Titled after Bob & Earl’s 1963 R&B track – Whitehead is a melophile and has cited in previous acknowledgments the likes of Misfits, Prince, and Sonic Youth – Harlem Shuffle follows the upwardly mobile furniture salesman Ray Carney. The book, set between 1959 and 1964, is divided into three sections that have the feel of discrete novellas. Each section offers a glimpse into Carney’s life as he becomes embroiled in Harlem’s criminal world, and each centres on a caper: the Theresa Job, the Duke Job, the Carney Job. The novel is not driven by plot but by character, and it takes some time to adjust to its structure and pace. While the section breaks effectively cover a great deal of ground in a short span of time, they also tend to disrupt momentum, deflating an otherwise high-velocity narrative. These breaks also force each story into abrupt resolutions. A swift flash-forward may reveal how the narrative’s loose ends have been neatly tied, before the focus suddenly shifts towards Carney’s questions about his father’s legacy and his own fate.

Carney comes from a line of crooks, to use the novel’s parlance. There is his father, the late and legendary Mike Carney, as well as his cousin Freddie, whose scheming leads to Carney’s involvement in a heist at the historic Hotel Theresa. Carney supplements his income by selling stolen goods through his store, but as his criminal escapades intensify he is forced to confront his moral flexibility. This establishes the book’s central theme, the ‘[s]triver versus crook’ dichotomy that Carney attempts to parse throughout the novel: ‘Strivers grasped for something better – maybe it existed, maybe it didn’t – and crooks schemed about how to manipulate the present system … But perhaps Carney was being too stark. Plenty of crooks were strivers, and plenty of strivers bent the law.’

Rumination on the theme generally occurs in the moments when Carney is reflecting on his own position on the sliding scale: ‘“I may be broke sometimes, but I ain’t crooked,” he said to himself. Although, he had to admit, perhaps he was.’ As the novel’s framing device, this can feel forced, though its true purpose is revealed in the final and strongest section of the book, set in 1964, the year of Harlem’s race riots.

There are the eerie parallels between the Harlem riots and the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests, both responses to police brutality. ‘It’s the same old thing,’ Carney says. ‘They get away with it, and then people want to be heard.’ But the novel’s real politics emerge when Freddie befriends Linus, the down-and-out son of the Van Wycks, a renowned New York real estate family. When Carney intervenes after Linus and Freddie rob the Van Wyck family home, he realises how the wealthy and powerful commit their crimes ‘out in the open, notarized their misdeeds or engraved them into bronze plates for building facades’. The subtext of the novel is then revealed: the greatest crime in America is the theft of land, and Harlem’s disproportionate crime rate is a result of the systemic inequality that keeps the powerful in power.

The novel’s political overtures can belie Whitehead’s confidence with crime as a genre. This is apparent once the reader notices how frequently Carney’s wife, Elizabeth, is mentioned in relation to her job. Elizabeth works for a travel company, Black Star – a David Bowie reference – which assists Black road trippers to safely make their way through segregated America (the company is the Green Book, an annual Black travel guide from the Jim Crow era, come to life). Despite how frequently her employer is introduced as if for the first time – up until the novel’s final thirty pages – it ultimately bears no relevance to the narrative itself. Instead, it seems to function as a vehicle to make asides about segregation and the burgeoning civil rights movement. Given the political heft of Whitehead’s most recent novels, perhaps the habit is difficult to relinquish. It might also suggest an insecurity with the genre, as if the crime novel must make an explicit political comment to gain substance or cultural traction.

Whitehead is at his best when he is least self-conscious. His novelist’s eye and ear for Carney’s milieu conjure a world as evocative as any in his previous work. When liberated from making social commentary, the prose is precise, lush, and satisfying. Peppered among the slick Harlem jive is keenly observed imagery: ‘He ran [a] finger along the scar in his cheek as if scraping invisible peas out of a pod.’ What prevents Harlem Shuffle from being a convincing crime novel, then, is part of its broader failure: Whitehead’s reluctance to depart from rousing social messaging. The book is a rich and tender portrayal of a vanished Harlem. It may not prompt a social awakening, but then again, why should it?