The Fourth Bear: A Nursery Crime

Excellent, imaginative, so funny!👍👍❤️if you’re already a J Fforde fan, this will add to your collection nicely. Highly recommend and hope there’s another one soon.

If you have not encountered Fforde before, run (do not walk) to the links above and pick up The Eyre Affair. A more erudite, funny, accessible, fun read can hardly be imagined. Eyre was the first in a series of books about his literary detective Thursday Next. The later Thursday books were good but not as great as Eyre, and were followed by The Big Over Easy, first of the Nursery Crime series. Over Easy was actually a much earlier book, one that Fforde apparently returned to after the first few Thursday Next books. It reads as if he did a partial rewrite, and the end result was pretty uneven.I'm very happy to say that The Fourth Bear is very good - certainly better than Over Easy, and better than the later Thursday Next tales.Spoiler-free plot synopsis: Police detective Jack Spratt is head of the Nursery Crimes division, specializing in crimes related to nursery-rhyme and childrens story characters. It seems that the famous homicidal maniac The Gingerbread Man has escaped from the asylum and has resumed his serial killer spree of years before. In the meantime, investigative reporter Golilocks has disappeared while investigating some cucumbers which seem to be exploding with great violence, and all the local bears have good alibis.Injecting the characters of nursery rhyme and childrens stories into the real world gives Fforde the opportunity for some great jokes and situations, and he takes full and unfettered advantage of the situation to tell a very funny story. I learned things I never knew before about the risks of thumb-sucking, bear social structure, alien physiology, and an entirely new set of tongue-twisting rhymes that spin off of Peter Pipers pickles. Great fun all around, and the kind of thing that Fforde does better than almost anybody.But what sets this book a step up for Fforde is the strength of the plot. This is a real and functional mystery, complete with red herrings, maguffins, nice subtleties, office politics, both venal and honest politicians, and a resolution that works perfectly with the rest of the story. If you were to strip it of its fantastic and humorous elements (and you could! (though you shouldn't)) there would still be an interesting mystery with interesting characters.And really, you can't ask for much more than that.

The Fourth Bear is subtitled A Nursery Crime, and, yes, there are many word plays and allusions throughout this book. For anyone growing up with fairy tales and nursery rhymes, this is fun.Our main character is Jack Spratt—yes, that Jack Sprat whose first wife died of complications from obesity. Now he is trying to live a normal human life—hence, the new spelling of his name—rather than his previous life as a PDR, Person of Dubious Reality.Any fan of detective stories knows that the good detective picks up on anomalies—like Sherlock Holmes noting that the dog did not bark. So it is with the story of the Three Bears. If the bears were having a meal together, the porridges would have all been cooked in one pot and served at the same time. The three bowls should have all been the same temperature, or nearly so. Why was Papa’s too hot, Mama’s too cold, and Baby’s in between? And why was Goldilocks murdered?We get appearances from the Quangle Wangle, the Gingerbread Man (a serial criminal who taunts the police with “You can’t catch me”), Dorian Grey (a used car salesman with an unusual guarantee), Madeleine Usher, a space alien, some scientists from Laputa, and others too numerous to mention. This book is a hoot.

Detective Inspector Jack Spratt and Detective Sergeant Mary Mary return in their second adventure by author Jasper Fforde, which builds off the events of "The Big Over Easy" while at the same time avoiding repeating the chief themes of that novel. Fforde has conjured up an elaborate fantastical world in this series of novels, and it is a delight to return to it (he has spoken of a third and final "Nursery Crime" story at some point in the future, which I highly anticipate).Solving the murder of Humpty Dumpty made Jack Spratt famous, but, as the new book opens, he has fallen somewhat, thanks to a couple of botched operations, most notably his failure in the Red Riding Hood case, which left both Red and her grandmother catatonic. He is told to attend a psychiatric evaluation, which he fervently would rather avoid, even as a young reporter with golden hair turns up dead at a Battle of the Somme theme park ("Somme World", which is designed to mortify anyone who goes there), hours after she was discovered naked in bed at the Bruin household. Who killed Goldilocks, and why? Included here are, among other amusing details, the reasons why the story of the smallest bowl being 'just right' doesn't hold water, and what that indicates.Fforde is not content to hit the same notes that made "The Big Over Easy" so entertaining, which some may see as a negative, depending on what you think about what he chooses to replace it with. The first novel made a great deal of the fictional unverse's obsession with 'true crime' stories, and the effect this had on police procedure, but this angle is more or less absent from "The Fourth Bear". There is no sense that the characters are spending their time trying to be more dramatic; Briggs, Jack's police captain, has seemingly gone from a self-aware parody of the trope where police captains are always suspending their officers to merely another example of that trope played straight (albeit with every referring to "Plot Device Number _" in reference to various strategies and situations they find themselves in). Playing the story a bit more straight adds a bit more straight-up drama to the story, though Fforde has not toned down his trademark irreverence one bit.This approach also allows for some real exploration of the characters in a non-satirical context, and both Jack and Mary get a lot of good development here. Jack's concerns one of the intriguing new angles Fforde introduces here: a more thorough explanation of the existence of 'fictional' characters in the 'real' world, and how they differ from normal humans. Jack is a 'PDR' (Person of Dubious Reality), but seems to be fairly well-adjusted, while he is able to call out his psychiatrist on being a threadbare plot device who has no backstory or memories otuside what the author has supplied her with (which is emotionally devastating).Fforde casts his net quite wide in terms of source material, reeling in not just Southey's characters but far more obscure ones such as Mr and Mrs. Punch (British puppets who I suspect non-Brits such as myself will find rather mystifying); and the entire mystery revolves around various figures from Edward Lear's "The Quangle Wangle's Hat", which I had never heard of before, but numerous important plot details are drawn from it (one might consider reading that poem before reading this).All in all, another winner from Fforde.

Clever, humorous and suspenseful.

This was much better than the first. Much more of that Thursday Next magic. In this entry Jack Sprat and Mary Mary have to catch the Gingerbreadman without being on the case and solve the mystery of Goldilocks. Bears get a lovely role in the satire of a right to arm bears. Funny family drama too. Much funnier much better satire.

This is one of Fforde's earlier works and involves Insp. Jack Spratt of the Nursery Crimes Division. For me, this story-line is better than the Thursday Next story-lines; frankly - both are wonderfully weird with delightful, dry humour. Unfortunately there are only three Spratt novels. Just a matter of choice really - as I would wholeheartedly recommend any and all of these brilliant novels. Apart from the mind-bending humour, the mysteries are fascinating in their own right.

I found this novel boring and confusing. I've read it basically for Goldilocks, but here she is adult and killed almost at the beginning. Her meeting with the three bears and all is uninspired, I think.But it has its funny moments and witty and snarky passages.I'm not the biggest fan of this book or series.

An erudite adventure featuring talking bears, fluid-filled aliens and frustrated policepersons, not to mention everyone's favourite giant evil ginger biscuit on the rampage in that metropolitan hub of the universe, Reading. Oh, and Dorian Grey gets a new career as a car salesman, because of course he does. Just read it.

Very funny, almost every part if this is a witty joke. That said the characters are also well thought through and the plot is very entertaining. I would recommend this to anyone who likes a laugh, and having read The Big Over Easy is not essential to understanding(ish) thus book.

I had bought "The big over easy" by chance, and it turned out to be one of the funniest and most ironic books i have read in a long (long) while. "The fourth bear" was mentioned as coming next at the end of the book, I bought it almost immediately after, and it is just as good as "The big over easy". It's fun, ironic and clever, with plenty of cross references.