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“After the darkness of the last two books, the lightness that is Carney’s humble appeal fills a psychological need for me,” she said. “I could have explored the world differently, it is not due to these terrible systems of capitalism and institutional racism.”
Yet, while writing about Harlem in the 1960s, Whitehead found himself returning to themes that had long preoccupied him: racial injustice, class differences, established power structures that allow the ruling class to exploit the vulnerable. The last caper in the novel takes place shortly after. 1964 Harlem riotsIt erupted after a 15-year-old black student named James Powell was shot dead by a white police officer. Whitehead had just finished writing this when protests broke out in the United States in response to the murder of George Floyd.
“It was very strange,” he said. “I chose the week after the Harlem riot because I didn’t want to exploit it. And then we were there again.”
Whitehead first had the idea for a Harlem crime novel seven years ago, but set it aside to write “The Nickel Boys.” A fan of heist movies like “Dog Day Afternoon”, “Asphalt Forest” “Charley Varrick”, “Taking Pelham 123” and “Clothes” wanted to write a crime novel from fences, butlers and other perspectives. low-ranking scammers and scammers.
“Maybe I’m being arrogant, but I think everyone has a guilty side that can come out and be expressed or expressed in small ways. You know, maybe steal a pack of gum,” he said.
Whitehead became immersed in the novels of Richard Stark, under the pseudonyms of Chester Himes, Patricia Highsmith, and Donald Westlake. He read a memoir by Mayme Hatcher Johnson, the wife of Harlem crime boss Bumpy Johnson, which proved to be a treasure trove of clues about criminal attempts. To find out the price of a hat or a cup of coffee, she browsed newspaper advertisements of the period and studied different case models (“Aitkens had three or four good hits for a crowbar before it was enough purchase”, while Drummond “wanted six” eight strokes, ‘ he writes).
He was deeply immersed in writing when he realized he had an untapped resource—his parents who lived in Harlem in the 1960s and raised him and his siblings in Midtown and Upper Manhattan. He learned that his father had worked during the summers at Blumstein’s, an upscale mall where Carney got his first job selling furniture, and that his father had stopped by Chock Full o’Nuts, next to the Hotel Theresa, where Carney went for coffee and worked daily. waiter for gossip and information.
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