The fourth installment in Jasper Fforde’s New York Times bestselling series follows literary detective Thursday Next on another adventure in her alternate reality of literature-obsessed England
The popularity of Jasper Fforde’s one-of-a-kind series of genre-bending blend of crime fiction, fantasy, and top-drawer literary entertainment builds with each new book. Now in the fourth installment, the resourceful literary detective Thursday Next returns to Swindon from the BookWorld accompanied by her son Friday and none other than the dithering Hamlet. But returning to SpecOps is no snap—as outlaw fictioner Yorrick Kaine plots for absolute power, the return of Swindon’s patron saint foretells doom, and, if that isn’t bad enough, The Merry Wives of Windsor is becoming entangled with Hamlet. Can Thursday find a Shakespeare clone to stop this hostile takeover? Can she vanquish Kaine and prevent the world from plunging into war? And will she ever find reliable child care? Find out in this totally original, action-packed romp, sure to be another escapist thrill for Jasper Fforde’s legions of fans. Thursday’s zany investigations continue with First Among Sequels. Look for the five other bestselling Thursday Next novels, including One of Our Thursdays is Missing and Jasper Fforde’s latest bestseller, The Woman Who Died A Lot. Visit jasperfforde.com for a ffull window into the Ffordian world!
The fourth installment in Jasper Fforde’s New York Times bestselling series follows literary detective Thursday Next on another adventure in her alternate reality of literature-obsessed England
The popularity of Jasper Fforde’s one-of-a-kind series of genre-bending blend of crime fiction, fantasy, and top-drawer literary entertainment builds with each new book. Now in the fourth installment, the resourceful literary detective Thursday Next returns to Swindon from the BookWorld accompanied by her son Friday and none other than the dithering Hamlet. But returning to SpecOps is no snap—as outlaw fictioner Yorrick Kaine plots for absolute power, the return of Swindon’s patron saint foretells doom, and, if that isn’t bad enough, The Merry Wives of Windsor is becoming entangled with Hamlet. Can Thursday find a Shakespeare clone to stop this hostile takeover? Can she vanquish Kaine and prevent the world from plunging into war? And will she ever find reliable child care? Find out in this totally original, action-packed romp, sure to be another escapist thrill for Jasper Fforde’s legions of fans. Thursday’s zany investigations continue with First Among Sequels. Look for the five other bestselling Thursday Next novels, including One of Our Thursdays is Missing and Jasper Fforde’s latest bestseller, The Woman Who Died A Lot. Visit jasperfforde.com for a ffull window into the Ffordian world!
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Overview
The fourth installment in Jasper Fforde’s New York Times bestselling series follows literary detective Thursday Next on another adventure in her alternate reality of literature-obsessed England
The popularity of Jasper Fforde’s one-of-a-kind series of genre-bending blend of crime fiction, fantasy, and top-drawer literary entertainment builds with each new book. Now in the fourth installment, the resourceful literary detective Thursday Next returns to Swindon from the BookWorld accompanied by her son Friday and none other than the dithering Hamlet. But returning to SpecOps is no snap—as outlaw fictioner Yorrick Kaine plots for absolute power, the return of Swindon’s patron saint foretells doom, and, if that isn’t bad enough, The Merry Wives of Windsor is becoming entangled with Hamlet. Can Thursday find a Shakespeare clone to stop this hostile takeover? Can she vanquish Kaine and prevent the world from plunging into war? And will she ever find reliable child care? Find out in this totally original, action-packed romp, sure to be another escapist thrill for Jasper Fforde’s legions of fans. Thursday’s zany investigations continue with First Among Sequels. Look for the five other bestselling Thursday Next novels, including One of Our Thursdays is Missing and Jasper Fforde’s latest bestseller, The Woman Who Died A Lot. Visit jasperfforde.com for a ffull window into the Ffordian world!
