I have been ill recently, which gave me plenty of time to read a couple of novels by Colson Whitehead, who is a much-admired black American novelist with a couple of Pulitzer Prizes to his name. The novels are Harlem Shuffle and Crook Manifesto: they are closely related in characters and themes, and will eventually form a trilogy with the third novel being written now. I recommend them, because of their intriguing plots, their mix of interesting characters, and the rich and complex picture they present of Harlem as the black microcosm it was some fifty years ago.

The novels are centred around Ray Carney, who is black and has lived in Harlem all his life, trying to prosper there. He owns a furniture store, where he strives to make a respectable living to support his wife and young family. But alongside this straight life, he also has a crooked world: he acts as a fence, to whom robbers come to sell him stolen jewels or watches or whatever, which he then sells on to other specialised fences in the New York underworld. Carney is uneasy about his illegal trade, but it provides money to invest in the shop and save for a better flat for his family. And anyway, he has grown up with crooked dealings everywhere in Harlem, where it is natural to bend the law in order to survive in a hostile white-dominated world. The problem for Carney is that, while he tries to keep out of the criminal world as much as possible, he constantly finds himself being drawn in deeper and deeper, into dangerous situations – very often because of his crazy and irresponsible cousin Freddie who needs rescuing.

The structure of the novels is effective: each novel contains three sub-sections, which are in effect three distinct short novels. Each recounts a different situation or scam in which Carney gets involved; and each of them is set in a different year – Harlem Shuffle during the early Sixties, and Crook Manifesto during the early Seventies. The effect of this deliberate time-structure is that we see Carney developing over the years … at the same time as we follow the changes in the urban landscape and culture of Harlem.

The way the plots are presented is clever and stimulating. Whitehead has said that, needing a change in his writing, he was attracted by ‘heist’ stories in films and novels – how crimes are imagined, planned and executed; which in turn opened up treatment of the moral and criminal problems of Harlem. There’s a twist, though: Carney is more like a detective in that most of the time he is trying to uncover what is actually going on in the dangerous situations in which he finds himself immersed. This gives narrative drive, and reader involvement: you have to concentrate in order to make sense of things. In addition, Whitehead writes elegantly but concisely: you have to pay close attention to phrasing if you want to follow.

And then there is the rich variety of characters. Carney himself is central, of course – we see him develop over the novels, from being quite detached from the confusion around him to being more and more outraged at the injustice of the society and the brutal actions of the criminal world. He witnesses murders; and launches himself into a couple of revenge plots, almost like some rather clumsy detective trying to unravel who’s really guilty. There are many minor characters, who Whitehead develops with incisive detail… and a couple of secondary characters of importance, such as Pepper, who is a life-long professional crook, an ageing loner who takes on jobs in heists as they turn up. Pepper is a fascinating creation, in that he is shown as both inarticulate and unreflective, yet Whitehead conveys his complex but confused musings about right and wrong, and about the nature of human relations – subtle and credible.

The two novels provide a rich and complex portrait of Harlem, both physical and sociological. Whitehead was too young to know Harlem in the periods of the novels, so he must have done a lot of research. In an article, he mentions talking a lot to his parents, but he must also have drawn on many people’s memories as well. The physical description is detailed: which shops and bars were on which streets, frequented by which people…and how all of this changed rapidly over time. The society of the area was clearly black – although interestingly Whitehead does not emphasise this: it’s taken for granted by everyone, since Harlem was a beleaguered black enclave surrounded by white areas which were fairly hostile. Curiously, Whitehead very rarely gives any facial description – and given that I have never lived in a black community, I found it very hard to put faces to the majority of characters. Racial conflict is understated, but it’s there – from a riot over the police shooting of a black teenager in Harlem Shuffle, through to the emergence of black power militants in Crook Manifesto. Carney is perfectly aware of the conflict, but he simply knows the rules of the game, and tries to avoid getting himself into trouble through going to the wrong areas or talking to the wrong people.

Finally, the novels present a picture of Harlem (and indeed much of New York) as riddled with corruption. There is a constant traffic in “envelopes” full of cash, buying protection from gangsters or the police, or advantages from city authorities – and this is a non-racial process, applying to everyone. One story is built around arson – the owner of a run-down building sets fire to it…claims the insurance… and then shares out the grant from the city for ‘redevelopment’. Carney knows that all of this is morally rotten, but he does what he has to do, because that’s how he (and many others) survive.

All in all then, these are richly-textured novels, which are highly readable and entertaining.