Pulitzer Prize-winning author Colson Whitehead on his latest novel Cool Machine

It all started with one word: Fence.

Colson Whitehead typed it as a note on his phone about 14 years ago and forgot about it. Back then, he had other books to write. The first of them, The Underground Railroad (2016) was turned into a miniseries on Amazon and won a shoal of prizes including the Pulitzer.

The Nickel Boys (2019) was the second. It was made into a film and won another Pulitzer. No writer had ever done that with back-to-back books. When it came out, he made the cover of Time Magazine. “America’s Storyteller,” the headline read.

Both of those novels had painful subjects (a magical realist runaway slave story and a true-life racist reform school horror respectively) and when he finished them he felt like he needed a change. He’d always liked heist movies, and so maybe he could write something like that. He looked back at old notes on his phone and there was that word again.

Had you ever read a novel about a fence? I ask him over Zoom. Over in New York’s Upper west side, he shakes his head. I haven’t either. Odd, that: you would have thought someone involved in what Scots law calls reset - dealing in stolen goods - invariably leads the kind of double life that would attract novelists.

He agrees. “In a heist,” he adds, “maybe they’ll steal $2 million in jewels, half of them have been shot and they’re on the run and they bring their booty to a fence and he says ‘I’ll give you ten cents on the dollar’ which always seems such a horrible thing. So I got some sociological studies on fences. A lot of them will have a storefront and their legit operation will be in the front but in the back they’ll do all their illicit business.”

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That’s the way his fence protagonist Ray Carney works in Harlem Shuffle (2021), the first in a trilogy which has just ended with the publication of Cool Machine. A black Harlem furniture store owner, liminal criminal and family man, Carney is one of the great characters in modern American fiction, right up there with John Updike’s Rabbit Angstrom and Richard Ford’s Frank Bascombe.

Those last two, though, appeared in books that weren’t written sequentially. Whitehead’s Harlem Shuffle trilogy was, and you can see it in the intensity of characterisation and the sophistication of the plotting. Each book contains three novella-length stories, all wildly different in subject matter yet containing echoing leitmotifs, and all linked through Carney’s explorations of crime and capitalism.

“Ray is an audience surrogate,” Whitehead explains. “So as he’s learning, the reader’s learning. Some of the obstacles he faces are mundane and domestic, and some of them aren’t – like being held at gunpoint or being kidnapped.”

The other thing the reader is learning is about Harlem. Harlem Shuffle opened in 1954 and after various crime capers, ended in the 1964 riots, when Carney defended his furniture shop against looters. Crook Manifesto (2023) took the story into the Seventies, when Harlem was following the rest of NYC into a crime-ridden downward spiral and his shop was firebombed.

Cool Machine opens in 1981: New York is on the way back, and so is Carney’s business. The fire was five years ago but now he has just been made Sterling Furniture’s Dealer of the month. But his adored wife needs money to set up her own travel business and a criminal mastermind asks him to join him on One Last Heist ....

Over the books, we see how New York changes along with Carney: “churn, baby, churn” is a repeated motto. But although Whitehead puts real locations into the plot and although the books now have their own tourist walking tour, today’s city is a different beast.

“Definitely,” says Whitehead. “I mean, last night, I saw some footage of the Bronx in the Seventies and it looked like Dresden, all empty lots and burnt-out buildings. But neighbourhoods come back. I used to live in what is now a very gentrified part of Brooklyn called Fort Greene. It’s bizarre to walk around there now and think, ‘Damn! I should have brought that crack house when I had the chance!’

That, though, is what he loves about the city, he says, the way it churns and reinvents itself. The furniture Ray sells is part of that churn and so are the goods he recycles - including in Cool Machine, one of Jesse Owens’s gold medals from the 1936 Berlin Olympics and a looted African mask.

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Most writers don’t take their characters’ work seriously, but Whitehead always has, so Ray is firmly four-dimensional.

“I think I'm usually good with structure and outlining, but normally the [protagonist’s] voice takes a while to creep in. But in this case, I had that, I knew how Ray walked and talked, and I just had to figure out the difference between Ray at 40 and at 50.”

Ray is such a sharp-eyed trickster of a character that he is a joy to follow across the decades, as is his sidekick Pepper, one of fiction’s most engaging sociopaths. So why bring the curtain down in 1986?

“Well,” he laughs, “at a certain point you age out of the criminal life. Ray is 55 now and Pepper is 65 and a little the worse for wear. But with Ray, I felt his journey to reconcile his different selves was over. And 1986 was the height of the AIDS crisis and the crack epidemic and the city was just entering another depressive phase, so it seemed a good place to stop.”

What did that feel like?

“I’d been thinking about how I was going to land the ending right from the end of the first book, so I’ve been working towards that final page for five years, though the whole project has taken seven. But when I wrote it, I felt immense satisfaction.”

What’s next? Another novel, though he’s keeping it under wraps for now. “But I feel optimistic about it and I’m excited, and that’s always good.”

Colson Whitehead is at Edinburgh International Book Festival on 21 August at 1pm. Cool Machine is published by Fleet, price £22.

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