Motherless Brooklyn

Plot and style matter, but character is what I engage with. This book is a hilarious and touching portrait. Lionel Essrog doesn’t ‘suffer’ from Tourette’s Syndrome, but he happens to have it. He’s so natural that he completely normalizes his condition.

The plot involves an investigation that is told in Chandleresque prose, a very private-eye noir. Essrog is an unexpected narrator who nevertheless manages to own the story. I don’t use the phrase ‘pitch-perfect’ very often, but it fits here. 

Lionel Essrog is a low-rent detective with Tourette’s syndrome. Under pressure Lionel is guaranteed to blurt out the worst possible thing. This is much more than a literary gimmick, he is a full-rounded character, in way over his head and struggling to do the right thing. Motherless Brooklyn remains one of my favorite detective novels, it delivers the pace and style of Raymond Chandler or Walter Mosley, but adds a neurodiverse protagonist that speaks to my dyslexic soul.

On the surface, this book reads like a detective novel. Lionel Essrog suffers from Tourette’s Syndrome. An orphan raised in a boys’ home in Brooklyn, when the story opens, Lionel is in the employ of a small-time gangster, Frank Minna, who has hired Lionel and three other troubled boys to staff his quasi limo service/detective agency. When Minna is abducted during a stake-out in Manhattan and turns up stabbed to death in a dumpster, Lionel makes it his mission to find his killer. So much of the pleasure of reading this book comes from the plot twists and the inventions… show more.