Magic Riders on the Underground Railroad

Nicole Glover, The Conductors

Hetty Rhodes didn’t smuggle dozens of escaping slaves to freedom in Philadelphia during the Civil War, just to watch them get murdered. But that’s exactly what’s happening. During the precarious Reconstruction years, White police have little interest in violence perpetrated in Philadelphia’s Black community. So Hetty and her husband Benjy take it on themselves to investigate, armed only with ingenuity and a little carefully chosen magic.

Nicole Glover’s debut novel channels multiple well-loved writers in the crime, historical fiction, and fantasy genres. But Glover also establishes her own voice based on her characters’ precarious economic and social positions. She writes from a position simultaneously outsider, kept down by institutional barriers and stark, unquestioned racism, but also insider, as her characters establish their own community in the shadow of White dominion.

The first body shocks everyone. Charlie Richardson, an escaped slave like Hetty and Benjy, parlayed his natural wits, and limited moral reserves, into a local fortune, but made enemies along the way. Because the community doesn’t trust lawmen, witnesses turn to Hetty, whose experience on the Underground Railroad has made her a local legend. But when Hetty begins investigating, she discovers a cursed mark carved into Charlie’s flesh.

Before long, Hetty’s astrology-based wizardry begins finding traces of magic strewn across Philadelphia. Hetty is an unusually skillful spellcaster, but in a city where magic is an artisanal skill, sold from street-corner stalls, her celestial powers get lost in a cacophony of evidence and rumor. Then the second body appears, suspiciously close to Hetty and Benjy’s door. Seems the killer’s motives are personal, and the Rhodes family themselves are targets.

Because of how books are marketed, Glover’s story will draw comparisons to writers like Laurel K. Hamilton and Jim Butcher, fantasy novelists whose supernatural elements heighten their gritty, crime-strewn urban settings. But reading Glover, my mind drifted to Walter Mosley. Both authors feature characters transplanted from their home communities, into segregated cities that prove to be anything but promised lands. Both address how cities create, and enforce, racial boundaries.

Nicole Glover

And both, in differing ways, deal with how law often functions as an impediment to order. Hetty and Benjy Rhodes, like Mosley’s Easy Rawlins, investigate crimes which law enforcement openly disregards. They accept penny-ante payments for their inquiries, and have to maintain day jobs among the suspects they’re investigating. They do this because, if the community doesn’t enforce ethics and punish wrongdoers, nobody will. Their neighborhood has to govern itself.

The Reconstruction-era setting emphasizes Glover’s themes of division and community. With the Civil War over, America has forgotten its pledges to Black citizens, who live marginally. Though key plot points turn on a local Black political machine, it’s dominated by men (specifically men) desperate to be seen as reputable by White Philadelphians. Notably, Black wizards aren’t allowed to own wands, just as freed Blacks weren’t allowed to own guns.

Magic, in Glover’s telling, isn’t a preternatural workaround for difficult situations, a way to suspend physics. Instead, it’s a skill, and a common one: every storekeeper and housewife has a few spells handy, just in case. Hetty is remarkably skilled at “Celestial Magic,” but so is the murderer. She uses magic like James Bond uses his famous gadgets, a handy way to escape momentary problems, but ultimately a tool.

Perhaps you’ve noticed that I felt deeply invested in Glover’s atmospheric storytelling. For her, magical Philadelphia isn’t a background; she immerses readers in an intricately realized environment. An important side point in Glover’s novel is that Hetty is a renowned storyteller, who spins elaborate yarns of her Civil War adventures spontaneously for eager listeners. This lampshades the parts of storytelling that clearly interest Glover most.

But don’t overlook the mystery aspect of Glover’s storytelling, either. The murders, which start out with only a handful of loosely spaced clues, become more tangled as the investigation progresses. Hetty and Benjy have to pursue evidence without official help, even as the killer clearly aims at them. As a veteran mystery reader, I started a suspect list and tested it against the mounting evidence. But even I was wrong.

Glover’s writing hooks you early and keeps you engaged. Her style is familiar enough to genre readers that it won’t jar anybody, or probably change anybody’s understanding of the genres; but she uses readers’ expectations as a foundation to build on, not as a hammock. Her writing is familiar, but not passive. Even as I recognized the influences that shaped Glover’s voice, she never stopped finding ways to surprise me.