Literary mind games and crimes in a fantastic world

THE thing about characters from nursery rhymes is that they always do the same thing. It’s written into their DNA. According to Mary Mary (“quite contrary”), a detective sergeant in the Nursery Crime Division of the Reading, England, police force, “We call them PDRs. Persons of Dubious Reality. Refugees from the collective consciousness. 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.”

“Characters from cautionary tales are particularly mindless,” she continues. “They do what they do because it’s what they’ve always done -- and it’s our job to stop them.”

Thus, Punch and Judy will batter each other forever. The Great Long Red-Legg’d Scissor-man lives only to snip off the thumbs of thumb-sucking children. The Gingerbreadman, the principal villain of Jasper Fforde’s second Nursery Crime mystery (though it also has a murderous Fourth Bear in it, just as Graham Greene’s 1950 Cold War thriller had a Third Man) is pure serial killer: 7 feet tall, 4 inches thick, inhumanly strong, with glace cherry eyes and a heart of evil.

Readers of Fforde’s “Thursday Next” series, in which the eponymous heroine investigates crimes against literature, know that when a reference to the likes of Greene pops up in one of the Welsh author’s tales of sometimes tedious but often inspired silliness, it isn’t by accident. While you may not have trouble following “The Fourth Bear” if you’re unfamiliar with Oscar Wilde’s Dorian Gray (here, the name of a used-car salesman who guarantees that the pristine 1970s Austin Allegro bought by Chief Inspector Jack Spratt will never age) or the English Romantic poet Robert Southey (whose name graces a condominium complex for talking bears in Reading who deal in controlled substances: porridge and honey), you will miss a lot of the fun.

Fforde spoofs the conventional mystery novel, to be sure. It’s amusing how little the form of the hard-boiled police procedural has to bend to accommodate Goldilocks and the Three Bears, never mind Constable Ashley, who is an alien from the planet Rambosia and whose native language is binary -- all ones and zeroes -- and who adapts to the Nursery Crime Division’s cramped offices by sticking to the ceiling. We’re reminded of how spurious the “realism” of crime fiction often is, how stereotypical the characters are, how formulaic the plots.

The Reading force is stretched to the limit trying to catch the Gingerbreadman, who has broken out of St. Cerebellum’s hospital for the criminally insane, while Goldilocks, a newspaper reporter writing about explosions that have killed elderly farmers who grow “extreme cucumbers,” has been found dead in SommeWorld, a theme park that aims to immerse visitors in the horrors of World War I. Still, Inspector Spratt is suspended by his boss. He is suspended not for any reason that makes sense but because the Nursery Crime series demands that he be suspended in each episode, just as Nero Wolfe had to tend the orchids in his New York brownstone. Spratt is required to undergo a psychiatric evaluation by a woman named Virginia Kreeper. Her name, he reminds her -- in case we missed it -- is that of a plant, and she herself is a kind of minor character that literary critics call a “threshold guardian,” an obstacle for him to circumvent, nothing more.

But Fforde is also after bigger game. Like Mary Mary, Jack Spratt (who “could eat no fat”) is a PDR. Unlike the Gingerbreadman, he can usually pass as a regular human being. His PDR-ness is something he denies to himself and hides from others. When Spratt’s second wife, Madeleine -- his first wife died, no doubt because she could “eat no lean” -- discovers that she is married to a nursery-rhyme character, she is stunned.

The joke is that Spratt is a regular person, just like us: part thinking being and part automaton impelled by prejudices, compulsions and other murky, irrational stuff -- the very collective unconscious that gave rise to nursery rhymes in the first place. “The Fourth Bear” turns out to be a surprisingly cool-eyed glance at the human condition disguised as a witty, typically British entertainment whose elaborately cantilevered plot even includes a McGuffin.

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Michael Harris is the author of the novel “The Chieu Hoi Saloon.”