Frank Minna is the secret king of Court Street. Frank Minna is a mover and a talker, a word and a gesture, a detective and a fool. Frank Minna c’est moi

A good hard-boiled novel needs a memorable location and a memorable detective, somebody to guide us through the intricacies of the plot in a first person narrative that is fast and captivating. The template has been established a long time ago, and explored by masters of the genre whose names are too well known to us fans to repeat here.
Jonathan Lethem knows he needs a hook / an edge, something special to make his own, if he wants to write such a detective novel that will stand out from the crowd. He struck gold here by choosing the heart of Brooklyn, both ethnic and rife with crime, colourful and dangerous in a story that starts in the early seventies, when a group of four street boys are taken out of the orphanage and made over into a gang of petty criminals by a local slum lord, only a few years older than themselves: Frank Minna.
For Lionel, Gilbert, Tony and Danny this is a dream come true – to escape from the horrors of the orphanage and to earn money in moving goods of dubious origins from one warehouse to another. The likely illegality of their work adds to the charisma of their benefactor, Frank Minna, and endures even a years long separation when the gang leader if forced to flee his native hood by a deal gone bad.

When Minna comes back and opens a rental car agency that serves as a cover for more dubious activities, the four young men are eager to return under the umbrella of the slippery Frank Minna, and for several years things appear to work smoothly for the four orphans who now call themselves ‘The Motherless Brooklyn’.

Minna men wear suits. Minna Men drive cars. Minna Men listen to tapped lines. Minna Men stand behind Minna, hands in their pockets, looking menacing. Minna Men carry money. Minna Men don’t ask questions. Minna Men answer phones. Minna Men pick up packages. Minna Men are clean-shaven. Minna Men follow instructions. Minna Men try to be like Minna, but Minna is dead.

Frank Minna sets up a routine surveillance job at an upmarket building that houses a ‘Zendo’ – a sort of meditation retreat. When the deal goes sour, the young amateur sleuths show their limitations in a life & death crisis that makes orphans out of them once more.
It is left to the most unlikely member of the gang to solve the murder mystery of their boss and mentor.

Lionel Essrog is the second half of the recipe for a good hard-boiled novel: the memorable detective. What he lacks in self-control and experience with investigative methods is compensated by his candid view at the suspects and at the clues in the case, and what he may lack in stylish and suggestive similes is replaced by the turbulent and explosive vocabulary provided by his Tourette syndrome. Lionel attributes to the same mental condition , or more correctly to his OCD syndrome, his often overlooked talent to focus obsessively on minute details of the surrounding world and to be underestimated by his peers.

So many detectives have been knocked out and fallen into such strange swirling darkness, such manifold surrealist voids (“something red wriggled like a germ under a microscope” – Philip Marlowe, The Big Sleep), and yet I have nothing to contribute to this painful tradition.

Lionel is here a touch too modest because, as he is written by Lethem, he can be quite articulate and knowledgeable about the rules of the game, and even his bursts of coprolalia are strangely literate and coherent.

Orphan meets ocean. Jerk evaporates in salt mist.
“Freakshow!” I yelled into the swirling foam. It was lost.

This admirable ability to be consistently literary articulate, coupled with the fortuitous repression of his excesses when the plot requires it, makes me consider the use of Tourette syndrome a sort of literary gimmick and a not too accurate medical description of the condition. Lionel is a composite of the most extravagant aspects of Tourette, coupled with other syndrome borrowed from OCD, coprolalia and autism that more often than not are not linked to the basic physical tics that form the majority of the Tourette cases. By turning Lionel into a kind of Hollywood glamorous irreverent genius, Lethem joins a long list of authors who misrepresent the real problems of the people afflicted. At least, that was my take on the treatment of Lionel in the novel.

Having mentioned my reservations, I want to close my remarks by stating that this is a damn good story, very well written and atmospheric. I was not convinced by Lionel as a patient, but he was fun to follow around as he tries to solve the mystery of Frank Minna, going from Ziggedy zendoodah with Japanese monks to a car chase and death match against the Kumquat Sasquatch
If I chose to say nothing of the actual murder investigation, it is because I want to preserve the surprises for the next reader.
I will keep Jonathan Lethem on my radar for literary crime novels.

Read For Book Club
Motherless Brooklyn by Jonathan Lethem is a different & darkly humorous gangster/crime thriller that I thoroughly enjoyed. There is a remarkable and memorable protagonist afflicted with Tourette Syndrome, Lionel Essrog.
Throughout the story Lionel investigates the murder of his boss and because of his Tourette's people assume him to be weird and crazy. For that reason they underestimate him.
A caring and unique soul, Lionel will stay with me for a long time.

The brilliant thing about this book is how deftly it illustrates how a straightforward noir-in-the-big-city can be so fresh and different, creating a wildly compelling narrative. Through the voice of a protagonist with Tourette’s syndrome, enabling a confluence of word play that humanizes Lionel, even as it reveals a sub layer of power dynamics that comes with language, irrevocably tied to how it is wired into our minds. It’s an amazing juxtaposition with the necessary obscurity of a detective seeking out and contextualizing clues.

And so much information there is to be revealed, as Lionel actually knows very little of his present circumstances. Only now he is galvanized despite the social perceptions pressuring him, and discovering who he is when his identity is divorced from his mentor, role model, brother, father, and friend.

A very happy byproduct of this reframe is some of the most pleasurable prose work I’ve consumed. It drips with grit yet subverts expectations of genre, bringing in a high degree of specificity and interesting diction under Lionel’s ecosystem of references manifest in tics. Even when stifled they “say” something. The result is literary experience in prose and character work; subverting just the right amount of tropes; evoking similar standbys. It is immeasurably satisfying and completely unique, at least to me.