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780143035411 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Penguin Publishing Group |
| Publication date: | 07/26/2005 |
| Series: | Thursday Next Series , #4 |
| Edition description: | Reprint |
| Pages: | 416 |
| Sales rank: | 77,971 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.20(w) x 7.80(h) x 0.90(d) |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
Jasper Fforde traded a varied career in the film industry for staring vacantly out of the window and arranging words on a page. He lives and writes in Wales. The Eyre Affair was his first novel in the bestselling series of Thursday Next novels, which includes Lost in a Good Book, The Well of Lost Plots, Something Rotten, First Among Sequels, One of Our Thursdays is Missing, and The Woman Who Died A Lot. The series has more than one million copies (and counting) in print. He is also the author of The Big Over Easy and The Fourth Bear of the Nursery Crime series, Shades of Grey, and books for young readers, including The Last Dragonslayer. Visit jasperfforde.com.
Hometown:
Brecon, Powys, Wales, United KingdomDate of Birth:
January 11, 1961Place of Birth:
London, United KingdomEducation:
Left school at 18Read an Excerpt
A Cretan Minotaur in Nebraska
Jurisfiction is the name given to the policing agency inside books. Working with the intelligence-gathering capabilities of Text Grand Central, the many Prose Resource Operatives at Jurisfiction work tirelessly to maintain the continuity of the narrative within the pages of all the books ever written. Performing this sometimes thankless task, Jurisfiction agents live mostly on their wits as they attempt to reconcile the author’s original wishes and readers’ expectations against a strict and largely pointless set of bureaucratic guidelines laid down by the Council of Genres. I headed Jurisfiction for over two years and was always astounded by the variety of the work: one day I might be attempting to coax the impossibly shy Darcy from the toilets, and the next I would be thwarting the Martians’ latest attempt to invade Barnaby Rudge. It was challenging and full of bizarre twists. But when the peculiar and downright weird becomes commonplace, you begin to yearn for the banal.
—Thursday Next, The Jurisfiction Chronicles
The Minotaur had been causing trouble far in excess of his literary importance—first by escaping from the fantasy-genre prison book Sword of the Zenobians, then by leading us on a merry chase across most of fiction and thwarting all attempts to recapture him. The mythological half-man, half-bull son of Queen Pasiphaë of Crete had been sighted within Riders of the Purple Sage only a month after his escape. We were still keen on taking him alive at this point, so we had darted him with a small dose of slapstick. Theoretically, we needed only to track outbreaks of custard-pie-in-the-face routines and walking-into- lamppost gags within fiction to lead us to the cannibalistic man-beast. It was an experimental idea and, sadly, also a dismal failure. Aside from Lafeu’s celebrated mention of custard in All’s Well That Ends Well and the ludicrous four-wheeled-chaise sequence in Pickwick Papers, little was noticed. The slapstick either hadn’t been strong enough or had been diluted by the BookWorld’s natural disinclination to visual jokes.
In any event we were still searching for him two years later in the western genre, amongst the cattle drives that the Minotaur found most relaxing. And it was for this reason that Commander Bradshaw and I arrived at the top of page 73 of an obscure pulp from the thirties entitled Death at Double-X Ranch.
“What do you think, old girl?” asked Bradshaw, whose pith helmet and safari suit were ideally suited to the hot Nebraskan summer. He was shorter than I by almost a head but led age-wise by four decades; his sun-dried skin and snowy white mustache were a legacy of his many years in colonial African fiction: He had been the lead character in the twenty-three “Commander Bradshaw” novels, last published in 1932 and last read in 1963. Many characters in fiction define themselves by their popularity, but not Commander Bradshaw. Having spent an adventurous and entirely fictional life defending British East Africa against a host of unlikely foes and killing almost every animal it was possible to kill, he now enjoyed his retirement and was much in demand at Jurisfiction, where his fearlessness under fire and knowledge of the BookWorld made him one of the agency’s greatest assets.
He was pointing at a weathered board that told us the small township not more than half a mile ahead hailed by the optimistic name of Providence and had a population of 2,387.
