Mystery in the Big Apple
Pulitzer winner Whitehead writes crime fiction set in 1950s and ’60s New York,
The last time Colson Whitehead and I spoke was in 2019, a few months before his novel “The Nickel Boys” came out, the one that won him his second Pulitzer Prize in a row.
He was in Toronto and we were able to sit down in person. “I remember, it was my first interview. I almost started weeping because I was thinking about the kids of the Dozier School and I hadn’t talked about it yet,” he said over the phone from his home on Long Island, New York.
We’re set to talk about “Harlem Shuffle,” coming out Tuesday, the book he started to write after working on the intense and powerful 2016 book “The Underground Railroad,” which won him his first Pulitzer.
He’d wanted to write “something lighter” and a crime fiction book seemed just the thing.
But, as he told the Star back then, “we elected a white supremacist president,” so he put he crime fiction aside and wrote “The Nickel Boys” instead, a fictionalized story about the real-life Dozier School for Boys in Florida.
While that particular residential school might be American, it tapped into a wider narrative.
As he was on the road promoting the book, doing interviews, he said, in Ireland and Canada and Australia, people brought forward their own examples of residential schools.
“It’s not an American tragedy or Canadian — people in power abused people without power and everyone looked the other way.”
By the time he got back to writing “Harlem Shuffle,” he was “ready to do something that had more humour, more capacity for play.” It was a muscle he flexed in his earlier books, in his gambling book “The Noble Hustle,” for example, or the satire in “Apex Hides the Hurt,” and “being able to go back and exercise that muscle again was great.”
He doesn’t necessarily feel any pressure after back-to-back Pulitzer wins. Writing’s hard at the best of times. “I always wake up, look at my computer. I’m like ‘Don’t screw it up today, Colson.’”
His writing is so, so fine. There’s humour and joy in the language: he describes “limestone fortifications … that squat like an ornery old toad”; the patrons at a local bar who “knead grudges in their fists,” and who “look around at the grubby pageant” of dealing and deception around them.
It’s the kind of writing that brings you into a book and doesn’t let you go. The kind that wins you a Pulitzer.
“Harlem Shuffle” is a crime story, written in three sections, which Whitehead said he wrote as three novellas, set in 1959, 1961 and 1964, respectively. (You could read each one out of order and it would still all hang together — he’s working on a sequel, too, set up as three more novellas.)
Each section features a caper, one a big heist, with lead protagonist Ray Carney, if not necessarily at the centre of the action then caught up in it through his relationship with his cousin Freddie, whose mother took Carney in after his parents died, and through his growing reputation as a fence for stolen goods.
He’s an intriguing character, never quite sure which side of the legal divide he wants to stand on. There’s Ray the striver and Ray the crook.
“I think people can relate to that divided nature,” Whitehead said. “He wants to be a good family man and have a respectable business on Harlem’s main drag … but from his upbringing and his nature he has these criminal inclinations, this cryptic part of his personality, and I thought that was a nice dilemma to examine.”
Carney is a man with dreams, wanting to look after his wife and kids, and maybe move up in the world. He’s got a furniture store in Harlem’s main business district, 125th Street — he loves his business, a thing that provides Whitehead an opportunity to have some fun with language and that leads to some wonderful punctuations, where Carney’s gaze is interrupted by the beautiful lines of an Argent sofa. Cinematic.
When he was doing research for the book, Whitehead said, looking for the pieces that would help him find the language and “mechanics” of the different times and different heists, he’d run into newspaper ads for mid-century furniture — and in that way he “found the language for Carney’s occupation.”
There’s also the slang of the time, the language of the criminals and the language
of the heist, each requiring an attuned ear.
Researching various of his books, he’d come across a word while reading a slave narrative or a criminal’s memoir, and then “try to deploy it in a way that sounds realistic, the way the original people used it.”
The process is the same no matter what he’s writing about, he said, taming the language, finding the right words. The words build the world.
So, too, do the details of the time and place, the things that help us picture 1960s Harlem, that make it come alive.
“Bumpy” Johnson, Whitehead said, was a 1960s Harlem hood whose wife later wrote a biography. In it she describes her time in the gangster life, how the numbers rackets worked, how the Italians muscled in.
Then there were other events at the time, a mayoral race, the protests in Harlem in 1964 after the police killed a young boy.
The rabbit hole of research into Harlem is also how Whitehead figured out the mechanics of his fictional heist at the Hotel Theresa, fashioned on the real Hotel Theresa, still standing, where celebrities such as Cab Calloway would stay; then there was a heist at the Pierre Hotel in the 1970s, details that together create the base for a great fiction.
And there are the subplots, the ones that give us a sense of lives lived. Carney’s dad was a criminal and, throughout the book, Carney realizes he’s paying for the sins of his father.
“The early ’60s were before Black consciousness and Black is beautiful,” said Whitehead. “Carney is looked down upon by the hoity toity types of the Harlem business world, the bankers and lawyers, with his darker skin and his humble origins.”
Being aspirational, Carney tries to get into the club that his upper middle class father-in-law is a member of, an incident that ends with a gut-punch of a betrayal.
“It’s a New York book, so money’s important and it overlaps with class, and then real estate is important in another sort of indicator of where you are in the hierarchy,” Whitehead explained.
Which leads to some wonderful New York scenes, of Carney walking to Riverside Drive, looking into the windows of the houses there and imagining another life for himself.
It’s familiar, too, for Whitehead.
“As a New Yorker I thought growing up if I could just get that next better apartment, my whole life would change … That aspirational hunt for the better block, the better house animates a lot of New Yorkers’ lives, definitely mine.”
In an interview with The Associated Press last year, Whitehead said that when he looks through his work, who he was at the time determines how the book comes out. Who was he, then, when he wrote “Harlem Shuffle”?
It’s a pre-pandemic novel, he said — he’d written a lot of it before the pandemic hit, much of the research was done before he wrote “The Nickel Boys.”
“I think I’m really happy with my poker book ‘The Noble Hustle,’ and the ‘Underground’ and ‘Nickel’ books,” he said.
“I am more confident than I was 20 years ago … in my life with my wife and kids. I think when you have love in your life or you’re content … if you’re a better person, the work comes out better.”