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Summary
Summary
In a fading town, far from anyone he knew or trusted, a young Lemony Snicket began his apprenticeship in an organization nobody knows about. He started by asking questions that shouldn't have been on his mind. Now he has written an account that should not be published, in four volumes that shouldn't be read. This is the first volume.
Summary
Before the Baudelaires became orphans, before he encountered A Series of Unfortunate Events, even before the invention of Netflix, Lemony Snicket was a boy discovering the mysteries of the world.
In a fading town, far from anyone he knew or trusted, a young Lemony Snicket began his apprenticeship in an organization nobody knows about. He started by asking questions that shouldn't have been on his mind. Now he has written an account that should not be published, in four volumes that shouldn't be read. This is the first volume.
Author Notes
Lemony Snicket is the pen name of Daniel Handler, who was born on February 28, 1970. As Lemony Snicket, he is the author of and appears as a character in the children's book series A Series of Unfortunate Events. He has also written or contributed to other works using this pen name including Baby in the Manger, The Lump of Coal, The Composer Is Dead, and Where Did You See Her Last?.
Under his real name, Handler is the author of several books for adults including The Basic Eight, Watch Your Mouth, and Adverbs.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (1)
New York Review of Books Review
YOU can't blame a mystery lover for approaching "'Who Could That Be at This Hour?'" with trepidation. Lemony Snicket has burned us before. Like "The X-Files," "Lost" and countless other conspiracy-driven sagas, Snicket's 13 volumes of "A Series of Unfortunate Events" left fans with far more questions than answers. What was the true purpose of the clandestine organization known as V.F.D.? Why was everyone terrified of that question-mark-shaped shadow in the ocean? What was hidden in that MacGuffin of a sugar bowl everybody wanted? But in contrast to the frustratingly finite television series mentioned above, "Unfortunate Events" gave readers a glimmer of hope. Because the series's pseudonymous author was also one of its characters - and he never went away. In the six years since "The End," Lemony Snicket has been out there, a living spinoff, whose mere existence has held the lingering promise of "More to come. . . ." "'Who Could That Be af This Hour?'" is the first chapter of "All the Wrong Questions," a new mock-autobiographical series that recounts the almost 13-year-old Lemony's apprenticeship with an enigmatic secret society - a prequel to "Unfortunate Events." And while that first series worked as both a tribute to and parody of Gothic literature, this new one does the same for noir detective fiction. The book opens with the pulpy, "There was a town, and there was a girl and there was a theft." Its "Maltese Falcon"-esque plot, which pivots around a missing statue, has more twists than a soft-serve ice cream cone. And young Lemony's descriptions of the people he meets are hard-boiled enough to make Philip Marlowe proud ("Green eyes she had, and hair so black it made the night look pale"). There's even a character named Dashiell. However, this book is no mere exercise in genre spoofing; this is, after all, a Lemony Snicket novel. That means you get a delightfully eccentric supporting cast, which here includes a tween reporter named Moxie who dresses like Annie Hall and uses words like "gimcrack." It also means you get snarkily dry humor - the lobby of a lackluster hotel, for instance, displays a bowl of peanuts "that were either salted or dusty" - and unapologetic blasts of absurdity, like a pair of prepubescent taxi drivers (Pip steers, while Squeak works the pedals). And, as with all Snicket novels, you get a narrator with a penchant for defining every 10-cent word he uses. Over the course of 13 "Unfortunate Events" books, this practice grew tiresome - a word that here means I wish he hadn't done it so much. However, in "'Who Could That Be at This Hour?'" we are made privy to the genesis of Lemony's defining habit: He himself is subjected to it by an adult spy tutor who sorely underestimates his abilities. In a pleasing meta twist, young Lemony echoes the kind of gimme-some-credit grumbles that may have been voiced by real-life Snicket readers (as when our hero gripes, "I know what penchant means"). All of it serves to make the tween Lemony a lively and endearingly peculiar protagonist, the kind of figure who would be at home in a Wes Anderson film. At one point Lemony reveals that anyone who wanted to torture him for information would simply need to get his socks wet. But what about all those unsolved mysteries from "Unfortunate Events"? The book's pages are peppered with tempting maybe-clues - a reference to a well-known character, the mention of a mythical sea beast whose body curls up like a question mark. Are these allusions or illusions? It's all part of the game that Snicket plays with his readers. The puzzle, he seems to tell us, is more important than its solution. However, there is a complete, self-contained mystery within "'Who Could That Be at This Hour?'" By the end, you will know the identity of the statue thief. And you will have had a great time getting there. But don't dream for a second that you'll finish the book without at least a dozen new unanswered riddles. And will those conundrums be resolved in this series? Will any of them truly tie in to the previous books? Will the success of this series really depend on providing some sort of closure? Or am I asking all the wrong questions? Christopher Healy is the author of "The Hero's Guide to Saving Your Kingdom." its sequel will be published in April.
