For “Cool Machine,” the 1980s-set final novel in his Harlem crime trilogy, Colson Whitehead drew inspiration from another classic American story.
That’s right, “Die Hard.”
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While there aren’t any obvious parallels between the movie and his novel’s three sections, Whitehead says the idea of the 1988 blockbuster action film, which stars Bruce Willis as a New York City cop trying to make things right with his wife while terrorists ruin Christmas Eve, inspired him to raise the stakes of his story.
“It’s the last book, and it’s the ’80s, so I wanted to go big. And I think ‘Die Hard’ is an exemplary, big-budget, high-concept action movie from the ’80s,” says the author, who won the Pulitzer Prize twice for earlier novels, in 2017 for “The Underground Railroad” and 2020 for “The Nickel Boys.”
“The heist in the 1981 chapter of the book is much bigger and more complicated than I’ve done before,” he says. “So the idea of a big ’80s blockbuster informed some of it. Also, it’s the last volume, it’s the last story, so you want to go out with a bang.”
As he has in his two earlier books in the trilogy, “Harlem Shuffle” and “Crook Manifesto,” Whitehead in “Cool Machine” focuses on Ray Carney, his protagonist, a furniture salesman and part-time fence, or dealer in stolen goods, and Pepper, Ray’s sociopathic friend, mentor and criminal associate. And like the first two books in the trilogy, it’s told in three novella-length sections that are grounded in reality.
“The core influence on all three books is ‘The Taking of Pelham 123,’ which is an early ’70s crime movie,” he says. “It’s a real cross-section of New Yorkers in all our cranky glory. I remember seeing that as a young kid in the ’70s, and that’s really the sort of low-technology crime story that going way back made me want to write a heist story.”
Whitehead, who spoke via Zoom a few days before the book’s publication, discussed writing the trilogy, spending time downtown in the 1980s and watching films like “Escape From New York” and TV shows like “Andor.”
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Q. This book is the final installment in your Harlem trilogy, which initially started as a single novel. How did the stakes change as the narrative expanded into a trilogy?
It was going to be a single story, but I realized it was going to be a trilogy halfway through writing the first one. I conceived of “Harlem Shuffle” as three novellas in one. And halfway through, I kept coming up with more and more ideas for heists, capers, and so it became two books — but really for just like a day. Immediately, I was like, It will be a trilogy and I’ll follow the main character for 30 years and I’ll follow the city for 30 years.
Q. Would you talk about how we find your protagonist, Ray Carney, a furniture salesman and sometime dealer in stolen goods, in “Cool Machine”?
It’s the end of Carney’s story. He’s in his 50s, and we’ve seen him become a father in the first one. Now his kids are grown up and out of the house. He’s an empty nester, sort of vaguely depressed.
Part of the depression comes from having achieved his goals. The store’s doing fine. His criminal business is puttering along. No big police interest. As a father, as a person, he has to ask himself, So what’s next?
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Q. In a way, these books are about work and the satisfaction some people get out of what they do, as opposed to vacations or vices or other things.
I think a lot of my books feature what I call weird jobs. So my first book, “The Intuitionist,” is about elevator inspectors. “Apex Hides the Hurt” is about a branding consultant. “Zone One” is about people who clean up after the zombie apocalypse.
While I have had very few real jobs in my life, I sort of understand the philosophy of work, and I’ve gotten a lot of creative juice out of finding the metaphorical implications of jobs.
Ray Carney is a fence. What does that mean? A lot of fences will have a public face, a real storefront, and then they’re doing their evil business in the back. That’s a divided nature, and so a simple job like a fence, for me, is very generative.
Q. He loves his wife, Elizabeth. He loves his kids. But when they’re not around, he seems to fall back into crime.
When Elizabeth goes away, he does tend to get into some trouble. He’s unsupervised, and definitely there’s a compulsion that he’s trying to master and understand. In the third book, he’s maybe realizing that he doesn’t do it because he needs the money. He likes the chaos.
He definitely has a secret life. When I was thinking of who he is after midnight, there’s a section in “Harlem Shuffle” that deals with dorveille, which is a way of sleeping that people did before we got electric light: You fall asleep for four or five hours, and you’re up for an hour or two before your second phase of sleep. It’s called segmented sleep, and apparently, it’s what a lot of people did in the Middle Ages.
I connected with that because it seemed like after midnight, there’s this two-hour block of activity when no one with a real job is up. It’s the domain of alcoholics, criminals, and writers, and definitely, I felt at home there at different moments of my life.
Q. How do you make a book feel like it’s set in the 1980s? Is it enough to include some ’80s references and then focus on the characters and story, or is it something else?
I mean, the characters are always the most important thing, and then which things from the ’80s can I repurpose for the story that would make sense?
People would get their radios stolen in the New York City streets in the ‘80s, and so there was a rise of a thing called the Benzi Box, a portable radio you would take when you left. Then people started putting these signs that said “no radio,” so you wouldn’t break the glass and then find out there’s no radio in there. So that’s a mark of the ’80s, but then, how can I use that for Ray’s story? For Pepper, when he sees those signs, it’s a break in protocol, you know, the prey, the car owner, should not try to communicate with the predator, the thief. It goes against his own sort of criminal code. And for Ray, having a “no radio” sign is a capitulation to the forces of the city; it’s embarrassing. Like, I’m a man; I’m not going to say “no radio.”
