Tick off

Lionel Essrog--the protagonist of Jonathan Lethem's 1999 novel, Motherless Brooklyn; a private investigator, a character with a fatal flaw--Tourette's Syndrome.

What a brilliant flash of imagination it was for Jonathan Lethem to have anointed his lead character with Tourette's Syndrome, an affliction that could be triggered at any moment, sending his cerebral circuitry off into a Karaoke of the mind, his tics and associations gathering momentum like the boulder of Sisyphus on its downhill course, gathering momentum until he was forced to give over to it. Lethem could have chosen other afflictions for Essrog, not the least of which could have been petite or grand mal seizures; he could have chosen autism or perhaps even bipolar shifts from the manic high to the depressive low. Lionel Essrog, in the moment of his creator's big bang of creation, became an icon. It is not that there were no afflicted characters before him; Willie Ashenden walked with a limp as, indeed, Somerset Maugham, his creator, did; Quasimodo was a hunchback, the eponymous phantom of the opera had a badly scarred face, Johnny Tremaine had his thumb fused to the palm of his hand when a pot of molten silver spilled. Pre-Essrogian literature is filled with men, women, and children who bore their fatal flaw and were transformed by it to the point where they made of it a valuable commodity.

In his way, Lionel Essrog took the fatal flaw to a new height; Tourette's Syndrom begins interiorally, then extends outward. Lionel Essrog opened the door for Mark Haddon's Christopher John Francis Boone of The Curious Case of the Dog in the Night Time, allowing Boone, an autistic, to do a detective job of his own, recording his adventures in a book that at first blush seemed to have had a mechanical defect of missing pages until we realize that his adventure is chaptered in prime numbers.

Jonathan Lethem did for affliction what Hammett and Chandler did for the mystery. Since the appearance of Lionel Essrog, it is no longer merely democratizing to bring the afflicted and unusual out of the closet and into the full light of inquiry, it is a dramatic enhancement by which the character displays his or her transactions with the flaw into a transformative story.

In the early days of pulp magazine mystery and suspense, Frank Gruber's Oliver Quade used his preternatural memory for fact to solve crimes. Quade was known as The Human Encyclopedia, his erudition the cause of the solution. Lionel Essrog succeeds not because of his Tourette's but in spite of it. Read of Essrog in Motherless Brooklyn and take notes.

It's a Mystery to Me

Like a well-loved restaurant or the evocation of a particular flow of music, the one story we return to again and again, whether we know it or not, is the mystery.

We do not return to find out who killed whom or why, because in some almost mystical sense we already know those answers; we return for the same reason we return to lake or sea side. We return for the tidal pull at the heart of our being. Had we evolved on a different planet, we should perhaps treasure hunting sagas or epics of armed clashes that would put The Iliad to shame; we should perhaps return to the saga or the romance or the fantasy. But we are humans of this planet. No known surge protector insulates us from the crackle of inner conflict arcing across the electrodes of the primal self. And if we cannot live in accord with our primal self, how then are we to live on this planet as it moves about this sun, orbiting every known dichotomy and, indeed, those not yet discovered? Our creation myths abound in mystery, transubstantiation, and apocalypse. Our secular bibles, left in motel rooms, not by the Gideons but rather by lonely missionaries of another sort, are mysteries with fallen women on their covers, hopelessly yearned for by men who have fallen even farther and deeper, taking such comfort as they can from the belief that for a time they can find a place somewhere in which they can lead an exemplary life if not an Edenic one simply by placing hubris and ambition aside.

Some of the great mysteries of our planet include Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, which rewards personal integrity in the face of the unknown, and which we see all too rarely in a world embellished with executive inducements; and that splendid tale of redemption, The Mayor of Casterbridge, in which Michael Henchard learns in plausible fashion the potential for repairing an heinous crime (also one of the great opening chapters of the English language).

As we have done by adding mayonnaise to so many things, as well we have done in this country to the mystery by adding the very thing mayonnaise has come to represent, the Middle Class. My own favorites among the early generation of mysteries are the nearly forgotten Hammett venture, The Glass Key, all of the Chandler output, and two others who have veered off into the shadowy sidelines, Norbert Davis, and Peter Ruric. Eric Knight, who was known for quite another type of story, wrote a classic in 1938, You Play the Black and the Red Comes Up, as the title suggests, a hardboiled response to life, and as the text suggests, a
stylized retelling of Orpheus and Eurydice.

All choice reading, as indeed one of my great favorites and, in its way, the thrust of this entry-cum-challenge. In 1999, Jonathan Lethem published that great existential joy of a mystery, Motherless Brooklyn, featuring Lionel Essrog, a private detective with not only a life-defining mission (to track down the killer of his mentor) but as well a life-affecting martyrdom to Tourette's Syndrome.

Talk about taking on challenges and clients. We need--no, I need, my own Lionel Essrog, a character yanked right out of the gof bag of my psyche, who has a mission and some actually physical or psychical miss-wiring, a character who will be forced to compete with a strong opponent as well as a strong impediment. My characters like to get out and mess about, so no sense making the problem agoraphobia. Drugs have been done to death, Nero Wolfe has more or less retired the bulky detective, thanks to Joe Hansen, David Branstetter has pretty well made gayness in an investigator a non-event; Lew Archer's intelligent musings remove that aspect of things, and maybe, oh, please, there's some ray of hope in the lovely material TIV has posted about OCD. My client, Allen Sidle, a Jungian psychiatrist, has already grabbed the notion of a Jungian "on-call" for a Freudian buddy in a mystery, and at the moment, a PI with a need to handle arson-related cases seems as managed as a Hillary or Mitt campaign event.

The notion of a man or woman having to deal first and foremost with some physical or emotional hang-up, each time he or she heads out the door is warmly enticing. Donald Westlake, writing as Tucker Coe, has it pretty well nailed with Kinds of Love, Kinds of Death, in which former cop Mitch Tobin is held in thrall by that great chain of guilt. Tobin got his partner to cover for him while sneaking in a little romance. Trouble was, the partner needed back-up and Mitch wasn't there. And because of that
absence, partner was ambushed and killed. Yep, guilt works, and we can all of us relate to it.

Grief? Nah. Revenge? nope.

What's out there, calling the Siren's song?
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