Harlem Shuffle

Crime fiction but not in the way I expected. In many ways the crime element is secondary to the story of the main character, Ray, and his struggle between being an upstanding businessman or embracing the crook within. New York in the 1960s comes alive on the page. This is one of those books that is a joy to read and occasionally pulls you up with a phrase or image so wonderful you have to stop and read it again.
Plus crime of course!

Raymond Carney—savvy furniture store owner in 1960s Harlem; a small-time, look-the-other-way fence for stolen goods—is one of the most likable criminals I’ve ever read about.

He dreams of moving his young family on up to a nice apartment on Riverside Dr. and scraps for every dollar. His hustling ways occasionally flare into big-time crime or revenge, but his insights into the teeming city are always keen.

Whitehead can do it all: perfectly observed details of the time and place, great characters, wry humor, surprising plot developments, devastating emotional scenes. The implications of race and class are deftly drawn. The prose… show more.

Who doesn’t love this book? It is both telescopic, a universal saga of race and class, and microscopic, about Carney, who wasn’t so much crooked as “bent,” running a legit furniture business in Harlem, with a “shuffle” on the side – radios, TV’s, jewelry – all of suspicious provenance.

The cast of characters – upward mobile black families, snooty rich and powerful whites, shady characters of all colors and persuasions from crooked cops to prostitutes to hoodlums to crooked jewelers – it makes me think of Whitehead as a modern-day Damon Runyon. 

There is hair-raising suspense, even horror, when Carney… show more.

Colson Whitehead takes us into the bowels of 1960s Harlem, where slick operators, ruthless conmen, and aspiring citizens rub shoulders. I liked Ray Carney as soon as I met him and felt bad that life kept tossing him curveballs. Like his cousin Freddie, who dragged him into a life of crime and high anxiety. The book is funny, poignant, fast-paced, and utterly absorbing. And the prose, like all of Whitehead’s writing, dazzles and delights.