The Big Over Easy
Detective Inspector Jack Spratt of the Nursery Crime Division at the Reading Police has been investigating suspicious nursery-rhyme fatalities for years, to the quiet contempt of the more glamorous murder squads, when Humpty Dumpty, a philanthropist, financier, and serial drinker with a long romantic history, is found shattered at the foot of a wall in a bad part of town. Is it suicide, accident, or the sort of crime only Jack is trained to recognize? Paired with new Detective Sergeant Mary Mary, who was hoping for a posting with the celebrated detective Friedland Chymes, Jack works a case involving giants, beanstalks, foot soldiers from the Three Pigs, and a lending dispute that goes back decades. Jasper Fforde's 2005 spin-off from his Thursday Next series is a deadpan police procedural played entirely straight inside a nursery-rhyme universe.
What you might want to know about The Big Over Easy
The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
First in the Nursery Crime series. Detective Inspector Jack Spratt of the Nursery Crime Division catches the case of one H. Dumpty, found in pieces under a wall in Reading. His new sergeant Mary Mary is on her first case.
The Big Over Easy was written by Jasper Fforde and published in 2005. Fforde is also the author of the Thursday Next series and the Shades of Grey duology, all sharing his absurdist sensibility.
Jasper Fforde's Nursery Crime series has two books: The Big Over Easy and The Fourth Bear. Both are fairy-tale-detective comedies.
The Big Over Easy is a standalone novel by an unknown author, not part of a series.
The Big Over Easy is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.
