It’s no secret that I’m a massive fan of Fforde’s The Eyre Affair and its sequels, but for some reason I had never ventured into any of his other novels. Fforde did a live chat with the Guardian recently, which reminded me of this fact, and prompted me to give this series, “Nursery Crimes”, a go.
The Nursery Crimes novels are only two strong so far, though according to Fforde there’s another one on the way. Insofar as they take place in an England that is slightly askew from the one we know, they tread familiar ground for Fforde’s readers; indeed, there are some suggestions that the characters inhabit the same universe as Thursday and Landen (though there are indications to the contrary as well: the absence of dodos and neanderthals, for instance). In any event, our hero, Jack Spratt (who can eat no fat) is a detective in Reading, Berkshire, and heads up the underfunded Nursery Crimes Division, policing Persons of Dubious Reality (of which he himself is one).
As in The Eyre Affair books, the borders between fiction and reality are porous in this world, and persons involved in Jack’s cases include the Gingerbreadman (who cannot be caught), Punch and Judy (who apparently make good marriage counsellors when they aren’t beating each other senseless), Wee Willie Winkie (who suffers from narcolepsy), and, for some reason, Dorian Gray. In the first novel, Humpty Dumpty is discovered in pieces at the bottom of his favourite wall; in the second, Goldilocks runs out of the Three Bears’ house into the forest and is discovered blown to pieces several days later. So yeah. Maybe don’t read these to your kids.
There are things in here that I would ordinarily be drawn to – anthropomorphised bears being not the least of them. I’m not opposed to meta-fictional conceits in the general course of things, but here it gets to be a bit much. I think the main problem with these novels is that they basically read like an extended Dad Joke. At the risk of being dismissed as a disaffected hipster, they are, at their heart…lame.
That’s not to say there’s nothing to like here. These books are light-hearted police procedurals set in an absurdist universe in which the usual laws of cause and effect (and pseudo-science) have been warped for our entertainment. There’s nothing wrong with that, and it’s decent rainy-Saturday-with-a-tub-of-ice-cream fare. But it doesn’t satisfy on a more fundamental level in the way that, for me, other novels by the same author have.