Jasper Fforde. The Fourth Bear. New York: Viking, 2006. E-book.

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. (N.B.: I have noted in recent years, many of my high school students are not familiar with these as they used to be.)

Our main character is Jack Spratt—yes, that Jack Sprat(t) 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.

Mary Mary (Mary Mary who grows the garden, not the one who sings) describes PDRs as

“Uninvited visitors who have fallen through the grating that divides the real from the written. They arrive with their actions hardwired due to their repetitious existence, and the older and more basic they are, the more rigidly they stick to them.” (14)

Mr. Spratt is now a detective for the Reading (note the spelling, if not the pronunciation) Police Department’s Nursery Crimes Division. This is lots of fun.

I do not know if Mr. Fforde got his inspiration from Mad magazine, but many years ago that comic periodical imagined a merger (today we might call it a mashup) between True Detective and Jack and Jill magazines. One of the headlines read “Did Humpty Dumpty Fall or Was He Pushed?”

Detective Spratt apparently developed a reputation by solving the Dumpty case in an earlier episode. This time he has encounters with Scissor-man, the guy who cuts off the thumbs of thumbsucking children, and Punch and Judy, the violent but lovable traditional puppets.

The main case in this novel involves the murder of Goldilocks, a reporter who is an activist for the right to arm bears (see Bill of Rights, Amendment Two) and has been investigating a series of deadly explosions involving competitive cucumber growers. It is a hoot: Something that might have been dreamed up by “the usual gang of idiots” at Mad magazine.

Any reader of Gulliver’s Travels knows the significance of cucumbers. What if scientists really were coming closer to harnessing the latent solar energy in cucumbers? Like the nuclear power in Uranium or Plutonium, it could be a source of energy or a powerful weapon.

There is much more. 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, and others too numerous to mention.

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?

People like Goldilocks who ask such questions could be in danger…There is more going on in the story of Goldilocks and the Three Bears then we thought.

N.B. This is one of a series, the first we have read. It will not likely be the last.