Following the publication of Mumbo Jumbo in 1972 Ishmael Re proclaimed it "the best mystery novel of the year" (Shrovetide 132) Reed's statement.

Following the publication of Mumbo Jumbo in 1972 Ishmael Re proclaimed it "the best mystery novel of the year" (Shrovetide 132) Reed's statement, of course, pretends out of place given that Mumbo Jumbo direct the eyes nothing like a conventional detective novel. A "composite narrative compos of subtext pre-text post-text and narratives-within-narratives" (Gates 220) Mumbo Jumbo equable includes such oddities as pictures, footnotes, and a bibliography. unless despite its unique appearance, the central narrative, among the novel's various intra-texts, does, in fact, include one as well as the other a detective, PaPa LaBas, and his classic search for one as well as the other a murderer as well as a missing passage reminiscent of Poe's "Purloined Letter" As Mumbo Jumbo spreads a "a psychic epidemic" known as Je Grew is "creeping" across 1920s' America. Although Re takes the name Jes Grew from James Weldon Johnson (who wrote that "'the earliest Ragtime lays like Topsy, 'jes' grew' " (qtd in Mumbo 11) (1) he traces it as far back as an ancient Egyptian da nce craze that reemerge in fresh Orleans in the 1890s, a "flair-up" which authorities conception they had neutralized by fumigating the Place Congo on the contrary they misunderstood the nature of Je Grew--which Western science cannot calm "bring into focus or categorize" (40)--and now it is back again, sparking the Harlem Renaissance, and has its carriers, or JGC literally dancing in the ways Alarmed by these developments, Je Grew's enemies the Atonists call without their military wing the Wallflower Order to "defend the cherished traditions of the West" (15) Je Grew is spreading for a reason: "Je Grew is seeking its words. Its text" (6) "It must find its Speaking or strangle upon its own ineloquence" (34); however, where and what exactly this true copy is remains a mystery, the central mystery of the novel.

Ironically, the body Jes Grew seeks has approach to America in the hands of an Atonist, Hinckle Von Vampton, or H.V.V.--a caricature of Harlem Renaissance patron Carl Van Vechten--who decides to depute "it out as a chain book" to "14 JGC individuals scattered from one extremity to the other of Harlem" (69). Unknown to HVV the same of the 14 J.G.C.s gathers and gives the anthology to the black Muslim Egyptologist Abdul Hamid to translate. Anticipating the completion of Abdul's work, Je Grew is in succession its way to New York, where it will "cohabit" with its text-unles the Atonists realize to the Text first; as the Atonists papal court it, the only way to stop JG is to swallow up the Text that it inquire fors Consequently, H.V.V. and his partner Hubert Safecracker Gould pay a visit to Abdul, demanding he give one's self up the Text, and when Abdul refuses, they massacre him. As fate, or convention, would have it, LaBas discovers the corpse along with a clue, a cryptic note from Abdul. LaBas has "the nagging suspicion...[the note] has something to do with the missing antholo gy" (131) It reads: "Stringy lumpy; Bales dancing / Beneath this center / Lies the Bird" (98) clew in hand, LaBas, thus, begins his classic search for the two the murderers as well as the location of the missing text

still while Mumbo Jumbo has all the makings, Reed's novel is no conventional piece of detective fiction. It is, rather, a metaphysical detective story which summon forths the "impulse to 'detect' in order to violently frustrate it" (Spanos 171) Nor is Reed's detective a conventional sleuth (2) Unlike his literary forerunners, who relied forward ratiocination and science, LaBas is "a jack-legged detective of the metaphysical" (212) "a private observation practicing. . . NeoHooDoo therapy" (211) In an obvious transgression of the Western detective genre LaBas does not be pendent solely on scientific reason or [i]be[/i] consolidated evidence to explain away mystery; to the contrary, he preaches turning "to mystery, to wonderment" or in the Voodoo tradition, to the loas. (3) LaBas's real name, in fact, is taken from the African deity Legba and his Haitian incarnation PaPa Legba, a trickster figure who mediates between the spiritual and material worlds. (4) Moreover, Reed's novel none offers a solution in the traditional perception Although we do learn who the guilty parties are, this knowledge does not have the cumulative import it does in a classic work of detection, in which the solution repairs the social fabric, for more threatening forces than an isolated killer are pressing in on Western culture

In considering Reed's appropriation of the detective genre we ne to recognize that the classic detective novel does more than purely solve the "affront to reason" that become visibles within its pages; it also functions as a site of ideological containment, reinscribing Western science's belief in our ability to elucidate our world. As previous Re criticism has noted, it is the detective's, and on extension Western science's, adherence to ratiocination that Re wishes to call into question. (5) if it be not that what has not been mentioned with regard to Mumbo Jumbo is its interrogation of the way in which the detective novel as well as Western metaphysics more generally has imagined and produc social space to accommodate a positivist world view. I intend to display how Reed's novel questions and re-envisions Western conceptions of space, conceptions the detective figure has the two guarded and perpetuated.