I shielded my eyes against the sun and looked around. A carpet of sage stretched all the way to the mountains, less than five miles distant. The vegetation had a repetitive pattern that belied its fictional roots. The chaotic nature of the real world that gave us soft, undulating hills and random patterns of forest and hedges was replaced within fiction by a landscape that relied on ordered repetitions of the author’s initial description. In the make-believe world where I had made my home, a forest has only eight different trees, a beach five different pebbles, a sky twelve different clouds. A hedgerow repeats itself every eight feet, a mountain range every sixth peak. It hadn’t bothered me that much to begin with, but after two years living inside fiction, I had begun to yearn for a world where every tree and rock and hill and cloud has its own unique shape and identity. And the sunsets. I missed them most of all. Even the best-described ones couldn’t hold a candle to a real one. I yearned to witness once again the delicate hues of the sky as the sun dipped below the horizon. From red to orange, to pink, to blue, to navy, to black.
Bradshaw looked across at me and raised an eyebrow quizzically. As the Bellman—the head of Jurisfiction—I shouldn’t really be out on assignment at all, but I was never much of a desk jockey, and capturing the Minotaur was important. He had killed one of our own, and that made it unfinished business.
During the past week, we had searched unsuccessfully through six Civil War epics, three frontier stories, twenty-eight high-quality westerns and ninety-seven dubiously penned novellas before finding ourselves within Death at Double-X Ranch, right on the outer rim of what might be described as acceptably written prose. We had drawn a blank in every single book. No Minotaur, nor even the merest whiff of one, and believe me, they can whiff.
“A possibility?” asked Bradshaw, pointing at the PROVIDENCE sign.
“We’ll give it a try,” I replied, slipping on a pair of dark glasses and consulting my list of potential Minotaur hiding places. “If we draw a blank, we’ll stop for lunch before heading off into The Oklahoma Kid.”
Bradshaw nodded and opened the breech of the hunting rifle he was carrying and slipped in a cartridge. It was a conventional weapon, but loaded with unconventional ammunition. Our position as the policing agency within fiction gave us licensed access to abstract technology. One blast from the eraserhead in Bradshaw’s rifle and the Minotaur would be reduced to the building blocks of his fictional existence: text and a bluish mist—all that is left when the bonds that link text to meaning are severed. Charges of cruelty failed to have any meaning when at the last Beast Census there were over a million almost identical Minotaurs, all safely within the hundreds of books, graphic novels and urns that featured him. Ours was different—an escapee. A PageRunner.
As we walked closer, the sounds of a busy Nebraskan frontier town reached our ears. A new building was being erected, and the hammering of nails into lumber punctuated the clop of horses’ hooves, the clink of harnesses and the rumble of cartwheels on compacted earth. The metallic ring of the blacksmith’s hammer mixed with the distant tones of a choir from the clapboard church, and all about was the general conversational hubbub of busy townsfolk. We reached the corner by Eckley’s Livery Stables and peered cautiously down the main street.
Providence as we now saw it was happily enjoying the uninterrupted backstory, patiently awaiting the protagonist’s arrival in two pages’ time. Blundering into the main narrative thread and finding ourselves included within the story was not something we cared to do, and since the Minotaur avoided the primary story line for fear of discovery, we were likely to stumble across him only in places like this. But if for any reason the story did come anywhere near, I would be warned—I had a Narrative Proximity Device in my pocket that would sound an alarm if the thread came too close. We could hide ourselves until it passed by.
A horse trotted past as we stepped up onto the creaky decking that ran along in front of the saloon. I stopped Bradshaw when we got to the swinging doors as the town drunk was thrown out into the road. The bartender walked out after him, wiping his hands on a linen cloth.
“And don’t come back till you can pay your way!” he yelled, glancing at us both suspiciously.
I showed the barkeeper my Jurisfiction badge as Bradshaw kept a vigilant lookout. The whole western genre had far too many gunslingers for its own good; there had been some confusion over the numbers required on the order form when the genre was inaugurated. Working in westerns could sometimes entail up to twenty-nine gunfights an hour.
