Jasper Fforde's The Big Over Easy is the first volume of a new series set in the same universe as the Thursday Next novels. (In fact, several characters appeared in The Well of Lost Plots.) Detective Inspector Jack Spratt is the head of Reading's Nursery Crime Division. The Division investigates the shenanigans of nursery tale characters, who quite inexplicably inhabit the world along with ordinary humans. Despite some occasional successes (including the capture of the infamous, limb-rendering Gingerbreadman), the Division's highly public failures have made it the laughingstock of the Reading Police Department; as the book opens, for example, the three little pigs have just been acquitted of the murder of the big bad wolf. Jack barely has time to resign himself to this defeat before the next mystery comes across his desk. Apparently, Humpty Dumpty has had a great fall.

I enjoyed Fforde's Thursday Next novels, and The Big Over Easy displays many of the same strengths as that earlier series. As usual, Fforde employs an enormous number of literary jokes, most of which center around nursery rhymes. Jack's deputy, for example, is Mary Mary ("quite contrary"), and Jack grouses over his reputation as a giant-killer ("they weren't technically giants, just very tall"). The Big Over Easy is also populated with a large cast of amusing and colorful side characters, from Humpty himself (apparently very popular with the ladies) to the eccentric Lord Spongg, who runs a foot-care company so astonishingly successful that it has cured all of its potential customers.

The protagonists, by contrast, are pretty boring. I think that Fforde intended Jack Spratt to be a twist on the usual anti-hero of noir fiction. But that "twist" means that Jack is a happy family man, content with his lot in life -- likeable, but rather dull. And Mary Mary, despite her amusing name, is basically a non-entity. In fact, she was so poorly defined that I half-expected her to be the secret villain. (She's not.)

The Thursday Next novels have always flirted with mystery, but The Big Over Easy is a more direct exercise in that genre. It certainly goes through the paces, but the resulting mystery is too messy and confusing. Part of the problem is in the setup: a number of clues end up being red herrings that, aside from being distracting (not in itself a fault), also seem inconsistent with the ultimate resolution. (I'm thinking in particular about Humpty's support for left-wing causes.) But the bigger problem is the absence of reminders, the subtle coaxing of memory that good mysteries effect to keep their readers abreast of the investigation without spoiling the plot.

This is all sounding pretty negative, so I should emphasize that I did enjoy reading The Big Over Easy. It's hard not to like Fforde's fertile imagination and good humor. But the first volume of the Nursery Crimes series is not his best work.

Copyright © 2009 Steven Wu