Book Review: Readings

The Big Over Easy

by Jasper Fforde

Viking, 386 pp., $24.95

Realizing that you have to break an egg to make a novelette (or something like that), Jasper Fforde cracks the biggest egg of all and cooks up a delectable new mystery. A bullet hole in Humpty Dumpty's shattered shell suggests his big fall was due to murder, and as the slaying occurred in Reading, it falls under the jurisdiction of Detective Inspector Jack Spratt and the Nursery Crimes Division. Seems the Southern English town is home to quite a few refugees from Mother Goose and the Brothers Grimm, and they're as prone to criminal activity as their nonfictional neighbors. As Spratt and his rookie partner, Sgt. Mary Mary, play all the king's horses and all the king's men, piecing their ovoid victim's life together again, they encounter a blackmailing Willie Winkie, a racketeering Georgie Porgie (aka Georgio Porgia), a kleptomaniacal Tom Thomm, and an adulterous Rapunzel, who was having an affair with the ex-egg, who, we learn, was a philandering sot with a criminal past and a suspicious record of international trade transactions (!). Fforde spins these storybook figures into a hardboiled police procedural with the same irreverence and whimsy that he brought to his series with literary detective Thursday Next (The Eyre Affair, Lost in a Good Book, The Well of Lost Plots, Something Rotten). As Spratt tracks down the killer, Fforde sends up the mystery genre and its time-honored traditions, from the improbable deductions of know-it-all sleuths to corpses perpetually being discovered by dog walkers to, well, the beleaguered cop who has to fight to keep his investigation open and his division from being shut down. That Spratt succeeds in this last is no surprise and might be the least of the book's pleasures. It's all the literary ribbing, exuberant wordplay, absurd humor, and delightful diversions – a philosophical chat with the Titan Prometheus, a bizarre mansion designed by Dr. Caligari, and news items regarding "nurseries" and the Most Worshipful Guild of Detectives ("'Ugly' Sisters to Sue for Defamation") – that makes The Big Over Easy a feast for fans of literature and even a dainty dish to set before a king.

Jasper Fforde will be at Barnes & Noble Arboretum on Monday, Aug. 1, 7:30pm.