Review | Colson Whitehead’s crime novel ‘Crook Manifesto’ among the most historically resonant fiction around

Whether he’s writing the sort of novel that brings him Pulitzer Prizes (“The Underground Railroad,” “The Nickel Boys”) or what can be called — very loosely — crime novels, Colson Whitehead mines familiar thematic seams.

There’s the inseparability of time, place and individual — New York City, Whitehead’s hometown, is as alive as any character in his new book “Crook Manifesto,” and as helplessly adrift in historical currents. Within that overall inevitability, contingency rules individual lives — a truly remarkable number of fatal and near-fatal encounters follow a young woman’s decision to return home for a few days — and family kick-starts the uncontrollable events.

The core of Whitehead’s second set (after 2021’s “Harlem Shuffle”) of three linked novellas chronicling the life and times of Ray Carney — son of a crook, fence, furniture shop owner, devoted father and husband, and a man who combines self-awareness and self-deception on a Shakespearean level — is captured in something Carney says twice. A few pages into the book, and repeated a few pages from the end, he muses: “What else was an ongoing criminal enterprise complicated by periodic violence for, but to make your wife happy?”

Or your daughter.

When the first novella in “Crook Manifesto” opens, it’s 1971 (the other two date to 1973 and 1976), and the era’s Taylor Swift-level prize for doting dads is a sold-out Jackson 5 concert at Madison Square Garden. Carney has been out of the crime life for four years, but after exhausting all the socially acceptable means of insider trading, he approaches a bent cop he once had regular dealings with. Detective Munson is happy to offer a quid pro quo that crosses a scarcely perceptible line in both their lives, and just “like that, in the time Walk turns to Don’t Walk, Carney was out of (criminal) retirement.” He survives the experience, barely, but he’s back in the game for good.

Time rushes on, the city — which has “good bones” — accelerates its shedding of its outer skin, mainly through fires, often deliberately set, as it literally aims for rebirth. The faces, albeit not the essence, of crime changes, as some characters die while others come through, rarely by guile and usually by luck. The novellas are as subtly tied as in “Harlem Shuffle” (set in 1959, 1961 and 1964, respectively) and the writing as beautifully expressive, even in its most darkly humoured moments — a group of stone-cold killers are described as primarily divided by their cleanup protocols, “men with strong opinions on quicklime versus sulfuric acid.”

For all the fun Whitehead has with crime-lit tropes, contemporary fashion and 1970s home furnishings — given the astonishing amount of research the author put in, he could open his own retro furniture store — Whitehead is not fooling around. The pages that describe how white cop Munson forced Black fence Carney to his service — and then began to think he had Carney’s full acquiescence — are among the most historically resonant fiction to be found. Given Whitehead’s self-imposed rule of three, there is bound to be a third set of three Carney novellas to come and it won’t be easy to top the first two.

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