Crook Manifesto
Interview conducted by Stéphane Bussard, journalist at Le Temps
His name has been associated with serious historical novels that made him a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner – in 2017 for The Underground Railroad, and in 2020 for The Nickel Boys – Colson Whitehead is not attached to a single writing style. The Intuitionist, the first of his eight novels (most of them published in French by Albin Michel), used mystery and allegory to tell the story of elevator repairmen from competing schools of thought in a future dystopia. Zone One (2011) gave us a pandemic and zombie apocalypse. His latest, Crook Manifesto (La Règle du crime, Albin Michel, 2024) finds its place on the crime and suspense shelves. Set in the author’s native New York, the book is the second installment in a planned trilogy that started in the 1960s with Harlem Shuffle published in 2022, in which otherwise upstanding Harlem furniture salesman Ray Carney is made an unwilling fence by the local criminal element. When Crook Manifesto begins, in the early 1970s, New York is beginning its death spiral, but Ray is mostly lawless – until, that is, he allows his old police contact, Munson, to pull him in on one last job. His motive, however, is as pure as it is irreproachable: securing Jackson Five tickets for his young daughter.