Ray Carney, the star of Colson Whitehead’s last book, Harlem Shuffle, is back and Crook Manifesto (again, like Harlem Shuffle) is a novel that comes in three parts, three essentially novella-length stories, each of which are loosely linked but also ever so slightly standalone. If you got a kick out of Harlem Shuffle, as we did, you’ll get a kick out of Crook Manifesto.
In the first and last of our trio of tales, Ray Carney is to the fore, looking to score some Jackson 5 tickets for his daughter – a score that unfortunately sees him reaching out to a bent copper named Munson he once knew back in his dodgier days (Carney used to fence jewels alongside selling furniture, but these days he’s doing his best to be a straight arrow – although, as Carney tells us, “Crooked stays crooked and bent hates straight. The rest is survival”). Turns out the powers that be are trying to tamp down on corruption in the force and so Munson is looking to cash out; Carney is in the wrong place at the wrong time, and finds himself on the rough end of a long dark night of the soul.
The middle tale of the three concerns a Blaxploitation film to be shot in Harlem by a former arsonist (with a proclivity, still, for the odd night time fire) known as Zippo, whose leading lady Lucinda Cole goes missing. Carney’s friend Pepper (who had been hired on to the set as security after locals kept walking off with the camera gear) is put on the case to track her down – and gets a fair few clouts as a result. Pepper knows a lot of people (and Whitehead has a habit of shooting off down sidetracks telling the stories of the people Pepper chances across) but don’t come here expecting a straight noir – if your expectations can be refuted and a different kind of story can be told, you know that Whitehead will go where his characters take him. Along the way, we learn a lot about Pepper and a fair bit about both Zippo and Lucinda (not to mention the gangsters whose paths they all intersect with) – plus, you know, shoot outs and fist fights and zippy, page-turning action.
In the final outing of the book, the fires that Zippo is fond of have become a city-wide crisis, with politicians and insurance agents and fly by night landlords and even residents themselves (guaranteed a couple of hundred bucks to relocate if their place burns down) setting fires, the city awash with flames and gutted buildings. Carney takes it into his head to find out who burned the building that contained the child of one of his own residents (Carney now owning the building where his furniture store resides) – asking Pepper, once again, to try and find out who lit the proverbial fuse. So Pepper starts asking questions which, as you’d expect, upsets a few people – and those people take it into their heads to get their own back on Pepper and Carney.
“A man has a hierarchy of crime, of what is morally acceptable and what is not, a crook manifesto, and those who subscribe to lesser codes are cockroaches.”
The way in which these stories ramp up is a masterclass in tension and suspense:
“It was getting worse minute by minute, like he was a nail being pounded deeper and snugger and stuck. Two white cops being pursued by the Justice Department, black radicals with machine guns, Notch Walker. This was unsustainable.”
Across these trio of stories, Whitehead fashions a compelling overview of life in New York in the 70s – that time of garbage strikes, and demolition, of rising crime and graffiti-strewn trains, of broken windows and Broken Window Theory – a world he knows well, having grown up there. Although its dense with detail by the time you reach the book’s closing chapters you can’t help but wish for another Carney outing and another. At the very least, we need one more instalment to find out whether Carney makes it back to the straight and narrow or fully embraces a late-in-life life of crime. The indomitableness of Carney alone makes Crime Manifesto (and Harlem Shuffle before it) well worth a read:
“The City tried to break him. It didn’t work. He was genuine Manhattan schist and that don’t break easy.”
Any Cop?: A really satisfying read and one we can imagine returning to, sure that we’ll see things we missed first time around.
Bookmunch 