Nursery Crimes Review

Believe it or not, but this is the second version of this post - I was going to write a review on the ‘Nursery Crimes’ series already, but then I got back to the second ‘Thursday Next’ book and at the end realized that there is a connection between the two series, as the third one explains how the many nursery characters come to Reading in the first place.

In the third ‘Thursday Next’ novel, “The Well of Lost Plots,” Thursday spends time in the BookWorld™ in order to keep a low profile and go through her pregnancy peacefully (no such luck) and fills in for, then, DS Mary Jones in a book called Caversham Heights (while Mary is doing some college courses). This means she has most time to herself and only has to stand in for Mary when the chapters demand it (book characters have a lot of spare time while they’re not in a chapter - unless you happen to be a viewpoint character in a first-person book, sucks to be you in that case, because you never have a private moment). The low-quality detective novel with its cliché mafia plot is deteriorating - it will probably never leave the well, the place where books hover until they’re published. By the end of the story, the book has become a refuge for nursery rhyme characters and the plot has severely changed - it’s now the plot of the first novel of the ‘Nursery Crimes’ series - “The Big Over Easy.”

This is a review on the two ‘Nursery Crimes’ novels out so far - “The Big Over Easy” and “The Fourth Bear.” They are set more or less in the same reality as ‘Thursday Next,’ but a good deal later than the first stories - “The Eyre Affair” (Thursday Next 1) is set in 1985, “The Big Over Easy” in 2004.

The series is made up of police procedurals which make a lot of fun of police procedurals while keeping to the basics of the genre. Main characters are Jack Spratt (DI in the first book, DCI in the second) and Mary Mary (DS, yes, the second ‘Mary’ is on purpose, her last name is changed from Jones to Mary, because that suggests she might be part of a nursery rhyme herself as ‘Mary Mary quite contrary’).

The first novel introduces not only the heroes, but also a few weird premises - in the world of Reading with the NCD, there’s also the Detective Guild and detectives are measured by how many published cases (generally written down by their sergeants) they have to their name. Jack doesn’t hold with that, even though his wife tries to get him into the guild in the first book. He simply wants to solve crimes correctly and get the real culprit behind bars - which does rarely work, because judges don’t take nursery crimes seriously. The second novel continues the weird-premise trend, but then, weird is right down the alley of author Jasper Fforde.

Fforde has a lot of strengths as a writer - I can hardly put any of his books down, pulled a few late-night reads to finish some of his stories. He writes excellent, if weird characters. He creates wonderful alternate realities, of the 1980s as well as of the 2000s. He definitely knows his literature and can thus make full use of that inside the pages of his books. After all, Jack and Mary try their best to help all nursery rhyme character who need help - and put those who are dangerous behind bars, if not with as much success as they would like to have. Even minor characters get enough space to be recognizable and it’s fun to spot them again later in the books.

But what Fforde does extremely well is foreshadowing. A successful foreshadowing means not only to hint at something throughout the story, but to do it without becoming too obvious or not obvious enough. Fforde balances that out to perfection, his hints are on point and come regularly enough to keep them in the back of the reader’s mind, but they’re not too obvious or come too often. He puts his hints in the background, displaying them well enough to be seen, but not wildly pointing at them - and that’s one thing which is so addictive about his books.

While the ‘Thursday Next’ series has a lot more and a lot weirder action, the ‘Nursery Crimes’ books are definitely more ‘detective novel’ than Thursday’s adventures. They are procedurals and excel at showing how much the ‘rules and regulations’ can hinder a detective in their line of work (especially if others want to hinder them). Jack and Mary regularly aren’t only up against the murderers they are looking for (Humpty Dumpty is the victim in the first, Goldilocks the victim in the second book - at least initially), but also against superiors who only think of their budget and don’t like the NCD much, other detectives trying to take over the case (looking at you, DCI Friedland Chymes!), influential suspects using their influence against them, and all the other twists and turns you’d expect from a police procedural, where to the ‘whodunit’ there also comes the book by which you have to do things.

Twists and turns are plentiful in both novels and both drift into thriller territory towards the end (when it’s no longer just the murder, but a crime much bigger and much more devastating). And despite their basis in nursery rhymes and other stories (Prometheus of ‘fire stealing’ fame is a regular in both novels, since he’s getting married to Jack’s daughter Pandora - no relations to the first Pandora), the stories manage to be grounded in reality. It’s a weird reality where your publication is more important than catching the killer and your DS might live two ships from Captain Nemo himself (he’s turned the Nautilus into a houseboat after it got shipwrecked), but it’s still a reality in which the dead stay dead and a threat to life and limb is a threat to life and limb.

Both “The Big Over Easy” and “The Fourth Bear” are very well-told stories with a great cast and a lot of interesting plot arcs. They’re addictive and fun to read and offer a lot besides pure murder and mayhem. Look into the series, if you like, and give them a go. They’re a great read for any season (I’ve read them in the middle of summer) and might keep you up longer than expected (I actually stayed up over two hours after bedtime, just to finish “The Fourth Bear”). Two big thumbs up from me!