I’d been taking notes for “Harlem Shuffle” here and there, and I’d plotted out “The Nickel Boys.” I usually mix it up between heavier books and lighter books, so “Shuffle” seemed like the obvious choice after a book about slavery. . . . In the spring of ’17, when I was ready to get back to work after the publication of “The Underground Railroad,” I had two workable ideas for books. You started working on “Harlem Shuffle” before writing your last novel, “ The Nickel Boys.” Why did you put it aside, and then why did you go back to it? The book’s set in New York because when I had the idea I was about to start writing “The Underground Railroad” and figured that when I was done I’d want to get my New York on again. I picked the ’64 riot in Harlem, but kept coming up with more capers for Carney to get embroiled in, and eventually decided to work on a bigger canvas. My initial idea was to have a heist unfold against the background of a city calamity-blackout, riot, police strike. It knew it would be the fifties or sixties because I wanted the crimes to be low-tech affairs, before electromagnetic pulse machines and computer hacking and laser-guided acetylene torches. How do you know which boxes to hit and how do you spring them open? Newspaper articles and Daniel Simone’s nonfiction account “ The Pierre Hotel Affair”-written with Nick (the Cat) Sacco, one of the crooks-provided the logistics of that twenty-eight-million-dollar heist.

The New York Times archive led me to the 1972 Hotel Pierre robbery, which suited my purposes. Pop culture provides familiar structural elements for a bank robbery (deactivate the alarm, subdue the patrons and the staff, attack the vault), but I couldn’t think of any hotel ripoffs. The “tick-tock” element is inspired by Stanley Kubrick’s classic “The Killing,” which features a dispassionate, omniscient narrator who counts down the heist and the robbers’ doomed fates. Did you research similar crimes from that era or is this pure invention?

You recount the job in minute-by-minute detail. I always hate the moment when our crook-heroes have gone to all the trouble of pulling off the job and then it comes time to unload the goods on a fence, who looks at the $2 million in gems and says, “I’ll give you ten cents on the dollar.” It’s infuriating! I hate the fence, so it seemed obvious that I should make the Reluctant Fence my protagonist. I was staring off into space and thinking about how much I like heist films and how much fun it would be to write a heist. How did the idea for the heist come to you? Your story “ The Theresa Job” is set in Harlem in 1959, and it revolves around a holdup at a ritzy hotel.

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