Poured Over: Colson Whitehead on Crook Manifesto

Jenna Seery

“New York is a character in the book, and I hate it when people are like ‘the city’s almost a character’”

One of our favorites of 2023, Colson Whitehead’s Crook Manifesto is a crime novel and so much more with unforgettable characters and a gritty portrait of New York in the 70s. Whitehead joined us to talk about his portrayal of the city he grew up in, creating a code of honor for criminals, important movie references and more with Miwa Messer, host of Poured Over.

This episode of Poured Over was hosted by Executive Producer Miwa Messer and mixed by Harry Liang.              

New episodes land Tuesdays and Thursdays (with occasional Saturdays) here and on your favorite podcast app.           

Featured Books (Episode):
Crook Manifesto by Colson Whitehead
Harlem Shuffle by Colson Whitehead
The World According to Fannie Davis by Bridgett Davis
The Colossus of New York by Colson Whitehead

Full Episode Transcript
Barnes & Noble
Barnes and Noble Union Square please give a warm welcome to Colson Whitehead and Miwa Messer.

Miwa Messer
Oh, hello people in the back row. I’m Miwa Messer, the producer and host of Poured Over and obviously you know the guy sitting next to me, National Book Award winner Pulitzer Prize, two Pulitzer Prizes. And, you know, reading Colson is always a trip, right? Because you never quite know exactly what you’re gonna get. But I don’t often get to sit down with a dude with that many awards and you know, so many best selling books. Having watched Cleopatra Jones, Blacula, Poseidon Adventure 1972. I almost had an airplane movie and then I was like, Maybe I should dial it back a little bit. And Earthquake, which do not watch that. It’s not worth it. Even though he mentions it in the book. Don’t do it. And I will own it. That was the second time I’d seen it, and I should have known better. So, Colson,

Colson Whitehead
Thanks. Hi, everybody.

I didn’t even get to the good movies like Serpico or Chinatown. Now. I just did the cheese. And again, I let me be clear. I was rewatching Okay, I have no defense here. Absolutely. No, I cannot say the dude with the Pulitzer got me to watch. How do we describe them?

Well, I mean, you know, blaxploitation is blaxploitation. Early 70s disaster movies, but they’re all exploitation fair of different kinds, exploiting trends. In the 60s, it would have been biker movies, beach movies. Mid 70s, you get some supernatural after the Exorcist…

Which I still actually haven’t seen because it just freaks me out too much. I can do gross. And I can do cheese and I can’t do horror. I like, I can’t do actual horror just…

And what would you think of Blacula? It’s not really…

That’s cheese. I think of that as straight up cheese. But The Exorcist. No, it’s not happening. Can’t do it. Crime novels, though. Harlem Shuffle, Crook Manifesto. You actually wrote a sequel? You’ve never done that? Until this book, right?

No, yeah. I mean, I’ve never had a character or world I want to revisit before. After Sag Harbor, the novel was like, Oh, what if I followed him? This teenage character in his 20s. And then a person I was seeing at the time was like, no one wants to read that. And I got kind of depressed. And put that aside. And then Zone One after I finished the book, and I was like, oh, maybe not the main character, but I’ll visit the world. There are some supporting characters like the quiet storm, this survivor, the zombie apocalypse, I got distracted with this one, I felt in the middle of the middle of the book. I kept coming up with the capers and jobs. And so I knew would be two books. And then if you do, too, like, what’s a twosome, it’s not like a thing. And a series so has to be a trilogy. So it became a trilogy quickly.

Okay, so we meet Ray Carney and his family and his in laws who drove me around the bend when I was reading a Harlem Shuffle. And that’s on me, not on them. But Elizabeth’s parents, man. So we got the whole world laid out for us, right? In Harlem Shuffle. We’re in New York and 59, 61, 64. Okay. You don’t actually have to have read Harlem Shuffle, to listen in on this conversation we’re about to have with Crook Manifesto, and I know a couple of people that asked that through Eventbrite, and everything else. And the reality is no, I mean, it’s fun if you have but Crook Manifesto really stands on its own. And now we’re in New York and 71,73. Now 71, 73 and 76. Okay, can you talk about New York in the 70s? First, I can tell some of you probably know what New York in the 70s look like. But there are some around you who I can guarantee do not. And I know they’ve been on YouTube, and I know they’ve seen the footage, but would you set up New York in the 70s?

