Colson Whitehead’s vivid, noirish Harlem Shuffle – whose sequel, Crook Manifesto, arrives in print this month – features Ray Carney, a wise-cracking, hard-working furniture salesman with connections to New York’s criminal underworld.
Carney, whose story is told over three acts, is the son of a long-deceased local hoodlum and is “only slightly bent when it comes to being crooked”. As the proprietor of Carney’s Furniture, he serves the black clientele in his neighbourhood, selling “gently used” items with a generous credit policy. Carney is determined to stay on the straight and narrow and become part of the city’s business elite, but then his cousin, Freddie, ropes him into a hotel heist. Predictably, things don’t go according to plan and Carney finds himself neck-deep in gun-toting mobsters and bent cops, several of whom are old adversaries of his father.
