Whatever Happened To Frankie King by Jay Neugeboren & Eli Neugeboren

I don’t even remember how I first heard about Frankie King, the 1950s basketball phenom who seemingly disappeared from his own life before being revealed decades later as the bestselling author of cozy cat mysteries written under a female pen name. But I did read Jay Neugeboren’s terrific article for The American Scholar on the subject, and was absolutely enthralled by the mystery of it all. I was thus super excited to hear that Mr Neugeboren was coming up with a graphic biography that would dive even deeper into the subject.

So it’s a pity that the graphic format does not end up serving the story that Mr Neugeboren chooses to tell in these pages. I hesitate to blame this on the format, especially as the book has terrific momentum in the beginning before stalling out around the time that Frankie quits basketball, almost as if echoing its subject’s trajectory. Writing for comics is not an easy or necessarily intuitive skill, after all. The decision to cut from perspective to perspective is executed in a way that’s nowhere near as smoothly done as in Mr Neugeboren’s original article, especially given how the narrative also shifts haphazardly back and forth in time in this longer-form book. Capping the story after Frankie’s death with another oral history from someone who went to school with him could be considered a recapitulation of the theme… if there wasn’t then a coda specifically about a scene from one of his books, followed by an arguably unnecessary synopsis of the entire biography. Sure this is a great way to write a symphony — and arguably a standard way to write a scholarly paper — but for the graphic novel format, it feels weirdly condescending both to readers and to itself. It’s as if the author did not expect to be able to grip the reader’s attention enough with the many diversions in the body of the text, thereby necessitating multiple recaps. The organization of the book is all a bit of a head-scratcher, and one that only highlights how little we really know about our protagonist and the seemingly odd choices he made throughout his relatively long and storied life.

Because here’s the thing: Frankie is a deeply interesting person who didn’t like talking about himself, and who liked explaining himself even less. We get glimpses into his childhood through the recollections of his loving, if occasionally exasperated, brothers. In what was probably the most well-documented period of his life, we see how so many knowledgeable athletes, coaches and reporters called him the greatest basketball player they’d ever seen. But then he drops out of college — Mr Neugeboren suggests that this was because the empathy-filled Frankie couldn’t stand the racial segregation of life in 1950s North Carolina — and joins the army, where the star athlete ends up assaulting an MP with his own rifle, gets sent to Fort Leavenworth Military prison and is finally washed out of the military with an other than honorable discharge. Frank refuses to explain why he fought the MP or what else he might have done to earn such harsh punishment, which we’ll soon see is pretty much the template for the rest of his life.

Mr Neugeboren does his best to fill in the gaps. The one part exploring his tumultuous relationship with his first wife Rima is one of the most narratively coherent, and easily the most horrific. Every other bit just sort of meanders, often folding back on itself unnecessarily in an attempt to clarify Frank’s choices. But because Frank was so private, even with the people he loved the most, we can’t really know why he did what he did. It all feels like layers of conjecture, shored up with ample verbiage to make up for scant substantial support.

This is very much a shame, as the article in The American Scholar was both captivating and compellingly written. This book, on the other hand, is well-meaning but a mess. Eli Neugeboren does his best to illustrate what he’s been given and does a perfectly adequate job. There’s just no saving such a bewilderingly organized narrative. I’d buy this book just to support the author’s investigative work but I definitely did not think it was up to standard of his excellent article, even if it does include a lot more detail.

Whatever Happened To Frankie King by Jay Neugeboren & Eli Neugeboren was published December 17 2024 by Graphic Mundi and is available from all good booksellers, including