I was born in 69. So my first memories are very dingy, dirty in New York. I think there was this atmosphere of fear. I sort of internalized it each time you go out the door you’re engaged in some kind of combat. And as a perfect you know, background for Ray Carney. Crime is at an all-time high, and the city is bankrupt. And, you know, in picking 71, 73 and 76 I’m trying to find different moments in the city’s history that can make some friction. And so you mentioned Serpico. I was a kid growing up watching matinees on, I have Channel Nine and channel 11. I remember seeing The Taking of Pelham 123 on a matinee and also Serpico. So it was cool to have this, the movie version of this crusading cops life. And then go back to the original Peter Moss book about him to go back to the NAB Commission’s report on police corruption. If you know that story of Serpico, he’s tattling on his corrupt comrades in the police force. And it was a big task for us. And so I find a year that I tried to focus on something that can work for Carney and then build it out from there and make it realistic and hopefully fruitful.

And of the things I love about both of these books is it’s really you can read them as novellas. It’s right both Harlem Shuffle and Crook Manifesto, you can read them as a series of three novellas sitting within one book. So here we are, right, and Ray gets pulled back. I don’t really want to call it the underworld. But let’s say he, he’s shown his little bit of bent side, right? He’s a little there’s that…

That trope and is a crime story where somebody wants to go straight, somebody wants to go legit, and then they pull them back in. So it’s fun to you know, see what I want to keep from the tradition and throughout and have fun with.

Because most crime novels don’t involve the Jackson Five. I mean, not even Chester Himes certainly not Iceberg Slim.

There’s a lot of pop culture. I mean, that’s my bent. And so, you know, hopefully you’re picking a reference that can move on different levels. And so, in 71, the Jackson Five are these, you know, supernaturally gifted young kids. But there’s a false front the same way that Ray Carney and other characters have a false front. We know from later revelations that his father’s abusing them. We know Michael Jackson will be abusing kids. And so there is that rift between the face we put out to the world and what’s actually happening. And then, in the second section, there’s a blaxploitation shoot in Harlem. And then I really sort of get to get my sort of pop culture in and have fun with the genre. And also people like Richard Pryor, who, in the early 70s, was about to blow up his concerts, were becoming best sellers. And he’s doing blaxploitation movies like The Hit with Billy Dee Williams, before he gets his sort of later, 70s fame. So pop culture is important to me. And then if I can sort of figure out how to weasel it in I’m really happy. And the bicentennial, but we the idea of ourselves versus the reality. So obviously, 1776 and 1976, the Bicentennial have different meanings for different populations, white and black. And I have a lot of fun with that.

So we’ve set up New York as a character, right? It’s not just Ray, it’s not just Elizabeth. It’s not just John, the kids. Pepper’s back, I was so happy to have Pepper back. And then you whacked him with a baseball bat. I’m not giving anything away because Pepper.

Pepper is a sort of older criminal he ran with Ray Carney’s father who was also a crook. You know, when we first meet him, there’s a flashback of World War Two. So he’s got a little, you know, little creaky, come to 70s and doesn’t take hits as well as he used to.

But he still takes them. Part of what I love about both of these books, too, is you’re talking about class, and race and change and masculinity, and all of these big sort of serious literary fiction, kind of moments in a crime novel. And I love that I love the idea that we don’t have to subscribe, to a certain form of storytelling. And you’ve been reading Richard Stark, there feels like there’s a little Elmore Leonard in this stuff.

I think in humor, I mean, I didn’t go back to him, but I definitely internalized him in the 90s when I was starting to read detective fiction, crime fiction.

So Ray Carney is kind of growing up as New York. I don’t want to say New York is growing up but New York is going through some massive change.

New York is a character in the book and I hate it when people are like the city’s almost a character. No. Dublin in Ulyssesis almost a character. But I realized halfway through Harlem Shuffle, yes, New York is a character and in the same way that Carney is going is having his ups and downs. So as a city, from the World’s Fair and 64, this time of optimism to the doldrums of the 70s. And then, you know, there’s a third book, I’ll take place in the 80s. And we come out of the fiscal crisis, but again, at the end of the 80s. There’s the height of the AIDS crisis, another Wall Street crash and the crack epidemic. So I am charting now the ups and downs of Carney’s life but also the city.

