Colson Whitehead wraps his Harlem crime trilogy with Cool Machine at Wordfest

Colson Whitehead is bringing the final installment of his acclaimed Harlem crime trilogy to Calgary's Bella Concert Hall on September 15 as part of the Wordfest festival.

Cool Machine concludes the series that began with 2021's Harlem Shuffle and continued with 2023's Crook Manifesto. Like its predecessors, the new novel offers a snapshot of a specific moment in New York City's history, though each book spans a distinct era: Harlem Shuffle moved through 1959 to 1964, culminating in the riots sparked by police shooting of a 15-year-old African-American boy; Crook Manifesto ranged from 1971 through the 1976 United States Bicentennial.

Cool Machine divides into three segments across different years. The first, "City at Night," takes place in 1981 and follows Ray Carney, a furniture salesman and occasional fence for stolen property, as he undertakes an elaborate heist involving an enigmatic and philosophical Black gangster named Uncle Rich. The second segment, "Here Comes Sue Simmons," shifts to 1983 and focuses on Pepper, a possibly sociopathic old-school criminal who takes a bodyguard gig that immerses him in the strange new world of the East Village art and punk scenes—a case involving a stolen African mask and a mysterious face-cutting assassin. The final story, "No Radio," arrives in 1986, where Carney and his wife, Elizabeth, who have spent all three books securing themselves financially through their respective business ventures, treat themselves to a fancy dinner overlooking Manhattan before Carney gets pulled back into the criminal underworld to help his nephew Robert, who has become tangled in a murder tied to municipal corruption.

Whitehead's trilogy consistently explores generational divide—a hallmark of all three books but particularly pronounced in Cool Machine—and the notion that New York City is perpetually in flux, with new worlds perpetually encroaching on the old. In one passage in Cool Machine, Carney meets his nephew at a pizza joint on 125th Street in Harlem that Whitehead describes as punishingly lit, a second-rate spot with a signed picture of Jerry Orbach on the wall and subpar pizza that "bled out orange grease like a gunshot body on a Saturday night sidewalk."

Whitehead explained in an interview that he was capturing something authentically New York. "A picture of Jerry Orbach on the wall is a common sight in coffee shops and pizza places," he said. "If you stop in for a slice and you're the headshot, definitely the pizza flippers will ask you to sign it. For me, that's more New York realism than acknowledging the lineage of crime stories." Though the vivid language fits squarely into the razor-sharp, crime-fiction wordplay Whitehead has mastered across his trilogy, the detail serves a larger purpose: documenting how a neighborhood looks and feels in a precise moment in time.