After reading thirty pages of Colson Whitehead’s magisterial 2021 crime novel Harlem Shuffle, I felt as though I were reading a particularly operatic story by Damon Runyon, complete with molls, dolls and Broadway-laden side-eyes.
Set in and around the famous Hotel Theresa in the early 1960s (a centre of the social life of the black community of Harlem, and once called the Waldorf of the area), Harlem Shuffle is the kind of widescreen social drama that immediately reads like a screenplay. With its pitch-perfect colloquialisms, local colour and deadpan humour, I felt grateful that this massively enjoyable book had been rereleased; I missed it the first time around, the post-Covid fug offering enough of a smokescreen to obscure it from view (mine at least). Set in Harlem between 1959 and 1964, Harlem Shuffle tells the story of Ray Carney, a furniture salesman striving to provide a stable, respectable life for his wife, Elizabeth, and their family. Despite his outward appearance as an honest businessman, Ray supplements his income by discreetly fencing stolen goods - a connection to the criminal world inherited from his family’s past. This carefully balanced life begins to unravel when his cousin Freddie draws him into the robbery of the Hotel Theresa, pulling Carney into a colourful network of gangsters, corrupt police officers, and street hustlers.
