Like his countryman and comic antecedent Douglas Adams, Jasper Fforde writes the kind of novels that inspire hardcore, slavish devotion.
How slavish? How hardcore? Well, the 44-year-old writer's debut novel, The Eyre Affair, sports more than 200 reader reviews at Amazon.com -- a hefty number for an absurdist fantasy starring a time-and-book-hopping "literary detective" named Thursday Next. Then there's the "Fforde Ffestival" on Sept 16 and Sept 17 in Swindon, England, a celebration and exploration of Fforde's work organized by "Fforde ffans."
Fforde, who left a 20-year career as a film and television camera technician to write what have become wildly successful novels, including the Thursday Next series, seems nevertheless genuinely flattered by the attention.
"This is the first (festival), and much to my surprise, it sold enough tickets to go past the break-even point," Fforde says. "I think it's less of an homage to me than lots of similar people getting together to talk about something they like." And, yes, he'll be there.
After all, Fforde ffans have a new world to explore with the release of The Big Over Easy, the first book of a brand-new "nursery crime" mystery series.
The main character, Jack Spratt (whose first wife died from eating no lean), is a detective in the Nursery Crimes Division of the Reading Police Department. His ever-contrary partner is Mary Mary, and they are investigating the mysterious passing of a one H Dumpty.
The Big Over Easy is actually Fforde's first book. Back in 1994, it was called Who Killed Humpty Dumpty?
"It was roundly rejected by everybody," he says. When it was time for a new book last year, Fforde offered to dust off Humpty and revise it.
This proved more difficult than it first seemed. "There are almost no rules and few logical constraints within the four Thursday novels -- almost anything can happen -- but Over Easy is a traditionally plotted crime thriller," one that futzes around with the conventions invented by classic sleuths such as Sherlock Holmes and Agatha Christie.
"This book comes out of the time when detective stories were more like crossword puzzles," Fforde says. "It plays with those cliches: Every library had a body in it; people are only murdered in exceptionally complicated ways; all murderers are brilliant except for leaving one tiny little clue for the detective to pick up on."
Given the generic traditions of these sorts of mysteries, a certain tone needed to be struck. "What I wanted was, nursery rhyme characters live in Reading, but it's just totally normal, terribly ordinary and domestic." Fforde says. "When the characters treat the world as ordinary, it makes the bizarre seem ordinary. All good stories are about people; that's where the drama is."
But his books are so dense with references, jokes and subversions of literary tropes that it seems obvious Fforde studied literature in college. Fforde laughs out loud at the suggestion.
"Oh, heavens no, I didn't go to university," he says, "I failed my A-levels (the exams that allow British high school students to move on to the next level). I read a great deal, listened to radio plays, watched lots of TV. I learned storytelling by osmosis, I think. See, I had wanted to join the film industry in some capacity since I was 10, so that's all I cared about."
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