Lemony Snicket
Created by Lemony Snicket (pseud. of Daniel Handler)

In the All the Wrong Questions series, the acclaimed author of the bestselling (despite his dire warnings) An Unfortunate Series of Events, gives a "highly autobiographical account" of LEMONY SNICKET and his rather peculiar adventures when he was "almost-thirteen." But fans of the previous series looking for answers to unanswered question may have to look elsewhere. Although there seem to be allusions to the saga of the troubled siblings, this new proposed quartet of novels "takes place at a time before the Baudelaire children were born."

Just as the earlier series tweaked and teased and gleefully knocked the slats out from under Charles' Dickens in particular and gothic novels in general, this new series seems to be having a jolly good time at the expense of hard-boiled and noir crime fiction. Lemony's certainly got the patter down.

"There was a town and there was a girl, and there was a theft. I was living in the town, and I was hired to investigate the theft, and I thought the girl had nothing to do with it. I was almost thirteen and I was wrong. I was wrong about all of it."

The unreliable narrator, the shape-shifting digressions, the open-ended questions and bizarre characters will all be familiar turf to Snicket's fans, but the patina of tough-guy tone and noirish angst adds a whole new slant to the proceedings, an alternately jaded but whimsical blend of Raymond Chandler and Douglas Adams, as young Lemony "ibegins his apprenticesship as an operative in an agency nobody knows about, under the tutelage of his mysterious chaperone S. Theodora Markson, she of the ancient roadster and the long flowing hair, whose favourite methods of teaching are "example and nagging." She also has a predeliction for big words, which she feels obligated to define immediately after using them, much to Lemony's exasperation.n a fading town, far from anyone he knew or trusted,"

"I know what pendant means," he pouts at one point.

But then, Lemony knows far more than he seems to. Maybe. His letter of introduction allows that he's "an excellent reader, a good cook, a mediocre musician and an awful quarreler," although it turns out Lemony never wrote the letter -- or was even supposed to know its contents.

That's just one more mystery within a mystery here as Lemony Snicket begins to investigate, seeking, as is his wont, "all the wrong answers to all the wrong questions."

But as our intrepid hero/sleuth/narrator says at the very begiining of his adventures, "Knowing something is wrong and doing it anyway happens very often in life, and I doubt I will ever know why."

THE EVIDENCE

• "The reason children sit in the back seat is that they are the only ones who think to look and see if anyone is following them."
  -- "Who Could That Be at This Hour?"
  
  
• "Green eyes she had, and hair so black it made the night look pale."
  -- "Who Could That Be at This Hour?"
  
  
• "Judging a book by its cover is like judging a person for their crimes. You can examine the evidence but you can never know the truth."
  -- "Who Could That Be at This Hour?"
  

NOVELS

• "Who Could That Be at This Hour?" (2012)...Buy this book...Kindle it!

RELATED LINKS

Kiddie Pulp
Get 'em while they're young. A suggested reading list.

Respectfully submitted by Kevin Burton Smith.