“Jurisfiction,” I told him. “This is Bradshaw, I’m Next. We’re looking for the Minotaur.”
The barkeeper stared at me coldly. “Think you’s in the wrong genre, pod’ner,” he said.
All characters or Generics within a book are graded A to D, one through ten. A-grades are the Gatsbys and Jane Eyres, D-grades the grunts who make up street scenes and crowded rooms. The barkeeper had lines, so he was probably a C-2. Smart enough to get answers from but not smart enough to have much character latitude.
“He might be using the alias Norman Johnson,” I went on, showing him a photo. “Tall, body of a man, head of a bull, likes to eat people?”
“Can’t help you,” he said, shaking his head slowly as he peered at the photo.
“How about any outbreaks of slapstick?” asked Bradshaw. “Boxing glove popping out of a box, sixteen-ton weights dropping on people, that sort of thing?”
“Ain’t seen no weights droppin’ on nobody,” laughed the barkeeper, “but I hear tell the sheriff got hit in the face with a frying pan last Toosday.”
Bradshaw and I exchanged glances.
“Where do we find the sheriff?” I asked.
We followed the barkeeper’s directions and walked along the wooden decking past a barbershop and two grizzled prospectors who were talking animatedly in authentic frontier gibberish. I stopped Bradshaw when we got to an alleyway. There was a gunfight in progress. Or at least, there would have been a gunfight had not some dispute arisen over the times allocated for their respective showdowns. Both sets of gunmen—two dressed in light-colored clothes, two in dark—with low-slung gun belts decorated with rows of shiny cartridges—were arguing over their gunfight time slots as two identical ladyfolk looked on anxiously. The town’s mayor intervened and told them that if there were any more arguments, they would both lose their slot times and would have to come back tomorrow, so they reluctantly agreed to toss a coin. The winners of the toss scampered into the main street as everyone dutifully ran for cover. They squared up to one another, hands hovering over their Colt .45s at twenty paces. There was a flurry of action, two loud detonations, and then the gunman in black hit the dirt while the victor looked on grimly, his opponent’s shot having dramatically only removed his hat. His lady rushed up to hug him as he reholstered his revolver with a flourish.
“What a load of tripe,” muttered Bradshaw. “The real West wasn’t like this!”
Death at Double-X Ranch was set in 1875 and written in 1908. Close enough to be historically accurate, you would have thought, but no. Most westerns tended to show a glamorized version of the Old West that hadn’t really existed. In the real West, a gunfight was a rarity, hitting someone with a short-barreled Colt .45 at anything other than point-blank range a virtual impossibility. The 1870s gunpowder generated a huge amount of smoke; two shots in a crowded bar and you would be coughing—and almost blind.
“That’s not the point,” I replied as the dead gunslinger was dragged away. “Legend is always far more readable, and don’t forget we’re in pulp at present—poor prose always outnumbers good prose, and it would be too much to hope that our bullish friend would be hiding out in Zane Grey or Owen Wister.”
We continued on past the Majestic Hotel as a stagecoach rumbled by in a cloud of dust, the driver cracking his long whip above the horses’ heads.
“Over there,” said Bradshaw, pointing at a building opposite that differentiated itself from the rest of the clapboard town by being made of brick. It had SHERIFF painted above the door, and we walked quickly across the road, our nonwestern garb somewhat out of place amongst the long dresses, bonnets and breeches, jackets, dusters, vests, gun belts and bootlace ties. Only permanently billeted Jurisfiction officers troubled to dress up, and many of the agents actively policing the westerns are characters from the books they patrol—so they don’t need to dress up anyway.
