Where Else but Reading? Blending Genres in Jasper Fforde’s Nursery Crime Series

Abstract

Like many works of children’s literature, fairy tales involve a large dose of the fantastic to show exemplary cases of real life-lessons for children. This fantastic quality allows final morals to have a universal dimension that is articulated by a basic metaphorical relation between the real and the fantastic by force of literary convention. In Jasper Fforde’s Nursery Crime series (NCS)—including the novels The Big Over Easy (2005), The Fourth Bear (2006) and the short story ‘The Locked Room Mystery mystery’ (2007)—the city of Reading is both a real and an imaginary place inhabited by real and imaginary characters. As the title of the series suggests, the series blends the genres of nursery rhymes and detective fiction. While it is true that elements of fairy tales have blended with other genres before, what makes Fforde’s fiction a special case for Fairy-Tale Studies is that the object of detective investigation is the fairy-tale literary tradition itself. The result is a hilariously self-reflective fiction constructed on the basis of literalized metaphor that presses on hard-core critical issues while retaining a popular, highly marketable profile that is common to both blended genres.