His sociopathic master thief, Parker, is hopefully in the book somewhere. Well I thought I should see what’s happening now, and I kept reading these detective novels, until I realized, I don’t care about detectives. Were there authors in the crime tradition you were looking to as you started the project? Hopefully if you do that right, other people will come along and enjoy it too. I try to come at it from my own point-of-view and to make a contribution. Or it might be about slavery or, say, coming-of-age in 1980s Sag Harbor. Can I write a zombie novel? I’ve read very few zombie novels, although I do like zombie movies. Can I write a crime novel? I’m not an expert. I have to give myself permission, though. Pretty soon he’s doing more than dabbling, when his cousin gets him caught up in the aftermath of a notorious heist: the score on the Hotel Theresa, epicenter of Harlem high society.Ĭolson Whitehead: Whether I’m writing about zombies amok or a heist, this is stuff I like. He’s also dabbling in some fencing of stolen goods. It’s the story of Ray Carney, a furniture store owner in early 1960s Harlem, a pillar of the 125th Street business corridor, and a family man with eyes on a three-bedroom on Riverside Drive. Whitehead is author to ten books and winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction (twice, for his last two, The Underground Railroad and The Nickel Boys), but Harlem Shuffle marks his first entry into the world of crime fiction. That’s the heady undergirding of Colson Whitehead’s newest novel, Harlem Shuffle (Doubleday, 2021). That’s a damn good city, electric and irrepressible, but there’s another place just beyond that surface and it’s populated by our ambitions.

The streets and neighborhoods, townhouses and office buildings, stoops and bodegas.

Colson whitehead zombie novel