Few writers are as delightfully off-the-wall as genre-bending Jasper Fforde. A year ago he asked his fans to leave Thursday Next behind, at least for a while, and to experience the first book in his Nursery Crimes series. Readers flocked to “The Big Over Easy” and its investigative team, Detective Chief Inspector Jack Spratt and Detective Sergeant Mary Mary. These valiant, and not terribly tightly wound, crime fighters return in “The Fourth Bear.”
Fforde’s setup is, as expected, absurd. Investigative reporter Henny Hatchett, Goldilocks to her friends, travels to the Berkshire town of Obscurity to interview septuagenarian Stanley Cripps. He is a member of an elite class of competitive cucumberers, and quite certain he has a shot of wresting the cucumber prize from his archrival, Hardy Fuchsia, at Vexpo2004. He’s talking to Goldilocks because he wants to shine a light on acts of vandalism that are threatening the lives and work of him and his fellow enthusiasts.
Goldilocks’ conversation with Cripps is the last he would have. Awakened by an alarm announcing a greenhouse intruder, he goes to investigate. He barely has time to leave Goldilocks a cryptic voicemail before a fierce explosion rocks the greenhouse, taking out Cripps and every window in a 5-mile radius.
When Goldilocks goes missing a week later, the incident seems unrelated to the explosion. There is enough of a Nursery angle – Goldilocks is known to be picky, in the “not-too-hot, not-too-cold sense,” and she’s known to be a friend to bears – that it seems to belong to the Nursery Crimes Division.
The Nursery Crimes Division, as described by an epigraph drawn from the fictional “The Bumper Book of Berkshire Records, 2004 edition,” was initially established by Jack Horner, and charged with overseeing inquiries involving “any nursery characters or plots from poems and/or stories.” The division garners little respect and less financial support from police and public. But the work is, for Jack Spratt and Mary Mary, close to a calling.
The investigation into Goldilocks’s disappearance takes a circuitous path. Along the way, the officers apprehend the Great Long Red-Legg’d Scissor Man who has, for years, been terrorizing the children of Cautionary Valley into exemplary behavior. They cross paths and match wits with the criminally insane Gingerbreadman, recently escaped from the St. Cerebellum hospital.
Jack needs to replace his car, and buys one from Dorian Gray. It’s quite a remarkable vehicle and a good match to Jack’s rough driving; the only place where damage shows up is on the picture of the car that is locked in the trunk. And, of course, where Goldilocks has been, the bears cannot be far behind. In this case, subplots revolve around the right to arm bears and illegal trafficking in porridge.
The mysteries around the cucumber and the explosion, about Goldilocks’s disappearance and the role of the bears all are solved before “The Fourth Bear” comes to an end, but the answers are almost beside the point. Fforde is a writer of extreme creativity with a well-honed sense of humor and a fondness for clever wordplay. The response to the pranks that play out over the page may just as easily be a guffaw as a smile.
Robin Vidimos is a freelance writer who reviews books for The Denver Post and Buzz in the ‘Burbs.
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The Fourth Bear
By Jasper Fforde
Viking, 378 pages, $24.95