Gabriel Bump actually has, a young novelist I really love, he’s got a new book coming out in November, but he compared Harlem Shuffle and Crook Manifesto to August Wilson’s Century Cycle. And if you know what I’m talking about, it’s the 10 plays that cover Pittsburgh, and the Black experience over the course of the 20th century. And they’re amazing. If you ever have a chance to read them, please do. And actually, I think it’s really accurate. I think it’s really, really accurate. You’re doing this sort of sweep and scope. With jokes. Okay, maybe more jokes than August Wilson. For me, as a reader, I get to sit with the narrative in a way that I might not necessarily like it’s one thing to see one of the Century Cycle plays on stage, right? It’s a really kinetic experience, and there’s movement and there’s dialogue and everything and you bring it all.

I mean, it’s a new venture and challenge. If you pull back, maybe it’s not three books, but a 100-page story, following one character for 30 years. Each novel has three stories that come together Voltron style, to make a novel, you know, each novella has a beginning, middle and end, at the pullback. You know, Harlem Shuffle is the first, is act one and Crook Manifesto is act two, and then I’m winding things up with the third book. And so it is a complicated structure. Once I realized I started a second book, I realized I should probably plot out more and plot the third book. And Harlem Shufflewas at the copy editor, but it was still open for changes. So I was allowed to take things with a third book and a second book and seed them in the first book, because I was locked in the house and watching Inception again. And I was like, oh, you know, he’s really good at seeing the end. And the beginning, I was like, but you do that too. Maybe we should do that for the whole trilogy. And so I was able to sort of figure out the ending and hopefully plant some seeds in Harlem Shuffle.

Yeah, there were a couple of characters who when they popped up in Crook Manifesto, Zippo I’m thinking of and also Elizabeth’s childhood friend. And I will say when Elizabeth’s childhood pal, I had feelings when that guy popped up, but it’s nice to sit in this room, like, obviously, I’m very attached to Pepper. Yes, I’m attached to a gangster, it happens, okay. I mean, y’all read the book, too. But for you. Coming back to this world, I like I still can’t get over the fact that you wrote a sequel. You’re talking about 1200 pages, in the life of the city in the life of a man in the life of a family in a community. And I’m also hoping you don’t do that Peter Matheson thing where he goes back and takes the three volumes of Watson’s life and then writes the book, he actually meant to write the first time. Can we just have fun with that?

But uh, I won’t say that.

Well, the Watson trilogy? Does anyone know? Am I dating myself? Oh, I’m so dating myself. The Watson trilogy was Peter Matheson sort of magnum opus set in Florida. And maybe 10 years after it came out. He just took it all together, rewrote it, and won the National Book Award. Well, so. But you have one of those. Okay, but let’s get back to this world for a second because here you are working with a code, right? Like there’s this language of the sort of respectable, I guess upper class like Elizabeth’s parents, right? And then you’ve got Ray’s sort of dad and Pepper in that whole world. Like, there’s all you’re working on two levels at any given moment. Right. There’s the there’s the slightly bent and then there’s the very…

Murderers, embezzling, pornography versus murder.

I get, there’s a lot happening. There’s a lot happening, but you’re not mapping this out on index cards and sticking them on the wall.

I used to have like a carry notebooks around. And then I lost one and it was devastated. I was flying on JetBlue. And I put my notebook into the Why did I do that? So I got to the hotel, like oh my god, but I was such a such a great memory, I’m going to recreate everything I put in the notebook. So I got another new one and I you know, furious act of mental acuity recreated and then went back to the airport the next day, and they found the notebook and I compare the two and I was like 10% of so now this goes into phone goes into Cloud wake up at 2am in the morning. I’m like boy meets girl, you know, it’s there.

But how do you build a code for gangsters?

You know, before that, I’m a big outliner and before I’m starting each new section, novella, chapter, I’m figuring out what Pepper is going to do what Carney is going to do, what are the motivations and so before I know how they’re going to do the fried chicken heist I know that what it means I know that what the heist means to them. So it’s a lot of planning you know, there’s some people were like the muse comes through the window and guides my hand. But as a New Yorkers, we know that the Muse is trapped on a seven train, there’s like a track fire. So I have to outline, a lot of people in Brooklyn who write the book competing for the muse.

