Review: Colson Whitehead’s New Crime Fiction ‘Crook Manifesto’

Whether he’s writing the kind of novel that earns him Pulitzer Prizes (“The Underground Railroad,” “The Nickel Boys”) or what might be – very loosely – called 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 each character in his new book “Crook Manifesto,” and equally helplessly adrift in historical currents. Within that overall inevitability, unforeseen circumstances rule 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 sets the uncontrollable events in motion.

The core of Whitehead’s second set (following 2021’s “Harlem Shuffle”), of three linked novellas about the life and times of Ray Carney – son of a crook, fence, furniture store owner, devoted father and husband, and a man who combines self-consciousness 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 was a perpetual criminal enterprise, complicated by intermittent violence, but to make your wife happy?”

Or your daughter.

When the first novella in “Crook Manifesto” opens, it’s 1971 (the other two date from 1973 and 1976), and the Taylor Swift Prize for Loving Dads is a sold-out Jackson 5 concert at Madison Square Garden. Carney has been out of crime for four years, but after exhausting all socially acceptable means of insider trading, he approaches a dirty cop he once dealt with on a regular basis. Detective Munson likes to offer a quid pro quo that crosses a barely discernible line in both of their lives, and simply “when Walk turns into Don’t Walk, Carney was out of (criminal) retirement.” He barely survives the experience, but he’s back in the game for good.

Time rushes on, the city – which has “good bones” – accelerates the shedding of its outer skin, mainly through fires, often deliberately lit, as it literally strives for rebirth. The faces, though not the essence, of crime change as some characters die while others get through, rarely through trickery and mostly through luck. The novellas are as delicately bound as in “Harlem Shuffle” (in 1959, 1961, and 1964, respectively) and the writing is equally beautifully expressive even in its most black-tempered moments – a group of stone-cold killers are described as divided primarily by their clean-up 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 astounding amount of research the author has done, he could open his own retro furniture store — Whitehead isn’t kidding. The pages describing how white cop Munson coerced Black Fence Carney into his service—then coming to think he had Carney’s full consent—are among the most historically resonant fiction to be found. Given Whitehead’s self-imposed rule of three, there’s no doubt there will be a third set of three Carney novels and it won’t be easy to top the first two.

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