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The Big Over Easy: A Nursery Crime | 
 enlarge | Author: Jasper Fforde
Publisher: Viking Adult
Category: Book
List Price: $24.95
Buy New: $5.99
You Save: $18.96 (76%)
New (8) Collectible (1) from $5.99
Avg. Customer Rating:  93 reviews
Sales Rank: 19695
Format: Bargain Price
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 400
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.1
Dimensions (in): 8.4 x 5.7 x 1.4
Dewey Decimal Number: 823.914
ASIN: B000S6NBUC
Publication Date: July 21, 2005
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
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Product Description
Jasper Fforde does it again with a dazzling new series starring Inspector Jack Spratt, head of the Nursery Crime Division
Jasper Ffordes bestselling Thursday Next series has delighted readers of every genre with its literary derring-do and brilliant flights of fancy. In The Big Over Easy, Fforde takes a break from classic literature and tumbles into the seedy underbelly of nursery crime. Meet Inspector Jack Spratt, family man and head of the Nursery Crime Division. Hes investigating the murder of ovoid D-class nursery celebrity Humpty Dumpty, found shattered to death beneath a wall in a shabby area of town. Yes, the big egg is down, and all those brittle pieces sitting in the morgue point to foul play. BACKCOVER: A wonderfully readable riot . . . [A] cleverly plotted, magically overstuffed yet amazingly digestible book . . . This summers perfect beach read for eggheads.
The Wall Street Journal
As if the Marx brothers were let loose in the childrens section of a strange bookstore.
USA Today
Pythonesque . . . Like the Harry Potter and Lemony Snicket books, this one is abundantly playful without being truly geared for children. Anyone who has ever been read a nursery rhyme . . . can appreciate Mr. Ffordes outlandish joking.
Janet Maslin, The New York Times
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| Customer Reviews: Read 88 more reviews...
Over Easy is Hard to Forget July 23, 2008
You have to admire someone who thinks (and writes) outside the box. Jasper Fforde takes the realm of children's nursery rhymes and transforms it into a world of mystery and mayhem that's definitely for adults. The list of suspects who could have offed the womanizing drunkard Humpty Dumpty is as colorful as the folks trying to crack the case, so to speak. Though I found some sections a bit hard to plow through (I can't stick with a page- long paragraph)the humor and downright cleverness of the book kept me turning pages. I loved the fact that in Detective Jack Spratt's world, the fictionalization of the investigation for the local rag is more important than the quest for justice. Straight from the newspaper comes the sizzling headline, "Nursery Favorite Dies in Wall-Death Drama." The wildly nutty ending was way over the top in a perfectly wonderful way. A well seasoned story that will really hit the spot.
 Mr. Fforde's marvelous little gem. June 6, 2008
Jasper Fforde made his name in the literary world with his very popular "Thursday Next" series of books following the eponymous heroine on a series of fantastically convoluted adventures in the world of metafiction. There are some connections between the characters in this novel and characters who appeared as minor figures in one of the "Thursday Next" books, but the "Nursery Crime" series is a distinct animal, albeit though it plays with many of the same metafictional themes. "The Big Over Easy", the first entry in the new series, is a wonderful little book.
The basic story follows Jack Spratt, the head of Reading's Nursery Crime Division (NCD), who has worked for decades in what is considered a career dead-end (one step above the Ministry of Magic's Centaur Office, if you will), handling criminal acts involving nursery rhyme characters (he himself is one, though he doesn't know it, combining Jack Spratt, Jack the Giant-Killer, and Jack and the Beanstalk). He is joined by Mary Mary, a young Detective Sergeant who despairs at being put in the NCD, and really wants to work with Friedland Chymes, the celebrity detective whose adventures she grew up avidly following. The rest of the NCD crew includes a rookie assigned there for two months and then forgotten about, a hypochondriac, and an alien (yes, aliens have arrived, and, as documented in one of the fake newspaper clips included at the start of each chapter, were determined to not be very interesting). The case: the apparent slaying of Humpty Dumpty. The list of suspects is byzantine, and the plot has more contortions than the Gordian Knot, dragging in as incidental figures, among others, Prometheus the Fire-Bringer of Greek myth: he ends up renting a room in Jack's house and romancing his daughter Pandora (despite the 3980-year age difference).
