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Motherless Brooklyn
How a dysfunctional detective finds the killer and looses the girl in a fast-paced murder mystery that provides a glimpse into day-to-day Brooklyn through the lives of complex, multidimensional characters.
Motherless Brooklyn begins with Frank Minna, the owner of a detective agency, sometimes "limousine" service, and petty crime ring getting kidnapped and killed after a meeting at the Yorkville Zendo in downtown Manhattan. Frank’s murder happens while two of his employees Gilbert Coney and Lionel Essrog are pursuing the kidnapped Minna and his captors. Minna is wearing a wire and Gilbert and Lionel can hear bits and pieces of conversation between Minna and his abductors but are powerless to stop the killing.
Early as the story unfolds, Minna leaves the Yorkville Zendo, a Japanese-run school teaching Zen meditation in the company of at least one thug he knows but has begun to fear. In the telling of the tale, the reader learns much of Frank Minna, a small-time criminal who does odd jobs for organized crime while trying to maintain a legitimate business front. Minna is a pitiful, self-delusional, and dishonest character who manages a modicum of redemption in his sympathetic treatment of Lionel, the story’s narrator. Ultimately Minna becomes a victim of his own ambition.
The remainder of the book is an amazing quilt of many strands. One thread that runs throughout is the detective story of finding Minna’s killers. It is woven with a coming-of-age account of four orphaned boys: Lionel, Gilbert, Tony Vermonte, and Danny Frantl. These two threads are intertwined with a compelling account of what it’s like to suffer from Tourette’s syndrome. "Dress me up and see. I’m a carnival barker, an auctioneer, a downtown performance artist, a speaker in tongues, a senator drunk on filibuster. I’ve got Tourette’s," so Lionel, begins his tale. There are also the jokes woven within the banter of the characters that provide insight into what it is to be from Brooklyn.
The secret to the murder is found in a hiatus of time from Minna’s first encounter with the boys—just as they are about to enter Sarah J. Hale high school and his return a few years later. Minna recruits the four in their early teens from St Vincent’s School for Boys in Brooklyn to be his henchmen for a few dollars an hour and free beer. Lionel and Tony both share a great need to find the parents they never had. Gilbert and Danny are insular characters that seem almost to have abandoned their parents rather than the other way around.
Though the four share a common bond of being abandoned, Lionel is alienated from the rest by his disease. Upon hiring the four to do a moving job, Minna asks their names and after they each respond, Tony, the leader of the foursome says, "you probably ought to know, Lionel’s a freak." To which Minna responds. "Yeah, well, you’re all freaks, if you don’t mind me pointing it out. No parents—or am I mixed up?" Thus, among these four, Lionel is accepted. He becomes their private freakshow.
And the freakshow, Lionel Tourette’s, was for me the most compelling thread of this story: "Tourette’s compulsions for counting, processing, and inspection." After catching up with the bad guys, six Japanese gangsters in a restaurant in Maine, Lionel has to make the round of all six clapping each perfectly tailored shoulder before making his exit. "Minna loved my effect on his clients and associates, the way I’d unnerve them, disrupt some schmooze with an utterance, a head jerk, a husky ‘Eatmebailey!’ I was his special effect, a running joke embodied. They’d look up startled and he’d wave his hand knowingly, counting money, not even bothering to look at me."
Brooklyn, or more specifically, the location of the detective agency, is yet another character in this story. "Minna’s Court Street was the old Brooklyn, a placid surface alive beneath the talk, with deals and casual insults, a neighborhood political machine with pizzeria and butcher house bosses and unwritten rules everywhere. All was talk except for what mattered most, which were unspoken understandings," Lionel says.
One remaining character, Julia Minna Frank’s wife, completes the main cast of this drama. She know who killed Frank and why. She comes into the lives of the four boys, just as they have graduated Sarah J. Hale high school and after the long hiatus between Minna and the four. An outsider too, now living in a dysfunctional marriage to Frank, she become the object of desire for the four Minna employees. "In our dreams we Minna Men were all Frank Minna—that wasn’t news," Lionel says. "But now we shot a little higher: If we had Julia we would be better than Frank, and make her happy."
You will like this book because it tells a compelling story. You see it through the lives of characters that you come to understand and appreciate for their lot in life and how they cope.
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