The Big Over Easy

Detective parody populated by nursery rhyme and fairytale characters.

It is similar to the Thursday Next series but Fforde narrowed this one down to a couple genres rather than using all of literature. Where Thursday Next will have a million different plots to balance, this one had a million different twists. It must be exhausting to be a Fforde protagonist.

Fforde excels at taking something that sounds silly and populating with well-developed characters to give it depth and make it believable. As usual, the targets of Fforde's humor are bureaucracy, capitalism, and the media and how much bureaucracy serves the other two.