8.2005
4/5 Stars
Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall, Humpty Dumpty had a great fall…but was it an accident, suicide or possibly murder? That is the question that detectives Jack Spratt and Mary Mary must answer in the first book of Ffordes new Nursery Crime series. Although the book at times lags because of introductions, it’s a very clever start to the new series.

A Jasper Fforde book is an automatic buy in our household, as the Thursday Next books have all been pretty wonderful. The Big Over Easy isn’t a Thursday Next book, at least not officially (and neither Thursday nor any of the other characters from the other books appear in this one).

However, after I’d been reading for a bit, I realized that there was some connection—Mary Mary mentioned living in a converted airplane, which rang a bell. I checked The Well of Lost Plots, in which Thursday is hiding out in a book, and, sure enough, she was hiding out in a Spratt/Mary book (albeit not this one.

Anyway, back to the book at hand. It’s fun. That pretty much goes without saying with Jasper Fforde, but in case you were worried by Thursday’s absence, I can assure you that if you liked those books, you’ll also like this one. There’s plenty of absurdity to go around in a world in which nursery rhyme characters not only coexist with ordinary people, but commit enough crimes against each other and the general population to merit a special—if drastically understaffed and underfunded—police unit to deal with those crimes.

Jack Spratt, a family man with five children and a happy marriage, is its head. He struggles against the indifference of his superiors to keep the NCD running. Unlike his former partner, Friedland Chymes, Jack is not a member of the Guild of Detectives, a powerful organization devoted to keeping popular detectives’ cases in print, on television, and in films. As a result, Jack is almost beneath notice, except for his failure to successfully prosecute the three pigs for murdering Mr. Wolfe.

Mary Mary joins the unit as his new sergeant; their first case, the murder of Humpty Dumpty, a successful, if shady, businessman (and giant egg). Things get kind of wacky from there.

When I first heard that Fforde’s new book dealt with nursery rhyme characters (and starred Jack Spratt), I was a bit worried that it might be derivative of Robert Rankin’s The Chocolate Bunnies of the Apocalypse, which also stars a Jack who is forced into the role of private eye, investigating a series of murders of wealthy nursery rhyme characters. I’m happy to say that other than the nursery rhyme aspect, the two books have nothing in common; both are good in their own ways.