What’s to like?įforde depicts a world in which accurately resolving a crime is less important than writing it up in best selling magazine ‘Amazing Crime Stories’ and your circulation figures mean more to your superiors than your ethics. It’s this blending of myth and reality that makes the tale so wonderfully fun. Why not? After all, he’s got nowhere more interesting to go since no country dares grant him citizenship and risk the wrath of Zeus, who is not happy that the whole infinite-liver-pecking-out punishment has been curtailed.

Just like his Thursday Next series, Fforde creates a world in which everyone reads and cares about literature, so there’s plenty of fun to be had spotting references to other texts. In what other world could Humpty possibly be considered a sex object? Set in Reading, Fforde cleverly mixs existing places with fictitious ones to create an enviroment in which anthropmorhised bears and illegal spinning-straw-into-gold dens are just a part of ordinary life for the town’s inhabitants. She died.’) and more random details (Mary is repeatedly advised that being from Basingstoke is ‘nothing to be ashamed of’). It really is quite a wonderful mixture of ideas and characters, including key nursery rhyme details (When DS Mary Mary learns that Jack Spratt’s wife loved fat she comments: ‘Isn’t that very unhealthy?’ and is informed ‘Very. The puns and wordplay are groan worthy, but there’s also a brilliant strain of literary detection running through it all. Amusing, innovative, surreal and frequently childish. Jack Spratt is determined to find out, but he’s under rather a lot of pressure: if the case proves to be nothing, his department will be closed due to his poor prosecution rate (only last week three pigs got off scot-free despite boiling Mr Wolf alive in what was clearly a premeditated act) if the case is something, local super-cop DCI Friedland Chymes wants it, and he won’t take no for an answer. Was he pushed or did his dangerous habit of sitting, often drunkenly, atop tall walls (despite being an egg and therefore rather vulnerable to heights and concrete) finally do him in?

This is the first installment in genre-crossing Jasper Fforde’s ‘Nursery Crimes’ series, and so DI Jack Spratt, head of the Nursery Crimes Division of Reading Police Department, is assigned to investigate Humpty’s fall and subsequent death. Although he was basically a good guy, businessman Humpty Stuyvesant Van Dumpty III had made a few enemies and was last seen, horribly drunk, boasting about his ability to summon up rather a large sum of money… What’s it about? If you’re thinking, “erm…he fell?” then you need to read this book.

The big over easy by jasper fforde