My sister gave me this book for my birthday, and I’m grateful. Jasper Fforde, you may recall, is the author of the delightfully silly “Thursday Next” novels, The Eyre Affair and its sequels. The Big Over Easy is the first in a new, unrelated series that concerns the Nursery Crime Division of the Reading CID in Reading, England. DI Jack Spratt handles all of the cases in the vicinity of Reading that involve pigs, wolves, beanstalks, billy goats gruff, giants, et al, including, in this case, the demise of one Humperdinck Jehoshaphat Aloysius Stuyvesant van Dumpty.

As the book begins, Jack’s in a bit of a down phase; the jury has just acquitted three pigs of the wrongful death of a wolf who was climbing down their chimney. The investigation cost the taxpayers a quarter-of-a-million pounds, and it’s even possible that the NCD might be closed at the next budget review–so when it develops that Humpty Dumpty was shot, Jack’s determined (with the help of Detective Sergeant Mary Mary) to track down the killer in double-quick time.

What follows is a delightfully oddball tale which is, in fact, a pretty good murder mystery at the same time. Fforde has a knack for creating screwball worlds somewhat like our own and yet deliciously off. In Fforde’s England, for example, all of the best detectives–Inspector Moose of Oxford, Inspect Dogleash, Miss Maple, and many others, including Reading’s own Chief Detective Inspector Friedland Chymes–are members of the Guild of Detectives, which has, among its other functions, the task of negotiating publication rights with such worthy periodicals as Amazing Crime Stories. To be successful, a detective must not only be able to catch the perpetrator; he must also run his investigation in a thrilling, well-paced, narratively-satisfying way. And, of course, he must have an Official Sidekick who’s well-able to write his cases up for publication.

The Big Over Easy gets off to a bit of a slow start, and I think it tries a little too hard now and then; but it’s also genuinely funny and filled with scads of allusions and odd links between rhymes and fairytales that would never have occurred to me on my own. Oh, and there are at least two Monty Python references, one of them nicely subtle.

I enjoyed the Thursday Next books, except for the latest, Something Rotten, which I’ve not yet read; but this one’s at least as good, and possibly better. All in all, I’m looking forward to the sequel. I do wonder how many books he can add to the series before the gag gets stale, though.