We knocked and entered. It was dark inside after the bright exterior, and we blinked for few moments as we accustomed ourselves to the gloom. On the wall to our right was a notice board liberally covered with wanted posters—pertaining not only to Nebraska but also to the BookWorld in general; a yellowed example offered three hundred dollars for information leading to the whereabouts of Big Martin. Below this was a chipped enameled coffeepot sitting atop a cast-iron stove, and next to the wall to the left were a gun cabinet and a tabby cat sprawled upon a large bureau. The far wall was the barred frontage to the cells, one of which held a drunk fast asleep and snoring loudly on a bunk bed. In the middle of the room was a large desk that was stacked high with paperwork— circulars from the Nebraska State Legislature, a few Council of Genres Narrative Law amendments, a Campanology Society newsletter and a Sears, Roebuck catalog open to the “fancy goods” section. Also on the desk were a pair of worn leather boots, and inside these were a pair of feet, attached in turn to the sheriff. His clothes were predominantly black and could have done with a good wash. A tin star was pinned to his vest, and all we could see of his face were the ends of a large gray mustache that poked out from beneath his downturned Stetson. He, too, was fast asleep, and balanced precariously on the rear two legs of a chair that creaked as he snored.
“Sheriff?”
No answer.
“SHERIFF!”
He awoke with a start, began to get up, overbalanced and tipped over backwards. He crashed heavily on the floor and knocked against the bureau, which just happened to have a jug of water resting upon it. The jug overbalanced as well, and its contents drenched the sheriff, who roared with shock. The noise up- set the cat, who awoke with a cry and leapt up the curtains, which collapsed with a crash on the cast-iron stove, spilling the coffee and setting fire to the tinder-dry linen drapes. I ran to put it out and knocked against the desk, dislodging the lawman’s loaded revolver, which fell to the floor, discharging a single shot, which cut the cord of a stuffed moose’s head, which fell upon Bradshaw. So there were the three of us: me trying to put out the fire, the sheriff covered in water and Bradshaw walking into furniture as he tried to get the moose’s head off him. It was precisely what we were looking for: an outbreak of unconstrained and wholly inappropriate slapstick.
“Sheriff, I’m so sorry about this,” I muttered apologetically, having doused the fire, demoosed Bradshaw and helped a very damp lawman to his feet. He was over six foot tall, and had a weather-beaten face and deep blue eyes. I produced my badge. “Thursday Next, head of Jurisfiction. This is my partner, Commander Bradshaw.” The sheriff relaxed and even managed a thin smile.
“Thought you was more of them Baxters,” he said, brushing himself down and drying his hair with a “Cathouses of Dawson City” tea cloth. “I’ll be mighty glad you’re not. Jurisfiction, hey? Ain’t seen none of youse around these parts for longer then I care to remember—quit it, Howell.”
The drunk, Howell, had awoken and was demanding a tipple “to set him straight.”
“We’re looking for the Minotaur,” I explained, showing the sheriff the photograph.
He rubbed his stubble thoughtfully and shook his head. “Don’t recall ever seeing this critter, missy Next.”
“We have reason to believe he passed through your office not long ago—he’s been marked with slapstick.”
“Ah!” said the sheriff. “I was a-wonderin’ ’bout all that. Me and Howell here have been trippin’ and a- stumblin’ for a while now—ain’t we, Howell?”
“You’re darn tootin’,” said the drunk.
“He could be in disguise and operating under an alias,” I ventured. “Does the name Norman Johnson mean anything to you?”
“Can’t say it does, missy. We have twenty-six Johnsons here, but all are C-7s—not ’portant ’nuff to have fust names.”
I sketched a Stetson onto the photograph of the Minotaur, then a duster, vest and gun belt.
“Oh!” said the sheriff with a sudden look of recognition. “That Mr. Johnson.”
“You know where he is?”
“Sure do. Had him in jail only last week on charges of eatin’ a cattle rustler.”
“What happened?”
“Paid his bail and wuz released. Ain’t nothing in the Nebraska statutes that says you can’t eat rustlers. One moment.”
There had been a shot outside, followed by several yells from startled townsfolk. The sheriff checked his Colt, opened the door and walked out. Alone on the street and facing him was a young man with an earnest expression, hand quivering around his gun, the elegantly tooled holster of which I noticed had been tied down—a sure sign of yet another potential gunfight.
