Lionel and Frank and the Minna Men. Frank Minna. He was older than the Minna Men, just a bit. But it meant they looked up to the local tough guy fixer like the father they never had. They never had fathers because they were orphans. Or maybe they were orphans because they never had fathers? Whatever. Frank looked after them, and they looked after whatever Frank said needed done. The four of them, from St Vincent’s Home for Boys.

And now they’re a limo-service-cum-detective agency. Not that anyone really detected anything, not until the terrible day Frank went and got himself murdered and his boys had to find the one person they would rather never have had to look for.

Else:

Jonathan Lethem’s fierce novel is all that and none of it. Lionel Essrog is Tourettic. "Eatmebailey!" he’ll suddenly cry in even the most tense of situations. Especially then. "Get, get, get, GOT! Duck, duck, duck, GOOSE!" He can’t help himself, in the same way he can’t help but rearrange your collar or tap you on the shoulder or touch something a half-dozen times. Unconscious tallys and secret rituals that only a confused brain can decode. Words as "verbal taffy". Certain things - masturbation, cheese-burgers, extended Prince remixes - can calm him, brain balm. But it’s respite not cure. They call him the Human Freakshow. The ones who like him: "Does every conversation with you have to be the director’s cut?"

Lethem’s book reminds us of Jim Sallis. In particular the monumental Death Will Have Your Eyes - a book never about its ostensible subject. If you were to take apart Lionel’s investigation you would find a Polish giant, a Buddhist retreat, some shadowy Japanese businessmen. Stuff. "It’s just, I’m not sure about this investigation. It seems like you’re just running around a lot trying to keep from feeling sad or guilty or whatever about this guy Frank." Compelling and strikingly well written (ignore the half-arsed cover), Motherless Brooklyn is both a book about Lionel in all his twisted, embarrassing but dignified glory - a man at war with himself - and a book about itself as fiction "Detective stories always have too many characters anyway," it concludes. "And characters mentioned early on but never sighted, just lingering offstage, take on an awful portentous quality. Better to have them gone." Impressive.