Crook Manifesto

by Colson Whitehead

2023

A tryptich of tales of crime and corruption in Harlem, from 1971 to 1976. Ray Carney, a former fence now a successful furniture salesman, is dragged reluctantly back into the life when a bent cop from his crook days comes asking for favors, and gets quite forceful about it. Two years later, a firebug acquaintance of Carney's hires Pepper, a taciturn muscle for hire, to watch over the Blaxpoitation movie he's making, and when the movie's star goes missing, Pepper goes looking for her, hitting the streets in his own unrelenting way until he gets the attention of an aging crime boss. Then, in 1976, amid the bicentennial fanfare that rings so hollow in Harlem, Carney hires Pepper to look into an arson which hurt one of his tenants, and they end up uncovering a wide and nasty network of corruption that puts them both in danger.

Whitehead's range as a writer is extraordinary. During the reading of this novel I occasionally imagined I was reading S.A. Cosby and not the erudite, literary prose master of The Intuitionist and John Henry Days. He's a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, so it's no surprise that he can inhabit a crime writer's world with ease. I did not know when I began this book that it is a sequel seven years after Harlem Shuffle, also about Ray Carney, which I have not read, but this novel is easily enjoyed on its own. The capers are crackling with raw noir energy, the Harlem is populated with a vast assortment of crooked characters with nicknames and idiosyncratic predilections, even those who show up in name only, and the drama and suspense come in unnerving bursts. There's plenty of sly humor among the seedy criminality, as well: "the flamboyant quotient in Harlem was at a record high these days, thanks to manufacturing innovation in the synthetic-material sector, new liberal opinions vis-à-vis the hues question, and the courageousness of the younger generation." But it's more than just a crime novel leavened with black humor, of course; a writer as talented as Whitehead wouldn't be satisfied with that. It's also an examination of power and race in America; in the background of the skull-cracking and gunplay there are rumblings of disquiet at the injustice and power differentials that Harlem, and America, are built on.