Whatever Happened to Frankie King

Frankie King was a precocious student and a promising basketball player at Brooklyn’s James Madison High School in the early 1950s. Sportswriters were comparing Frankie to the greatest college and professional players of all time, and he was recruited as a starting guard at the University of North Carolina. But Frankie dropped out before playing a single game.

This graphic novel follows King’s enigmatic life from its auspicious start in the limelight to his very reclusive existence in New York City, where he authored more than forty novels, including a popular series of cozy cat mysteries written under the pseudonym Lydia Adamson. Whatever Happened to Frankie King is the story of a unique and sometimes troubled life as well as a meditation on dreams realized, lost, and abandoned.

“The Neugeborens—father and son—have created an amazing tale about a loner, Frankie King, star basketball player, mystery writer, and hobo-philosopher. The art and the words are wonderful.”—Jerome Charyn, author of The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson

“Basketball, Brooklyn, antisemitism, and psychosis pervade Jay Neugeboren’s rich oeuvre. All converge in his meticulously researched, vibrantly illustrated study of the elusive, inscrutable Frankie King.”—Steven G. Kellman, author of Redemption: The Life of Henry Roth

“A winning portrait of an unforgettable personality.”—Publishers Weekly

Jay Neugeboren is the award-winning author of twenty-three books, including the novels The American Sun and Wind Moving Picture Company and After Camus and the memoir Imagining Robert: My Brother, Madness, and Survival, which was adapted into a critically acclaimed documentary film.

Eli Neugeboren is an award-winning artist, illustrator, writer, and professor whose work has appeared in Corpus: A Comic Anthology of Bodily Ailments, Weapon Echh!, and COVID Chronicles: A Comics Anthology, among other publications.