The book is also a social drama interrogating the nature of prejudice and how an environment limits ambition. In Harlem Shuffle, Whitehead flexes his literary muscles further, extending the boundaries and expectations of crime writing. That was evident in his creation of an actual underground railroad for his innovative 2016 slave novel of the same name (made into a captivating recent TV series by the Oscar-winning director Barry Jenkins), and in his brutal rendering of a 1960s true-life story of abuse and murder at a reform school in The Nickel Boy s (2019). Ray Carney’s Harlem is equally a messy and ugly world, where a knife-wielding pimp will “unzip” an out-of-favour working girl where the gangster Miami Joe and Freddie drink until they resemble “rye-soaked cockroaches scurrying from sunlight and propriety”.Ī crime novel might seem like a departure for Whitehead, but the double Pulitzer prize winner has always resisted categorisation. As in Himes’s novels, the language here is wiseguy crisp, zinging with street vernacular. But Whitehead isn’t looking over his shoulder. In the 1950s, Chester Himes set a high bar for Harlem noir with his series featuring badass black detectives Coffin Ed Johnson and Grave Digger Jones. The book is also a social drama interrogating the nature of prejudice and how an environment limits ambition Ray is strictly small-time until his feckless cousin, Freddie, inadvertently involves him in a heist to rob safe deposit boxes at the Hotel Theresa. He has a business diploma, framed on the wall, but that can only get you so far in a place oiled by corruption. By day, Ray charms customers on the merits of Collins-Hathaway armchairs by night he oversees a steady trade, shifting stolen goods.

But Harlem is still the black capital of the world, and its optimism and potential are embodied in Ray Carney, whose fortunes change on discovering, in his dead father’s car, a bundle of cash – enough to open a furniture store on 125th Street.Ĭarney senior was a local hood but his son, Ray, “was only slightly bent when it came to being crooked”.

Up at Hotel Theresa, the “Waldorf of Harlem”, you’re more likely to find “a pimp and working girl at the bar than Joe Louis or a grande dame of Negro society”.

Gone are the hi-de-ho days of Cab Calloway’s orchestra. At the start of Harlem Shuffle, Colson Whitehead’s dazzling new thriller, it’s 40 years on from the area’s 1920s renaissance. “N othing came close,” Claude McKay observed a century ago, “to the hot, syncopated fascination of Harlem”, with its overcrowded tenements, star-studded theatres, numbers runners, ragtime and jazz.

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