Well, also crime novels need structure, right? Because otherwise, it’s just complete chaos. And it’s actually a little hard to read when it’s that chaotic.

You can tell when, when they’re making it making up as they go along. There’s a real drag.

Alright, I want to go back to this idea that there’s a nobility and a morality to dudes like Pepper and dudes like Zippo and dudes like Ray Carney, they have a code, right? It’s almost like this weird knighthood of dudes who do bad things.

Well, that’s a crook manifesto. You know, what will you do? That’s within your moral limit, and what won’t you do? So there’s a character who is burning buildings down for insurance money, and Pepper are sort of a moral centers, like, I’m not going to judge you, but I would never do that. But he will, you know, commit incredible acts of violence and steal various things. But there is this hierarchy of crime. And I think, you know, as they pull back from story to story, and from book to book, we’re forced to think, you know, how bad is pepper? How bad is this character compared to these larger scale crimes?

I’m looking at it and Eventbrite question and I have to say, it’s making me laugh. What do you think Ray Carney would be doing if he was coming up in today’s world instead of the 70s?

I tried to be open and riff in those kinds of situations, but I you know, I’m so he’s so set in the 60s 70s and 80s. And I have no idea. Sorry.

I don’t really see Ray as a computer guy, so I just, I mean, then sooner or later your body gives out like we’re seeing this with Pepper’s. Got some creaking, my back is not doing you know.

I think you know, I love heist movies like Ocean’s 11. But the high-tech stuff I did, I definitely did not want to engage in this kind of cheap. I liked the sweaty guys and bad suits and sweat stains hunkered over the safes, you know, with their stethoscope. So definitely a low technology crime world is what I wanted from the very beginning.

There’s more serendipity. I think, too. I mean, if you have a cell phone, right, and you can figure out exactly which turn you were supposed to take and when you went right, you were supposed to go left kind of thing. The situations that Ray ends up in, certainly in the first novella of Crook Manifesto, Munson, Munson’s back, you can’t have that kind of thing. If there’s a cell phone in your pocket, you can’t have that kind of thing. If there’s a pager on your hip, like you kind of have to be able to flow free form as you’re going due to all of the different stops.

Oh, yeah. I mean, I think, you know, people were writing crime and detective and thrillers. Now I have a big sort of problem that they set them in the contemporary moment.

You know what I wanted to ask, did you ever read Bridgett Davis’s World According to Fannie Davis, her mother was a numbers runner in Detroit. And I meant to ask you that earlier, we were in the greenroom. I was like, oh, you might want that one. Because I know when you’re doing the research, right? There isn’t a lot of literature, right? Like fences don’t go out and write their memoirs.

There actually are two books I know written by a sociologist in the early 70s. Now they were really helpful, but there is a lack of fencing literature and also fences and pop culture. And so it was sort of open territory. You know, I always like to find stuff that hasn’t been done my first books by elevator inspectors, I beat everyone to the punch on that one. And luckily for us, there’s not a competition for fence literature either so…

But fences to tend to be the people who are sitting in the background or they’re just they’re not the sexy roles, right?

No, they’re definitely a character actor. You know, if you look at Jon Voigt in Heat, he plays a good fence fixer. Oh, yeah, that they seem to like sandblasted his face like, I don’t know.

That movie has not aged well, I used to love that movie. And I watched it again recently. I forgot Al Pacino kept doing the…

He started getting big in that.

There was a lot of scenery chewing like oh, I didn’t remember this part.

Well, you know, the 70s, some of the 70s movies touchstones are Serpico and Dog Day Afternoon and is Al Pacino here like I never want to insult anybody. And then he does get bigger in the 90s.