The plot is ultimately not that important; Fforde wittily simultanteously employs and satirizes the various tropes of the genre (identical twins, red herrings, culprits who are only introduced toward the end), and the real fun of the book is in the numerous details (though the final resolution is quite fun; the sheer number of plots going on is itself a sort of parody of the standard detective story). Fforde has a dry, very British sense of humour in the vein of Monty Python and such. His depictions of the novel's world are endlessly entertaining; the book is marvelous fun to read. Each chapter begins with a quote from various in-universe sources, mainly newspapers, highlighting and parodying various fictional tropes. The other major theme in the book is Fforde's exploration of the idea of the celebrity detective; Watson loyally documented and published Holmes' exploits, but here we see this concept run amok: publictation has become as, if not more, important than actuall solving the case for many detectives, Chymes most of all. They actively conduct their investigations in order to make them readable and dramatically interesting.
Highly recommended.
 I'll take Nursery Rhymes for $100... April 23, 2008
Fforde just makes you think too much. There is so much nursery rhyme tie-in that it makes your head spin. It's too much to really concentrate on the story! You spend all of the time piecing together the little bits of clues and subtle allusions to the rhymes themselves, and the story gets a bit lost in the shuffle. It did make me want to look up a lot of information on nursery rhymes, but it was a hard book to follow with all the distractions.
If you get a kick out of those sorts of tie-ins and know a great deal about nursery rhymes, this is probably one of the best books you'll read. The parts I did get were masterfully done. And Fforde has a great writing style, which is normally very engaging. But if you're more like me, and are going to spend the whole book almost getting it but feeling like you're missing something you should know, I'd give this one a miss. His Thursday Next books are far more enjoyable!
A really good, funny mystery! April 14, 2008
I first became enthralled with Jasper Fforde through "The Eyre Affair" and have read all of this books. Resisted "Over Easy" at first since I am not a big fan on mysteries or children's books. I surprisingly loved it and didn't want to put it down. Cannot wait to read "The Fourth Bear." And I loved this book because it was almost as round as Karl Pilkington's head. But much funnier.
Don't expect to solve this nursery caper on your own! March 30, 2008
4 out of 4 found this review helpful
I read this book and thought it was extremely clever but I just could not bring myself to give it more than three stars.
The basic plot premis is that the Reading, England, police department has a section called the Nursery Crime Division where Detective Inspector Jack Spratt works. Jack has just finished a case (The Crown v. Three Pigs) which should have resulted in the certain conviction of three pigs in the murder of a wolf. But, in an unforseen development, a jury of the pigs peers acquit them of the murder and his department head is telling Jack that the departmental budgetary meeting is going to result in the disbandment of the NCD. Not a good day for Jack. But things get even worse. Humpty Dumpty is found dead at the bottom of the wall where he liked to sit and think. Was it an accident, suicide or could it have been murder? Jack is assigned a new partner, Sergeant Mary Mary, who has transferred in from Basingstoke in the hopes of working with her hero and longtime contributor to Amazing Crimes Magazine, Detective Friedland Chymes. Jack doesn't want a new Official Sidekick, Mary wants to work with another detective, and Chymes wants to take over the Dumpty case so he can write it up for Amazing Crimes. Let the intrigue begin!
The first book I read by Jasper Fforde was The Eyre Affair with the Thursday Next character. I just fell for the whole concept. I had wanted the Nursery Crimes stories to be as enjoyable for me, if not more so. Sadly I cannot say that it was. Fforde has the most incredible imagination. He has taken a topic which we are all familiar with, nursery rhymes, and turned them upside down and inside out. The characters are all familiar and yet he has given their entire world a skewed slant which makes them totally different from what we would expect. I can give him nothing but robust, appreciative applause for his ideas and concepts. But, I didn't enjoy this STORY very much. There was just too, too much going on in the story for my taste. Mr Fforde put in too many characters, too many situations and too many possible villains for me. He gave me one villain, explained why it couldn't have been that character and took him away (or did he?). He gave me another villain, exposed the falseness of the reasoning for his guilt and so took him away (maybe?). It just seemed to go on much too long. In fact, this is the same problem which I had with the Thursday Next novel, it too went on far too long to completely hold my attention. I wanted this to be over but it just kept plodding along and along and along. And the reveal about the true murderer was just so bizarre that I actually went back and re-read parts of it just to make sure I had gotten it straight. And the parts about the Jellyman and the Sacred Gonga, well, I never got those at all.
I liked the book, I enjoyed reading it up to a point, but I don't think I will search out the next Nursery Crime book. I'll stick with Thursday.
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