Douglas Adams meets Miss Marple????

I heard Jasper Fforde read at the Public Library conference. It was hilarious and I was impressed that he could twist his tongue around the repetive wordplay. So this weekend I purchased the first novel featuring the literary detective Thursday Next - The Eyre Affair. The novel is a howl. It is a mystery, but I do get the feeling that Fforde read a bunch of Adams while growing up for the sense of the absurd is wonderful.

Tuesday Next is a detective working for an agency for that solves literary crimes. History itself is also skewed. The Crimean War is still being fought and Next is a veteran of that combat. People still fly in dirigibles. Our criminal Hades is going to be holding books of literature hostage as he has learned how to kill characters in a book so that they don't appear in later editions. Oh, he doesn't mind killing real people either.

Not your ordinary mystery, but great fun. Visit his page at Jasper Fforde. Once you are hooked he has great things to play with.