Another kind of joke from Jasper Fforde

I posted a comment last week about the entertaining jibes at crime-fiction plot devices in Jasper Fforde's novel The Fourth Bear. But there's more to Fforde's jokes than good-natured, self-referential literary japery.

There are also jabs at political correctness and conspiracy theorists, among other things, and, lest you think these are easy prey, Fforde's humor is always a bit more probing than you might expect from jokes directed at such targets.

And then there is the following, which is just plain funny, no explanation needed:

"`Lovers,' repeated Bartholomew. `Goldilocks and I. For more than a year now.'

"`Wait, wait,' said Jack in a state of some confusion. `You were, to great fanfare, Westminster's first openly gay MP and have remained a vociferous mouthpiece for all kinds of minority-rights issues for the past twenty-five years, and now you're telling me ... you're straight?'

"Bartholomew covered his face with his hands, and his shoulders shook with a silent sob.

"`You don't know what it's like,' he said miserably, `living a lie.'"

© Peter Rozovsky 2008

Plot devices by number and two questions for readers

Here are two short passages from The Fourth Bear, the second novel in Jasper Fforde's Nursey Crimes series:

"He explained the news to Mary, who said, `How about if we do a plot device number twenty-six and pretend not to look for him?'

"`So you're suggesting we look for him against orders, catch him, cover ourselves with glory, and the by-the-book officers look like idiots?'

"Mary nodded enthusiastically. `Pretty much.'

"`No, we're going to follow plot device number thirty-eight.'

"Mary narrowed her eyes. `Which one is that again?'

"`We wait until they beg for our assistance, then save the day. For now we follow orders."

and

"`The Gingerbreadman is not an NCD investigation, Sergeant. You know that.'

"`It was a coincidence, sir,' she responded confidently. `Do you think I would be crazy enough to talked him on my own?'

"`Perhaps not you,' said Briggs, glancing at Jack. Briggs thought for a moment and narrowed his eyes. `This isn't plot device number twenty-seven, is it?' he asked suspiciously.

"`The one where my partner gets killed in a drug bust gone wrong and I throw in my badge and go rogue?' replied Jack innocently. `I don't think so, sir.'

"`No, not that one,' countered Briggs in a state of some confusion. `The one where you try and find the Gingerbreadman on the sly and make Copperfield and me look like idiots.'

"`That would be a twenty-nine, wouldn't it?' put in Mary, who wasn't going to miss out on the fun.

"` No, no,' said Jack, `Briggs means a twenty-six. A twenty-nine is where the bad guy turns out quite inexplicably to be the immediate superior.'"

Jasper Fforde knows his crime-fiction plot devices. How well do you? What crime novels, stories, movies and television shows uses the devices he has his characters discuss? And what are the implications of having fictional characters discuss plot devices, particularly Jack's tentative "I don't think so, sir"?

(The Fourth Bear follows Fforde's first Nursery Crimes book, The Big Over Easy. It's highly entertaining reading, despite a stupid blurb from the Washington Times that Fforde is "our best thinking person's genre writer." (See critical clichés.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2008