Do you know Jack

Categories: Science Fiction & Fantasy , Fiction

Imagine a novel where Jack comes to the big city to seek his fortune.  The twist is, the city is Toy City and populated only with toys and nursery rhyme characters.  On the night of Jack's arrival, he's mugged and left in an alley. From there, he teams up with a bear named Eddie to solve the serial murders of Humpty Dumpty, Little Boy Blue, and Eddie's former partner Bill (a.k.a. Wee Willie) Winkie.  Along the way he meets a love interest (Jill) and develops a drinking problem (the problem being: the glasses in Toy city are all toy-sized--he solves it by ordering ten drinks at once).  This is Robert Rankin's The Hollow Chocolate Bunnies of the Apocalpyse and it is a hilarious diversion for a summer evening.

Of course, other authors have done the Nursery Detective theme as well.  I got the recommendation for Rankin's book by searching the library's Novelist database, trying to find something resembling Jasper Fforde's Nursery Crimes books.  Fforde has published two of this series, starring Jack Spratt (of eat-no-fat fame) as the hard-boiled detective solving the murders of Humpty Dumpty (in The Big Over Easy) and Goldilocks (in The Fourth Bear).  I'm eagerly waiting for a third.

What is it that makes the now grown-up Jack of the nursery story such a good detective?  Part of it, I suspect, is that the original Jack stories are based almost entirely around the cleverness of Jack.  Cleverness is an awfully useful trait in a detective and makes for a much more interesting mystery than brute strength.  There's also the fact that Jack is often the underdog who makes good in the end.  The average detective novel contains that convention as well, so the crossover is not nearly as mysterious as it might at first seem.

When reading Fforde and Rankin as an adult, it's quite interesting to pick out the various nursery characters and speculate whether aspects of their stories may help you solve the plot.  It's also a hoot to watch Jack, (who, after all, was a kid when you were a kid) now grown, experiencing his first kiss, or having an argument with his wife.  There's a sort of continuity in it; it hearkens back to that suspicion that as an avid reader I've always had: that characters don't stop when the book does.

So check back in with Jack.  You'll find him a bit older, though just as clever, and I daresay you'll like him just as much as you did when you were a kid.