Harlem Shuffle (2021) by Colson Whitehead.
Good Reads meta-data is 318 pages, 3.73 rated by 8591 litizens.
Genre: krimi.
DNA: Harlem 1960s.
Verdict: Harlem Cycle rechauffée.
Tagline: Welcome to Harlem.
Harlem 1960 is a world of its own, and this account is richly textured and detailed with blood and gore for those that like that on the page. Stability in this world is achieved by blind eyes and payoffs.
Navigating these shoals, riptides, cross currents, and squalls both white and black is Furniture Merchant who would like to be honest, but, well, temptations and pressures are many in the levels of this world. By day he sells recliners, sofas, wingback chairs, and by night he fences stolen goods, arranges robberies…but only because, he tells himself repeatedly, to help out his troublesome and always in trouble Cousin.
Furniture Man is an honest crook in a warped environment where the racism is palpable. Take a wrong turn and walk into another neighbourhood and the cops pounce on a black face on the wrong side of an invisible line. It pays to know the rules, and the most important ones are unwritten and almost never said.
***
The detail is so rich, the dialogue is so dense with the street idioms of the time and place, the racism so omnipresent that I drowned in the text, and flicked pages to stay afloat. Not only does every character have a backstory, though admittedly many recur, so do most objects.
There is as much violence, gratuitous as well as purposeful, in the book to remind me of Chester Hines’s Coffin Ed and Gravedigger Jones books of the Harlem Cycle set in the same milieu.