Cool Machine by Colson Whitehead review – final part of the Harlem Trilogy is freewheeling fun

In the summer of 1977 a bolt of lightning struck a substation on the Hudson River, knocking out power across New York City. Two nights of darkness sparked a wave of looting as Harlem and Bronx teenagers swiped high-end items from the downtown stores. They took speaker systems and turntables to experiment with at home. They taught themselves how to scratch and mix, and sang self-styled scat lyrics into stolen microphones. Hip-hop, according to urban legend, was the child of a lightning strike and a robbing spree. It’s art from crime, thinks Ray Carney, the hardscrabble hero of Colson Whitehead’s rollicking Cool Machine, the final part of his Harlem Trilogy. Or possibly vice versa, given that the man dislikes rap music and nurses a sneaking affection for old-school smash-and-grab. For years Carney has led the sort of intrepid double life that would make Spider-Man proud, supplementing his furniture business on 125th Street with a lucrative sideline as an underworld fence. In his stealthy, dogged fashion, he helps facilitate a process he describes as “the churn”: the movement of stolen goods through New York. The churn fuels the economy and helps refresh the culture. It’s the city’s equivalent of an endocrine system. The Harlem Trilogy, like its hero, is a cool-headed trickster, more ambitious and far-reaching than its dimestore facade would suggest. Carney’s tale can be relished as a set of shaggy-dog crime capers that bound from the high-stakes heist to the mysterious bag of loot to the fraught getaway through the rat-infested back alley. But it is also – perhaps principally – a story of New York through the decades, and its semi-autonomous circles of black and white society. Harlem Shuffle, the first book in the series, hotwired the action to the 60s civil rights movement. The second, 2023’s Crook Manifesto, played out during the 70s “Fear City” era, when the infrastructure collapsed, the murder rate spiked and Carney’s store doubled as a blaxploitation film set. …