Jasper Fforde's bestselling Thursday Next series has delighted readers of every genre with its literary derring-do and brilliant flights of fancy. In The Big Over Easy, Fforde takes a break from classic literature and tumbles into the seedy underbelly of nursery crime. Meet Inspector Jack Spratt, family man and head of the Nursery Crime Division. He's investigating the murder of ovoid D-class nursery celebrity Humpty Dumpty, found shattered to death beneath a wall in a shabby area of town. Yes, the big egg is down, and all those brittle pieces sitting in the morgue point to foul play.
Read Jasper Fforde's posts in the Penguin Blog
From Publishers Weekly
Fforde's whimsical fifth novel, his first not to feature literary detective Thursday Next, is consistently witty, but its conceitΠ²Πβputting a criminal spin on nursery rhymesΠ²Πβwears a bit thin. Det. Jack Spratt, the dedicated but underappreciated investigator in the Reading, England, Nursery Crimes Division, is depressed because the court finds the three little pigs "not guilty of all charges relating to the first-degree murder of Mr. Wolff." Working with an ambitious young detective, Mary Mary ("Quite Contrary"), Spratt later takes on the case of "fall guy" Humpty Dumpty. Fforde crafts a police procedural out of this bizarre alternative universe that prizes, as The Eyre Affair does, literacy (detectives, for example, garner recognition less for solving crimes than by writing articles about cases for the likes of Amazing Crime Stories or Sleuth Illustrated). While it can be charming to encounter Mrs. Hubbard or Tom Thomm or to hear Spratt bemoan "illegal straw-into-gold dens" in this unusual context, the novel's broad satire overshadows elements like plot, conflict and characterization. The result is unusually clever but not compelling in the least.
Copyright ΠΒ© Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Bookmarks Magazine
Hearing characters debate the implications of "illegal straw-into-gold dens" is attractive to a certain type of reader. Puns and silliness can certainly provide laugh-out-loud fun, especially when cleverly handled. But critics found this new series debut from literary jokester Jasper Fforde (The Eyre Affair, Summer 2002, is from FfordeΠ²Πβ’s first series, Thursday Next) a tad shallow and wearisome. Fforde doesnΠ²Πβ’t skewer nursery rhymes exclusively; he also spoofs mystery fiction protocol, including anagrams, secret twins, and butlers who did it. This is actually his most ingenious turn in an otherwise overlong send-up.
Copyright ΠΒ© 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.