Dear readers, This week, Colson Whitehead’s trilogy of crime novels set in Harlem comes to a triumphant close. With “Cool Machine,” Whitehead returns to his furniture salesman/part-time petty criminal Ray Carney, who provides readers with a window onto the changing landscape of his neighborhood and city over decades. The whole series is a pleasure. In the first book, “Harlem Shuffle,” set in the late 1950s and 1960s, Whitehead combines the mischievous glee of a stickup at a prominent hotel with some pointed class commentary and eventual revenge. “Crook Manifesto,” the 1970s-steeped second volume, is “a dazzling treatise,” as Walter Mosley said in his review for The Times, “a glorious and intricate anatomy of the heist, the con and the slow game.” Its central crime concerns Carney’s attempt to score Jackson 5 tickets for his daughter, but the story naturally spins into something much broader. The final book, “Cool Machine,” delivers us to 1980s Harlem, as Carney gets mixed up in one more heist. It’s another opportunity to savor the author’s “intellectual breadth, his ambivalent irony, his moral seriousness and pinball verbal play,” as our critic Dwight Garner wrote in his review. I appreciate a phrase Garner coined to describe one of the atmospheres he found in the book, “bodega realism.” If you’re inclined to complement your reading with visuals: A few years ago our photo editor curated a selection of images of Harlem in the 1970s to coincide with “Crook Manifesto.” Although the neighborhood has moved into a new decade by the start of “Cool Machine,” those photos will still impart a sense of Carney’s nostalgia and awe for his home, even if you’re miles from Striver’s Row. See you on Friday.
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