kicks off the mystery and to maintain this tone the author creates an atmosphere through the use of metaphor in which behavior is sometimes just a little off and incidents become just a little unnerving as a way of conveying how such beliefs impact human nature:
“As if struck, the girl jumped up. It was as if the tide of her terror, which had receded during the early morning hours, suddenly swung back with his remark, lifting her against her will to her feet.”
The Color of Superstition
This detective story commences with a seemingly randomly assertion made by one character to another for no other purpose than to stimulate debate and provoke conversation. The listener fails to bite, however, and it is his agreement on general principles that leads to the introduction of the event which precipitates the criminal investigation. The assertion is a metaphor intentionally laced with provocative prejudice and bias:
“They can be as dark as me or as light as you, but their ignorance is the same damned colour wherever you find it—black.”
Tweaking a Phrase
The phrase “barking up the wrong tree” is one of those metaphorical images which has become almost a cliché even though it is probably safe to say most people don’t really have a clue to it origin or exact meaning. A good way to lend a little “color” to such a phrase is tweak it so that the general gets narrowed down to something a bit of specific. The meaning remains the same, but that slight alteration removes it of much of the aspect of its cliché:
“You’re barking up the wrong sycamore, Perry.”
The Guilty Party
Metaphor is used effectively to identify the guilty party as the story comes to a close. The language is simple and direct and even repetitive, but no less powerful because of that directly simplicity:
“His two subordinates stood before him, holding between them a stranger—a sullen little black man whose eyes smoldered malevolence. As they brought him into the living-room, those eyes first encountered Ben. Their malevolence kindled to a blaze.”
What Killed the Baby?
The Harlem detective and his physician companion begin their odyssey toward solving the crime in this mystery by first discussing a tragic case of the doctor: the death of a baby due to parental trust in magic rather than science. The mystery thus begins on the whim of a metaphor:
“Beautiful, plump little brown rascal— eighteen months old—perfectly developed, bright-eyed, alert—and it passes out in a convulsion, and I was standing there looking on—helpless.”
“If it was so perfect, what killed it?”
“Superstition.”