Didn’t it come after Scent of a Woman. I don’t know which one of them fed the other and I was like it was yeah, it was after. No disrespect. We love Al Pacino, but There are certain performances when you see them on the big screen too. So this was a remastered 4k version. And I think that was part of it where it’s like, oh, I don’t think I’d ever seen Heat on the big screen until that moment and I was like, this is a lot. Yeah, I saw it opening day. Okay, but masculinity. Pepper’s relationship to Ray, Pepper’s relationship to the world, Ray’s relationship to Elizabeth and the kids and the kids who work in his store. Freddie’s son is now working, his cousin Freddie is now working in the store. And Ray just wants to be dad and yet…

I mean family is very important to him. It’s definitely huge in the in Harlem Shuffle, coming from a place of being a real loner and then assembling a family unit. His wife loves him, you know, having kids and having a nice place to raise them and then one other family business but do they want to work in the store? Like they work in a store? Do they want to carry on? Can this family unit make them whole? And there’s Pepper who was you know, sort of sociopathic isolate who becomes inducted into Carney’s family bit by bit is like an uncle, a weird uncle. What does he see in Carney and the life he’s built up and so I give Pepper you know, his moment in the sun and the third in the second section. And I get to examine crime and also family and the city and the counterculture through his eyes.

I love the fact that Ray’s kids keep calling him Uncle Pepper. And he keeps saying you have to stop doing that. You just have to stop. And you know, I would call him uncle but if I were those kids, I’d be doing the same thing because they have no idea right? They’re not following him around watching what he’s doing there. He’s the weird uncle at dinner. But building this community and deciding who comes back from earlier books, right? Like, Zippo was a choice. I happen to love the second section. I happen to love all of the movie stuff. It’s very, very funny. I was not thrilled when you brought back the ventriloquist in the club. Can we leave the puppets out of it, please? Am I the only person who’s creeped out by ventriloquist Okay, no. All right, thank you, I get an amen in the back because I can’t do puppets. And I can’t do ventriloquist but everything is so clean and so clear and so alive. And so corrupt. I mean, not an inch of anything.

If there’s an organization or a system is probably corrupted in this book. And so I guess that’s my point of view, or is that the way the world works? I think it is. But I’m not supposed to say that out loud.

I sort of feel like for re that’s how the world works. I mean, it still strikes me and having read all of the books that you’ve written, including Noble Hustle, I have read the poker book. And poker is not my game, which is why I bring up the poker book. It seems like you’re having more fun with these books. In the writing, then maybe you were able to have with earlier so even The Intuitionist even the zombie novel, even Zone One the zombie novel. It seems like you’re looser on the page.

I think, you know, humor is important, I think in John Henry Days and Zone One. With the more serious books, Underground Railroad and Nickel Boys, there’s not that room. And I think just built into the writing a crime story now. What’s it like super grim like serial killer thing like Luther or something? Like the fish hook in the eyeball killer, you know, something really incredibly grim and Baroque. You have to have fun with it. Have fun with the stock characters. There’s the first wave of Dashiell Hammett. And then a 50s, 60s wave of say Patricia Highsmith and Chester Himes when I was starting to write in the 90s. It was a great time to read James Elroy and Walter Mosley and Elmore Leonard, it’s hard to do a crime story without some sort of irony or humor, a little bit of a wink. And it’s a good opportunity for humor, which is part of my project. And so I feel very good.

Okay. Is it Dum-ah? Or Dum-as?

Were you supposed to say I mean, because I do both depending on…

Who’s talking. Yeah. So a proper pronunciation?

I feel like they would say Du-mas.

So we’ve got this Dumas club.

So hoity toity men’s club for upper crust Black folk.

And again, it just brings me back to this idea that you’re running on so many different levels. Right. There’s the front of this club, which we learned many, many things about. There’s the front of Ray just wanting to be a furniture salesman. I think part of him really does actually want to stay straight and he just can’t. But then you’ve got Pepper who was never ever going to be that guy, right? Like he was just always going to be Pepper.

Yes, there’s no recognition. I think Pepper is engaged. He is who he is, this sort of force of nature. So it makes a good foil because everything that’s human and other people is this alien thing he’s forced to confront. And so it’s fun to write that kind of character and point of view. And then also, I think, forces us to consider our own customs and their strangeness.

Can you talk about Ray’s ambition and Ray’s aspiration for a second? I mean, he really just wants to have a nice life, a nice apartment.

He’s a New Yorker. And you know, with the moves the next nice apartment or nice block, he might be cured.

He just wants a nice life. So why can’t he go straight? Does he need to go straight? Does he really need to go straight? Well, he doesn’t in this book. Well, I know, but you have a third book coming. I’m worried. I’m worried that we’re going to lose Ray’s innate readiness. I mean, he again, he’s got a moral code. He wants to do the right thing. But he gets caught up in a lot of stuff.

