The Big Over Easy: Jasper Fforde

This is the first book in the Nursery Crime series by Jasper Fforde, who also wrote the Thursday Next series. DCI Jack Spratt and Sergeant Mary Mary investigate crimes within the world of nursery rhymes. In The Big Over Easy, they investigate the apparent suicide of Humpty Dumpty. The book is a fantasy / mystery crossover with lots of humor, puns, and satire.

To give you a taste of Jasper Fforde's prose and the wackiness of the story, here is an excerpt. Mary Mary has just been transferred to the city of Reading in Berkshire, England.

Reading wouldn't have been everyone's choice for a transfer, but for Mary, Reading had one thing that no other city possessed: DCI Friedland Chymes. He was a veritable powerhouse of a sleuth whose career was a catalog of inspired police work, and his unparalleled detection skills had filled the newspaper columns for over two decades. Chymes was the reason Mary had joined the police force in the first place. Ever since her father had bought her a subscription to Amazing Crime Stories when she was nine, she'd been hooked. She had thrilled at "The Mystery of the Wrong Nose," been galvanized by "The Poisoned Shoe" and inspired by "The Sign of Three and a Half." Twenty-one years further on, Friedland was still a serious international player in the world of competitive detecting, and Mary had never missed an issue.

However, Mary does not get assigned to work with DCI Chymes. She is assigned to the much less attractive Nursery Crime Division, headed by Jack Spratt.

My thoughts:

My son read this first and recommended the book, and I enjoyed it very much. This book requires that you step into another world peopled by Nursery Rhyme characters, aliens, and mythical creatures... and suspend disbelief. I am not so good at doing that so it took me a third of the book before I was comfortable with the premise.

In this world, it is at least as important to be able to write up the results of the crime to be published (and made into prime time documentaries), as it is to actually solve the crime. In fact policemen are willing to stretch the truth to fit those requirements, and will compete to take over a case that may be "good copy." They then become stars of publications like the Amazing Crime Stories journal. That seems ridiculous on the face of it, but in today's world maybe not so much so. If you can just sit back and accept that it all makes sense in an alternate world, then it is a lot of fun.

I am not a fan of funny names in mysteries, but it works here so I accepted it. Sometimes the humor in mysteries escapes me, as I noted when I read reviews after finishing the book, but even my failure to get many of the jokes did not hamper my enthusiasm or enjoyment.

I will admit I had a problem with too many characters to track and getting confused by the characters and their relationships to Humpty Dumpty. But that happens in a LOT of mysteries I read. On the other hand, I liked the characters, I enjoyed following the story, and I thought the plot and writing were well done.

If you are a fan of humor and satire in your mysteries, and can handle fantasy elements, then this book is definitely worth a try.

TV Tropes has a nice page about the Nursery Crime series, and they describe it as "Shrek meets the Police Procedural."


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Publisher:  Penguin Books, 2006 (orig. publ. 2005).
Length:      383 pages 
Format:      Trade Paperback
Series:       Nursery Crime series, #1
Setting:      Reading, UK
Genre:       Fantasy / Police Procedural
Source:      My son bought this at the Planned Parenthood book sale and loaned it to me.

Reading in January 2018

So in February it only took me until the 11th to get a reading summary up for January's reading. In January I stuck with crime fiction, although the first book I read in 2018 was a mix of fantasy and mystery.

I am reading Les Miserables by Victor Hugo throughout the year as a part of a read along, one chapter a day. I really did not know what to expect, If I ever knew anything about the story I forgot it long ago. So far it has been very interesting, especially reading it in small chunks. Some days I get a bit ahead, sometimes I fall a bit behind. Check out the sign-up post at One Catholic Life for more details.


These are the nine crime fiction books I read in January and all of them were very, very good.

The Big Over Easy (2005) by Jasper Fforde

This is the first book in The Nursery Crime series. DCI Jack Spratt and Sergeant Mary Mary investigate crimes within the world of nursery rhymes. Here, they investigate the apparent suicide of Humpty Dumpty. The book is clearly a fantasy / mystery crossover with lots of humor, puns, and satire. My son read this first and recommended the book, and I enjoyed it very much. A review will follow... sometime soon. 

Grey Mask (1928) by Patricia Wentworth

The first book in the Miss Silver series. I was very pleasantly surprised. Book review here.

Hit List (2000) by Lawrence Block

Hit List is the 2nd novel in the Keller series. I read the first book, Hit Man, in December and liked it so well I started this one while reading another book. Keller is a hitman living in New York City; he gets his jobs or assignments from Dot, who works for a man who brokers (arranges) hits for his clients. As I said in my summary of Hit Man, it was a very enjoyable read but it is an adjustment to get used to a killer being the main focus.

Death of a Red Heroine (2000) by Qiu Xiaolong

The story is set in Shanghai in 1990 just after Tiananmen Square, with Chief Inspector Chen Cao as the lead character. The author was born in Shanghai, China, in 1953, but has lived in the US since 1988. I primarily enjoyed this book for the picture of life in Shanghai in the 1990s. I will be returning to the series.  

The Puzzle of the Pepper Tree (1933) by Stuart Palmer

The fourth book in the Miss Hildegarde Withers series. It was a lot of fun because of the setting, on Santa Catalina island off the California coast. Book review here, with  some comments on the film adaptation.

Cold Cold Heart (2017) by Christine Poulsen

A medical thriller with two story lines: one set at an Antarctic research base, and the other set in the UK. I loved the detail of the daily life on the base during the winter months when no one can leave and no one can fly in. Review here.

The Whip Hand (1965) by Victor Canning

Although I have read only three books by Victor Canning, I have become a big fan of his writing. This book is along the lines of a James Bond thriller, although the protagonist, Rex Carver, is a private eye and not a spy. He does do some side jobs for a British secret service department. Carver is hired to track down a missing au pair in Brighton. 

The Necessary Death of Lewis Winter (2013) by Malcom Mackay

This is the second book I read this month about a hitman, a man who kills for a living. Calum Maclean has been an independent agent, taking jobs as he needs the money. Then he is offered a temporary job working for Peter Jamieson, head of a crime organization in Glasgow, while the regular hitman is having a hip replacement. The first in a trilogy and I will be reading the 2nd and 3rd books also.

Metzger's Dog (1983) by Thomas Perry

Chinese Gordon and his friends Immerman and Kepler break into a lab at the University of Los Angeles to steal some pharmaceutical cocaine, worth a lot of money. But Chinese also takes some papers a professor has compiled for the CIA, which include a blueprint for throwing a large city into chaos. The CIA decides that a band of terrorists has stolen the papers... and go overboard in their attempts to rectify the situation. Very funny at times, entertaining, with a wonderful ending.