SOURCE: Swope, Richard. “Crossing Western Space, or the HooDoo Detective on the Boundary in Ishmael Reed's Mumbo Jumbo.” African American Review 36, no. 4 (winter 2002): 611-28.

In the following essay, Swope examines how Mumbo Jumbo fits into the genre of detective fiction.

Following the publication of Mumbo Jumbo in 1972, Ishmael Reed proclaimed it “the best mystery novel of the year” (Shrovetide in Old New Orleans 132). Reed's statement, of course, seems out of place given that Mumbo Jumbo looks nothing, like a conventional detective novel. A “composite narrative composed of subtexts, pretexts, post-texts, and narratives-within-narratives” (Gates 220), Mumbo Jumbo even includes such oddities as pictures, footnotes, and a bibliography. But despite its unique appearance, the central narrative, among the novel's various intra-texts, does, in fact, include both a detective, PaPa LaBas, and his classic search for both a murderer as well as a missing text, reminiscent of Poe's “Purloined Letter.” As Mumbo...