Slippery Slope

Crook Manifesto a novel by Colson Whitehead.  Doubleday.  319 pp.  *****

There is the pleasure of reading a great crime writer, someone like Elmore Leonard at his best, who makes any other storyteller I know look like a rank amateur.  There is the somewhat different pleasure of reading a great contemorary novelist, like Jonathan Franzen or Lauren Groff, who know how to tell a story but also bring a whole place, and a whole set of characters, to life.  (There is also the pleasure of a sui generis writer like Raymond Chandler, who seems by his rhetoric and sensibility to be a literary writer, but has soaked himself so deeply in pulp fiction that he turns it into poetry.  P.G. Wodehouse, a graduate of the same college as Chandler, did the same thing in another genre.)  But never before have I read a writer who combines the pleasure of true suspense fiction with that of a literary novel until I encountered Colson Whitehead.  I enjoy his crime novels on both levels at once.

Crook Manifesto returns us to the world of Ray Carney, whom we first encountered in Harlem Shuffle.  Ray is the son of a noted Harlem criminal, and is surrounded by questionable family members and associates, but Ray himself has tried to make it in the straight world, as a furniture salesman for people who have good taste but not a whole lot of money.  He almost accidentally got into the business of being a fence for stolen goods, at first with some items of furniture, later with some things that had nothing to do with his store, and by the end of Harlem Shuffle was in trouble not with the police but with the mob, because he had somehow gotten hold of their goods.

He came close to finding out that crime really doesn’t pay, not because you go to jail, but because you cross the wrong people and they kill you.  When he escaped that peril, we breathed a sigh of relief, because it seemed he had learned from his experience and would move on.  We root for Ray not only because he is fundamentally honest, but because he’s a family man with a wife and two beautiful children.  He has his vain side, a yearning to belong to the Dumas Club, a Harlem association of prominent black men, but even that seems just evidence of his wish for upward mobility, and to get away from the world of his father.

Crook Manifesto has moved from the sixties into the early seventies, a time in New York which I remember because my brother lived in Princeton for a time, and eventually—toward the end of that decade—lived in New York itself, so I would visit him.  It was a rather different city from what it is now, and Harlem was a dangerous place.  Ray’s business has gotten off the ground, however, and he’s moved to a more prosperous part of the neighborhood, where his in-laws once lived (they had always scorned him because of his background).  But he gets involved with the criminal element because his daughter desperately wants—another sign of the times—tickets to see the Jackson Five.

It isn’t that Ray can’t afford them.  He just can’t put his hands on the tickets.  But a corrupt cop of his acquaintance intimates that he can put his hands on some if Ray will help him out with a few things.  Ray reluctantly agrees, because he’s a loving father, not because he wants to get back into a life of crime.  But you don’t want to sell your soul for Jackson Five tickets (the rough equivalent of Taylor Swift tickets today).

The cop—named Munson—is white.  We’ve heard a lot about bad cops in recent years, but honestly, they’re like Snow White compared to this guy, who knows he is being investigated for corruption and is trying to get out of town with as much money as possible.  The extent of his corruption is breathtaking, though I found it believable.  Ray doesn’t really participate, just tries to humor the man and stay out of trouble.  By the end he’ll give up the damn tickets if he can just stay alive.  The suspense of that first section is overwhelming.  Ray does manage to extricate himself and score the tickets as well.

Like Harlem Shuffle, Crook Manifesto is a drama in three acts, and Act Two takes us to the world of another seventies cultural phenomenon, the blaxploitation film.  Ray has gotten involved with a man who is making such a film and wants to shoot part of it in his furniture store.  This director is not a cynic trying to make money; he loves the genre and hopes to create a classic.

This subplot introduces my favorite of all the characters we’ve met in both novels, a guy named Pepper who was a protégé of Ray’s criminal father.  He leads a shady existence but picks his capers carefully.  In this case he’s just acting as security for the film project.  But when the movie’s lead female disappears, he gets involved with various big-time criminals, some of whom have grudges against him.  Again, the suspense is almost unbearable, because Whithead isn’t above getting one of his characters rubbed out.

It is Pepper who has a crook manifesto.  He’ll work for certain men, but not for others, whose crimes cross a certain line.  But he finds himself dealing with such people, and he’s up to the task.

The third act stands as a summation of the two novels, and brings everything together.  Ray’s wife Elizabeth has gotten involved with the campaign of a Harlem politician, a man who, coincidentally, was her boyfriend some years before.  That situation makes Ray uneasy.  Ray, for his part, owns a little real estate, and begins to look into Harlem’s latest criminal enterprise, burning down old buildings for the insurance money not worrying who gets hurt in the meantime.  What hurts is that Ray’s father was once in that same business.  With Pepper’s help, he finds the extent of corruption that actually exists in Harlem; to nobody’s surprise, the worlds of politics and crime are entangled.  The final scene takes place in the fabled Dumas Club, and is a satisfying conclusion, and grand finale, to both novels.

I honestly can’t imagine what’s left over for a third, though Whitehead has billed this as a trilogy.  I can hardly see how Ray can recover, at least not legitimately.  But the world is continuing to change, Harlem too, and the greed of the eighties is on the horizon.