Colson Whitehead’s relationship with the crime fiction genre is complicated. Like Jonathan Lethem, another New York-centric writer who came out of less salubrious districts of literature before being accepted into the pantheon, Whitehead has long been one of America’s top-ranked practitioners of critically approved fiction (awards, good speaking gigs, New Yorker appearances).
This is what makes his just-concluded “Harlem Trilogy” such a treat and surprise. From Harlem Shuffle (2021) to Crook Manifesto (2024) and now Cool Machine, these slyly humorous page-turners are unabashed crime fiction of a brand one rarely sees anymore. Like many entries in the genre, they center on a smart, observant operator who keeps getting pulled into dark dealings he shouldn’t be part of but somehow maneuvers through. Unlike many of the books competing for each year’s Edgar Awards, the Harlem Trilogy is relatively unconcerned with the satisfaction of a crime solved or completed.
Rather, Colson Whitehead tells the story of a city through the prism of one of its inhabitants, a Harlem furniture store dealer who also happens to fence stolen goods. Ray Carney takes part in some crimes and avoids others, but is largely just trying to make a life without getting in too much trouble. The magic Whitehead brings is that Ray’s musings on the changing face of Harlem or furniture business minutiae—one of the more comic yet meaningful running bits in Cool Machine is Carney’s embarrassment at his pride in being selected Regional Dealer of the Month for a trade magazine—have more resonance than the well-choregraphed set pieces.
The trilogy covers a lot of territory, starting in 1959 and concluding in the mid-1980s, but its concerns don’t change much. Carney is a family man, worried about raising his two children and ensuring his wife Elizabeth—an indomitable, rarely seen figure who spends most of the books running her travel business—is never disappointed in him.
Titanic events unfold over the course of the books, from the 1964 Harlem riots to the Bicentennial, yet the stories truly live in the inner workings of Carney’s head. He continually turns over the risks of one scheme or another, particularly a staggeringly complex one-last-job heist at the Waldorf-Astoria, a centerpiece of Cool Machine. More often, Carney ruminates on the city, the world, America, and his place in it.
Rumination tends to be where Whitehead’s prose sings. His still-spectacular debut, 1999’s The Intuitionist, was another deeply interior novel in which Borgesian surreality is grounded by ruminative observations of the peculiarities of personality and urban bureaucracies. Often in the Harlem novels, Whitehead, via Carney, casts his eye back to an earlier New York that feels at the same time foreign and completely recognizable in the 21st century. Figures like Bumpy Johnson and Marcus Garvey hover, as do Harlem chroniclers like Chester Himes—though Whitehead’s lighter, often ironic touch doesn’t have Himes’ knuckle-duster bluntness—and landmarks from the Hotel Theresa to the elegant brownstones of Strivers’ Row.
The racial hostility of the city’s white police and the power structure below 110th Street is taken as a given, rarely soliloquized on, but there as a background hum of which Carney is always aware. While Carney is a born-and-bred denizen of Harlem, with a watchful eye whenever venturing outside (as well as within) its boundaries, he is hardly limited and serves as a wry guide to New York in all its bumptious energy, chaotic ambition, and grandiloquent decay.
In one of Cool Machine’s more effective feints, Whitehead starts a chapter with Elizabeth and Carney on a rare night out, dining at the World Trade Center’s Windows on the World. Carney is impressed once seated next to the windows, joking to Elizabeth, “they gave us a white-person table.” Here, Whitehead takes a quiet scene and turns it into an exposition on something larger, as Carney watches the city below:
From the 106th floor, the teeming boroughs and all those who lived and bled in them were turned into a vast, scrabbling miniature—insignificant, pitiable even—and ennobled at the same time, because you could make out the true breadth of their striving, extending as far as the eye could see. They were completely hopeless out there, and unstoppable. Broke-ass, chasing jackpots, cooking schemes pushing through. The nameless heroes of an asphalt romance.
From that point on, even though Carney’s criminal successes and his ability to transition to the straight and narrow continue to matter, they are no longer center stage. Cool Machine shows that for all the Harlem Trilogy’s crooked machinations—the barstool griping, the stolen goods coming in Carney’s showroom backdoor, the storytelling about legendary schemes and long-gone gangsters of the old school—the city is all that ever mattered. Despite the grime, double-dealings, hustles, and the grind of getting by that it imposes on these characters, Whitehead’s New York seems worth any price.
This isn’t a crime series. It’s a romance.