Crook Manifesto

Crook Manifesto is a 2023 novel by Colson Whitehead. It returns to the fictional world of his previous book, Harlem Shuffle. It is a work of crime fiction and a family saga that takes place in Harlem during three periods: 1971, 1973, and 1976, the year of the United States Bicentennial celebration.

Plot
Ray Carney is a successful furniture salesman. He is older than in Harlem Shuffle and he has retreated from small time crime. As his daughter has become more distant to him, he sees a chance to reconnect when she wants Jackson 5 tickets. However, the show was sold out long ago. To score the tickets he rekindles former sketchy relationships and is forced into small time criminal moves once again. He has to reacquaint himself with a corrupt white cop whose goal is to escape the heat that is on him in New York City. Carney transports stolen jewels, robs a poker game, and rummages through criminals' apartments. According to the New York Times, "Carney is resigned and observant, a participant and a hostage, as he embarks on a nightmarish shotgun ride across New York City."

Analysis
According to Evan Kindley, writing for The New Republic, in recent decades, there has been a meaningful rebirth in the historical fiction genre. He says, it has become the most respected genre in contemporary literature. Kindley, citing a literary scholar, also points out that most of the novels nominated for major American awards since 2000 are historical fiction.

In Kindley's view, Colson Whitehead has been impactful as an author advancing the rise of historical fiction during the 21st century. Although Whitehead has written many kinds of stories, historical fiction is shown to be his forte. Whitehead's career shows that he has interest in writing elaborate historical settings. These settings can be unusual. For instance, there is the unclear time period of New York City in his first book, The Intuitionist. Then there is the bizarre, such as the alternate reality of the South in The Underground Railroad. Only Whitehead's 2006 novel, Apex Hides the Hurt, approximates the present, yet it is surreal.

Reception
On the review aggregator website Book Marks, the novel received mostly "rave" and "positive" reviews from critics.

In a starred review, Kirkus Reviews said of the novel, "It’s not just crime fiction at its craftiest, but shrewdly rendered social history."

Writing for The New York Times Book Review, Walter Mosley described the novel as a "dazzling treatise, a glorious and intricate anatomy of the heist, the con and the slow game. There’s an element of crime here, certainly, but as in Whitehead’s previous books, genre isn’t the point. Here he uses the crime novel as a lens to investigate the mechanics of a singular neighborhood at a particular tipping point in time."