So it’s finding a signifier of the ‘80s, but then, most importantly, making it serve the story so it’s not just a random name check. It actually is there for a reason.
Q. You would have been in your early teens in the ‘80s. Did you spend time downtown in any of the places Pepper visits in the book?
It’s the time of Basquiat, Kenny Scharf, and a new sort of art movement, street art. It’s also a very fertile time of post-punk and No Wave music. I was not going downtown at that period, but my sister was four years older and she was a real hipster. I would hear these crazy bands as I walked past her room: Gang of Four, ESG, the Bush Tetras. As an 11-year-old, that’s what I thought was pop music. So she really informed my tastes.
The 1983 section, when Pepper goes downtown, is an homage to those days. A couple of years after ’83, that’s when I started making my pilgrimages downtown to buy my Siouxsie and the Banshees T-shirt and my Birthday Party record. So definitely, I had fun recreating this; I was finally at the moment in the series where I actually walked the same sidewalks as Pepper and Ray Carney.
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Q. I once played a song by The Birthday Party, Nick Cave’s chaotic and terrifying early band, for a goth friend of mine, and he said it was too scary.
The title of “Cool Machine” comes from a line in “Release the Bats” by The Birthday Party: “My baby is a cool machine.” The lyrics don’t really make sense; it’s some kind of weird erotic reverie of Nick Cave. But I always thought those words, “cool machine,” were really kind of, well, cool, so I sort of weaseled them into this novel.
Q. In his store, Ray is selling an idea of livable space at a time when the city is becoming less livable, and I wonder how much you were thinking about that as you wrote this.
It was sort of random. I wanted a straight profession and storefront for my fence. I picked furniture, I’m not sure why. But then, I make these decisions, and I have to sell it, whether it’s a zombie sweeper or a furniture salesman.
A lot of the fun in the book for me is his neurotic fixation on midcentury modern furniture. He’s in the middle of a gun battle, and he’ll stop to think, “Oh, this is a Sterling Model Dreamcast recliner; they stopped making them because the springs used to poke people,” and “Oh, I’m being shot at.” So he’s a dedicated purveyor of home furniture.
These decisions you make end up paying off as you really think about them, invest in them and see how they can serve the story.
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Q. We discussed movies the last time we spoke, and I wanted to ask you about the poster for John Carpenter’s 1981 film, “Escape from New York,” which appears throughout the book.
As kids, my brother and I were big movie rental people, always heading down to get our Betamax tapes and VHS tapes on Friday. We’d rent Dario Argento, John Carpenter, “True Confessions” with Robert De Niro, and a bunch of slasher movies. We were big Carpenter fans, so as a kid I was really into “Escape From New York.”
And then how it functions in the book, it’s a refrain because Carney, as a lifelong New Yorker, cannot understand why anyone would leave New York.
So it has a function for me personally, and in the book, it underscores Carney’s diehard New Yorker point of view, where you can’t even understand why someone would want to escape from New York, and what would happen to you if you did. Like, it seems crazy out there.
Q. So you and your brother had that poster growing up?
Oh, yeah. We had the novelization, we had the poster, we had the soundtrack. We had everything. If they’d had an “Escape From New York” T-shirt, we would have had that as well. A Snake Plissken eyepatch? I’m sure we would have had one of those.
Q. We also spend time with Pepper, who you described to me as “sociopathic mentor/uncle figure” and I wonder why characters like that are so compelling.
He provides a different idea of being a criminal, of being a person. Ray loves his family; Pepper has no family. Eventually, you know, he becomes adopted by them. But he provides a different way of being in the world and being a criminal and being a New Yorker. One thing I did not plan while I was writing “Harlem Shuffle” was Pepper’s bigger role, but he demanded it, and I gave in to it.
I really think it’s the power of point of view. When you’re seeing everything through his eyes, you’re his ally. I think a lot of the effective blue-ribbon TV that’s on now, like “Succession,” everyone’s a horrible character, but when they’re the POV character for an episode, you get seduced by their point of view. You’re seeing things with their eyes, and then they do something terrible, and you realize that you’ve been sort of seduced in this way. But I think the power of perspective and POV is really persuasive.
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Q. Speaking of blue-ribbon TV, you’re a Star Wars fan, and I wonder what you thought about “Andor,” which also uses a device like yours to revisit the characters over time.
I thought it was a cool structure for a series and definitely the three books are split into three stories in each volume. And by jumping ahead, even just by five years, you can really see how the tiny changes add up to a lot. I do remember seeing “Andor” and being like, “Yes! I’m doing the same thing!”
I found the structure really good in terms of just writing it. I would write one for three and a half months, and then take three months off and then figure out the next one.
I was writing it in segments, and it was less daunting than writing a novel straight through. Each story had a beginning, middle, and end, and then each story in each book was Act One, Act Two, Act Three. If you pull back, “Harlem Shuffle” is Act One,” “Crook Manifesto” is Act Two, and “Cool Machine” is Act Three.
Structurally, it really paid off.