No one does a better job of capturing an era (early 1970s), a place (Harlem), or characters. New York City is on the verge of bankruptcy. Harlem and the South Bronx are in a perpetual state of fire as slumlords, in corrupt collaboration with city officials, set fire to apartments in order to collect inflated insurance policies.
Ray Carney, a small time fence, and big time dealer of furniture–Can I interest you in this genuine leather Hathaway recliner?–comes out of retirement as a crook. He wants to please his daughter with tickets to the Jackson Five concert in Madison Square Garden. To access the hard-to-get ticket he exchanges favors with an old buddy with “connections.” His friends and acquaintances are people like Pepper, a quiet set of muscles who bangs heads for a living, and Zippo, a used-to-be firebug, burning things for joy, but today is a film school graduate, and Artiste making a Blaxploitation film. Chink Montague, Bumpy Johnson, and Notch Walker are Harlem mobsters fighting for control of city Harlem and the South Bronx. Black panthers and crooked cops strut the streets. Every character’s patter, eye twitch, and sidewalk shuffle is presented with perfect acumen. Don Graham, one of my all time favorite narrators, does the audiobook with brilliance.
Whitehead’s description, I can tell you from having lived it, of 1970s New York City is so accurate that it feels like he is recording events with a monster sized VCR on his shoulder. His lovingly rendered accounts of 1970s oversized and overhyped furniture made me laugh aloud. Unlike his first book about Ray Carney, Harlem Shuffle, is a trilogy. The three parts of Crook Manifesto, give us an atmosphere that feels more real than life, but falters when a new story is told with only minimal relation to its companions.