I think what I do, what I’m engaged now, because I’m in the third book, and I know what’s happening, the sort of major plot movements, I do have to figure out who he is from, where he is in 59. And the first 10 pages of the first book, to who he is in his 50s. You know, his kids are one and two in the first book, that are teenagers in the 70s. And then they’re out of the nest. He has this nice townhouse on strivers row. But it’s empty now, because his kids are off getting into middle age Carney, what does he want? You know, he’s achieved success in his legit business, and also his crooked business. So who is he? And who is Elizabeth? Elizabeth is also undergoing her generational change in this book. And in the third book, Where does she go? Where did she find herself in the 80s? A very smart woman who wants more and not a sort of traditional role. So where does she go? So it’s this is cool to map them and have a credible psychology for all these different characters over 30 years.

And I really like the arc that you gave Elizabeth in Crook Manifesto. But I really, really want to know what’s going to happen, because I think it could, the way you set up what I think is going to be her story in the third book, I’ll be patient. But how much longer do we have to wait?

I want to slow down. Yeah, sort of a grind. Frankly, I’m hoping this AI thing will catch up and take this whole job out of my hands. But it’s not there yet.

There was another audience question just asking how much of this is like your family’s kind of experience? Like the stories your parents would tell you right? About New York when they were young, and that kind of thing and family members and family friends and all of that. And how much of it is just straight up research. I mean, you do a ton of research.

My family, my parents were kind of mum about various things. And so I was researching Harlem Shuffle, and I was like, Oh, the Hotel Teresa. I’ll use that. Chock full of nuts, I remember chock full of nuts. So put that in the book. And then I would tell my mother, oh, yeah, I’m writing about the chock full of nuts and hotel Teresa. And she’s like, oh, yeah, I went there every day. I worked around the corner. And I didn’t realize that I was writing about my parents’ Harlem. They were a young couple in the early 60s raising kids, but it was never, you know, the stories that he told me were not. I mentioned Blumsteins, which is famous department store on 25th Street, my and I was like, I’m doing a lot of research. I’m a real writer and would write the scene and tell my mother’s like, oh, yeah, your dad actually worked there for two summers doctor in college. So there is a real overlap. And 125th Street is the main drag; you know that it still is today. Later on. I got some names of like, you know, well to do black folks lived in So and So arms in late 60s, right, this building Parkview terrace, I think what 96 on Central Park West was like, built in the sort of mid late 60s And that became a magnet for people going to Upper West Side. But a lot of it is walking around. Is this where Carney might live or his office? Is this a good place to dump a body? If you go on a West Side Highway, you know, like when the 130s there are two elevated sections, Westside highway and also an elevated Riverside Drive. And beneath it is his whole warehouse district where there’s no stores this real sort of factory neighborhood and that is like a perfect place to stash put some ice for three days in a hostage situation. So find those places like places I’ve never walked, and then I investigate and maybe that’s a good a good stage.

I mean, when you think about how much change we’ve seen in our lifetimes in New York, like it’s wild, right? Like just the neighborhoods that are gone or the buildings that have gone up and all of the very high rise glass buildings that are now around Union Square, it’s a trip and they’ve all gone up in like 20 minutes.

Definitely, you know, Shake Shack and GAP But if you go to blocks up, it’s the townhouses from 150 years ago and they’re still there.

It’s wild to see the evolution of New York right? And to see it to on the page, like this. And I mean, I, I’ve dipped in and out of The Colossus of New York, you did an essay collection years ago, almost 20 years ago, actually 20 years ago. Wow.

The first time I read here was like, in this store was 2001 with Chuck Palahniuk. Okay, I’m still here, bitches.

But I mean, how much of your own experience of New York outside of the stories you might have heard, or how much of your own sense of sort of change in time and age and all of the things that catch up with us when we walked by a storefront that’s been 15 different things in 20 minutes? Right? How much of that is informing?

