Crook Manifesto.

Colson Whitehead followed up his second Pulitzer Prize win with the first book in what has become his Harlem Trilogy, the action-packed, dark crime novel Harlem Shuffle. Set in the early to mid 1960s, the book introduced us to Ray Carney, the prosperous owner of a Harlem furniture store who occasionally fences stolen goods, although he’s less involved in criminal enterprises than his late father Big Mike or his cousin Freddie. The second book about Ray, Crook Manifesto, is itself a triptych of stories featuring him and some of his less scrupulous acquaintances, set in three different years in the 1970s against the backdrop of a rapidly changing New York City. It’s a pale successor to the first novel, with far less interesting plots and a shallower look at its social and physical setting than Harlem Shuffle offered.

Ray is still running his furniture store, and has largely left the criminal scene entirely by the time the story opens in 1971, when his young daughter asks for tickets to an upcoming Jackson 5 concert. Ray asks around to see if anyone has a hookup when he lands on the crooked cop Munson, who conscripts Ray into a fencing job that touches multiple underworld elements and ultimately threatens Ray’s life. Two years later, a blaxsploitation film shoot in Harlem brings us Ray’s muscle man Pepper, a side gig, along with some scenes in Ray’s store, but the project goes sideways when the lead actress disappears. In 1976, Harlem is beset by arson cases, many set by landlords torching their own buildings for fraudulent insurance claims. When one fire nearly kills a young boy in the neighborhood, Carney decides to investigate, running into a major real estate scam that sets him against some of the most powerful people in the borough.

Part of Crook Manifesto’s problem is that the stories are too short, and Whitehead packs in so much action – it’s a quick read – that there’s very little space for the bigger picture he’s trying to paint of a city in decline, or at least a neighborhood in decline as other, whiter areas hold their ground. The third section, about the constant threat of fires, whether deliberate or not, has a more profound point about the intersection of racism, corruption, and ineffective (if not outright counterproductive) public policy choices, even by those who profess to be trying to help economically disadvantaged areas. Whitehead barely gets to any of that because he’s racing through the story – sometimes literally, given the speed of some of the fires – and has to get us to the twist ending, which wasn’t all that surprising given how few possibilities there were for the solution to the mini-mystery anyway.

The first section with the crooked cop has the slowest buildup, but it does capture the noirish vibe that characterized most of Harlem Shuffle, particularly once Munson has Ray hooked enough that there appears to be no physical or figurative way out for the protagonist. We know Ray survives to part two, so that’s not much of a plot point, so Whitehead instead creates a situation where Ray’s predicament gradually gets worse, and he realizes it’s getting worse, until there’s the slightest opening for something to happen that gets Ray out of this in one piece. As I was reading that section, I was hoping that would be the worst of the three, because Whitehead was setting up something larger, but it ended up the best section by default.

I’ll still check out the third book, Cool Machine, at some point, but it’s another triptych, which doesn’t give me very high hopes for it.

Next up: The fourth of this year’s Hugo nominees for me, A Drop of Corruption by Robert Jackson Bennett.