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."
The 20 years Fforde spent as a camera technician on movies such as The Saint and Entrapment meant he was never on the creative end.
"In film, I was a small cog in a very large machine," Fforde says. "The opportunities to tell stories as a filmmaker are very, very slim, so I started writing novels. All you need is pen and paper."
Indeed, his time in the industry means that we won't be seeing a Thursday Next or Jack Spratt movie any time soon.
"I know how the film industry works," Fforde says. "They say, `We love your work, we won't change a word,' and suddenly Vin Diesel is playing (the female) Thursday. Any author moaning about being maligned by the movies should be ignored. They know what happens, we all do: They like the money; they take the money."
Fforde pauses for a second. This is a topic that clearly comes up a good deal.
"Some books have a huge potential for getting it right," he says. "A John Grisham novel is a perfect example. You have to be a pretty untalented filmmaker to do a poor job. But my books ... the pitfalls are huge and multitudinous. I'd rather it wasn't made than made wrong."
These "pitfalls" seems directly related to why his fans are so devoted. Like the Thursday Next novels, where characters move through time and jump in and out of novels, Over Easy is chock-a-block with the sort of subtle details Fforde calls "Easter eggs."
"The books, they're very, very dense on ideas and concepts," he says, "and if there's a particular reference to your favorite book or character or line, then it would have that much more relevance, it would feel like this joke was written for you personally. It makes people feel very warm towards the series, that I am on the same wavelength."
This is the core of novel writing for Fforde, the part that is truly magical. "It's just you and the reader," he says. "It's this strange telepathy between you and people you don't even know, and I think this is because storytelling is fundamental to everyone.We learn by stories. Our mother says, `If you touch the oven, you will be burned and then you will be sorry.' It's a little three act tragedy. Everything is a story."
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