I mean, that’s definitely there. And the way Carney sees the city overlaps with the way I see the city and I think you see the city; I think we all are seeing the city through this lens of change who we used to be when walked on this corner, the last time we were here, the store was this now, it’s that. I wasn’t around in 64. I was not very conscious in 73. But I can do New York, because you know, it’s still the same city, we’re still subjected to the same pressures and forces rich and poor, black and white, in the 50s and 60s. And now and I think, you know, in The Colossus of New York, there’s a section about the subway. And I think the things I was trying to capture in that essay, were the same in the 30s, you know, the hustle to get to work and being crammed. And, and they were the same when I wrote it in 2001. And, and now in 2023, there’s an essential character of the city that hopefully I can tap into and capture.

You have an epic playlist that gets sort of mixed around whenever you’re working on a new book, obviously, Jackson Five on the new playlist.

No, no, I mean, I have a master playlist of like 3000 songs, right. Okay. And it’s The Clash, and John Coltrane and Nina Simone and Daft Punk. Really, the music for the books never overlaps. Across one story, Bobby Womack did get inducted into the master playlist, okay, because I did go back and watch that movie eff Koto. Anthony Quinn, blaxploitation movie, there’s a 77 shaft disco, like seven, seven minute long version of shaft by Isaac Hayes. And that was like Underground Railroad. I was listening to that there only one railroad. So there is a rift between, okay, subject and subject and content.

But there’s not necessarily a rift right now between us and the start of the third book. So Colson is going to read a little bit from the new book.

So, the first four paragraphs of the new book, I’m only on page 52. And in this one, it’s 1981. And Ed Koch is mayor. And he used to say, How am I doing? I don’t remember the exact intonation, I have to research that before the book comes out. But there’s time. We’re coming out with fiscal crisis. Various municipal and federal interventions are taking us out of the 70s doldrums. In all of Ray Carney’s years as a fence, he’d been a reluctant fence and a ruthless fence. At times harried and imperiled by his choices, and other times the embodiment of crooked intelligence. There was only one occasion when he participated in the theft itself. And that was in the summer of 1981 when Uncle Rich came back to town, that bad news time, the city that year was true to its personality as malformed across the centuries, a monstrous entity powered by innate miseries operated by brute will and held together by pluck, fury and rebar. It had been flat broke, and now clambered determinedly from the crater of debt, one mucky handhold at a time, crime and its ingenuity, devise new permutations daily, making every citizen a victim or a witness, new arrivals poured in hourly, as if there was room multiplying the local varieties of sadness and perseverance and outnumbering those who’d scurried to the suburbs, or fled their last humiliation. It was dirty and sick and plain spoken its threats. How am I doing? The mayor asked on his rounds, barking like one of the mangy seals installed the decrepit and neglected Central Park Zoo, a real dump. It was his trademark. Everybody needs a gimmick. How am I doing? The same as everyone else, tired, banged up, but staggering forth somehow. As for Ray Carney he was a son of a city and during his rash of misfortunes and managing to engineer a few reversals. The day the Uncle Rich’s mess came to a head, Tuesday the 16th of June, was already out of the ordinary in that Carney had a notable appointment. An interview with Sterling quality, the monthly magazine of the Sterling furniture company, Carney had sold their products since he first opened his doors to budget conscious Harlemites of contemporary sensibility and taste to bright eyed couples who strain cheerfully under the monthly payments to geezers who set themselves adrift in living rooms on new recliners now, the company had chosen him as Northeast Regional Dealer of the Month of August, Carney jumped up and almost knocked over his coffee when he got the call. Across a lifetime a man cultivates a number of secret wishes that he dare not share with the world, precious things too delicate to exist outside to safe pastures of his mind, to see his name, flow and curl in the dignified type face of the Sterling furniture house magazine. It was a dream he’d held close for decades. He and Elizabeth celebrate with a dinner at his friend’s joint off Lex, where the two tiny portions coiled on the big plates and in insolent triumph.

Oh, please. I get it, I get that you want to slow down a little bit. But, man, we’re gonna have to be patient. We’re gonna have to be so patient. But it will be worth it as always, but I do have one tiny question. You’re not going to do that thing where you slide in another book that you weren’t planning on writing while you’re writing thing you were actually meaning to write?

No, I can only do one thing at a time.

I’ll sit quietly and sit quietly. I can wait. Colson Whitehead. Thank you so much.

Thank you, everybody, for coming. It’s very sweet of you.

Thank you all for joining us. Take care.

Poured Over