The Big Over Easy: Summary and book reviews of The Big Over Easy by Jasper Fforde, plus links to an excerpt from The Big Over Easy and a biography of Jasper Fforde.
The Big Over Easy A Nursery Crime
by Jasper Fforde
Hardcover: Jul 2005,
400 pages.
Paperback: Jul 2006,
400 pages.
It's Easter in Reading—a bad time for eggs—and no one can remember the
last sunny day. Ovoid D-class nursery celebrity Humpty Stuyvesant Van Dumpty III, minor baronet, ex-convict, and former millionaire
philanthropist, is found shattered to death beneath a wall in a shabby
area of town. All the evidence points to his ex-wife, who has
conveniently shot herself.
But Detective Inspector Jack Spratt and his assistant Mary Mary
remain unconvinced, a sentiment not shared with their superiors at the
Reading Police Department, who are still smarting over their failure to
convict the Three Pigs of murdering Mr. Wolff. Before long Jack and Mary
find themselves grappling with a sinister plot involving cross-border
money laundering, bullion smuggling, problems with beanstalks, titans
seeking asylum, and the cut and thrust world of international chiropody.
And on top of all that, the JellyMan is coming to town . . .
If you've enjoyed the Thursday Next series and appreciate a little bit of 'silliness', then this might be for you, but if literary slapstick isn't your cup of tea, you should probably steer clear! (Reviewed by BookBrowse Review Team).
New England Science Fiction Association
....rather than the apparent pre-adolescent desire to get a reaction that seemed to inspire some names in the Tuesday Next books, such as Jack Schitt. The invention here is more firmly in the zany fun category, with few lapses into "silly enough to be annoying."
(While Tuesday Next and her family, friends, and enemies are neither seen nor heard from, this is apparently set in the same world, and some of the minor characters, most notably Lola Vavoom, do make appearances.) Good, light summer fun reading.
Kirkus Reviews
Fforde lays on his erudition with a trowel, slathering literary references all over his rote detective story. Of course, it being rote is part of the point, as Fforde's trying to deconstruct the whole genre. While the effect is at first hilarious and ingenious, eventually the charm wears off. Shallow and snarky, though the concept is clever.
Publishers Weekly
Fforde's whimsical fifth novel, his first not to feature literary detective Thursday Next, is consistently witty, but its conceit--putting a criminal spin on nursery rhymes--wears a bit thin....The result is unusually clever but not compelling in the least.
The Guardian (UK) - Peter Guttridge
I love it. The Big Over Easy is great not just because it's very funny (albeit with some excruciating puns) but also because it works properly as a whodunit....Comic genius.
Recent Reader Reviews
Rated of 5
by Cloggie Downunder thoroughly enjoyable The Big Over Easy is the first in the Nursery Crime series by Jasper Fforde and, while it was not published until 2005, it was actually written in 1994, well before his highly successful Thursday Next series. It is a reworking of his first written... Read More
Fforde's
first book, The Eyre Affair,
was published in 2001, and was
followed by Lost In A Good
Book (2002), The Well of
Lost Plots (2003) and
Something Rotten (2004). All
revolve around, female
detective, Thursday Next who
lives in a parallel world to our
own where books are paramount,
the Crimean War is still ongoing
and dodos are the pets of
choice.
Fforde says that he felt the
need to take a break and, to
that end, resurrected the
concept for a novel that he'd
first written in 1993-94, which
became The Big Over Easy.
He was planning to publish a
new Thursday Next novel this
year, but I don't see anything
in the publishers catalog for
this year, so...
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(410 words).
of 5
by Cloggie Downunder
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