Chester himes

Cool Machine, the final novel in Colson Whitehead’s Harlem trilogy (following Harlem Shuffle and Crook Manifesto), is another tour de force and a fitting conclusion to the Uptown peregrinations of his endearing protagonist Ray Carney, a successful Harlem furniture salesman and part-time fence. It’s an old-school crime caper, set in 1980s New York against the backdrop of Mayor Koch’s rapidly gentrifying city, told in three interconnected sections excoriating Reagan-era capitalism. The ubiquitous construction works, graffiti and corruption are fuelled by the twin deities of power and money.

For modern America, Harlem is a once maligned, now much vaunted literary totem, which continues to occupy a gargantuan place both in the psychogeography of New York and the soul of the nation. Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, Zora Neale Hurston, Nella Larsen, James Baldwin and Chester Himes are just a few of the writers whose names are associated with the 50-odd blocks heading uptown from 110th Street at the northern end of Manhattan. Their echoes, traces and spirits can all be discerned in Colson Whitehead’s outstanding new novel Harlem Shuffle — a genre-defying blast from a bygone era, set between 1959 and 1964, yet one which urgently speaks to the present.