“Go home, Abe!” called out the sheriff. “Today’s not a good day for dyin’.”
“You killed my pappy,” said the youth, “and my pappy’s pappy. And his pappy’s pappy. And my brothers Jethro, Hank, Hoss, Red, Peregrine, Marsh, Junior, Dizzy, Luke, Peregrine, George an’ all the others. I’m callin’ you out, lawman.”
“You said Peregrine twice.”
“He wuz special.”
“Abel Baxter,” whispered the sheriff out of the corner of his mouth, “one of them Baxter boys. They turn up regular as clockwork, and I kill ’em same ways as regular.”
“How many have you killed?” I whispered back.
“Last count, ’bout sixty. Go home, Abe, I won’t tell yer again!”
The youth caught sight of Bradshaw and me and said, “New deputies, Sheriff? Yer gonna need ’em!”
And it was then we saw that Abel Baxter wasn’t alone. Step- ping out from the stables opposite were four disreputable-looking characters. I frowned. They seemed somehow out of place in Death at Double-X Ranch. For a start, none of them wore black, nor did they have tooled leather double gun belts with nickel-plated revolvers. Their spurs didn’t clink as they walked, and their holsters were plain and worn high on the hip—the weapon these men had chosen was a Winchester rifle. I noticed with a shudder that one of the men had a button missing on his frayed vest and the sole on the toe of his boot had come adrift. Flies buzzed around the men’s unwashed and grimy faces, and sweat had stained their hats halfway to the crown. These weren’t C-2 generic gunfighters from pulp, but well described A-9s from a novel of high descriptive quality—and if they could shoot as well as they had been realized by the author, we were in trouble.
The sheriff sensed it, too.
“Where yo’ friends from, Abe?”
One of the men hooked his Winchester into the crook of his arm and answered in a low southern drawl, “Mr. Johnson sent us.”
And they opened fire. No waiting, no drama, no narrative pace. Bradshaw and I had already begun to move—squaring up in front of a gunman with a rifle might seem terribly macho, but for survival purposes it was a nonstarter. Sadly, the sheriff didn’t realize this until it was too late. If he had survived until page 164 as he was meant to, he would have taken a slug, rolled twice in the dust after a two-page buildup and lived long enough to say a pithy final good-bye to his sweetheart, who cradled him in his bloodless dying moments. Not to be. Realistic violent death was to make an unwelcome entry into Death at Double-X Ranch. The heavy lead shot entered the sheriff’s chest and came out the other side, leaving an exit wound the size of a saucer. He collapsed inelegantly onto his face and lay perfectly still, one arm sprawled outwards in a manner unattainable in life and the other hooked beneath him. He didn’t collapse flat either. He ended up bent over on his knees with his backside in the air.
The gunmen stopped firing as soon as there was no target—but Bradshaw, his hunting instincts alerted, had already drawn a bead... the gunman disintegrated midstride into a brief chysanthemum of text that scattered across the main street.... on the sherriff’s killer and fired. There was an almighty detonation, a brief flash and a large cloud of smoke. The eraserhead hit home, and the gunman disintegrated midstride into a brief chysanthemum of text that scattered across the main street, the meaning of the words billowing out into a blue haze that hung near the ground for a moment or two before evaporating.
“What are you doing?” I asked, annoyed at his impetuosity.
“Him or us, Thursday,” replied Bradshaw grimly, pulling the lever down on his Martini-Henry to reload, “him or us.”
“Did you see how much text he was composed of?” I replied angrily. “He was almost a paragraph long. Only featured characters get that kind of description—somewhere there’s going to be a book one character short!”
“But,” replied Bradshaw in an aggrieved tone, “I didn’t know that before I shot him, now did I?”
I shook my head. Perhaps Bradshaw hadn’t noticed the missing button, the sweat stains and the battered shoes, but I had. Erasure of a featured part meant more paperwork than I really wanted to deal with. From Form F36/34 (Discharge of an Eraserhead) and Form B9/32 (Replacement of Featured Part) to Form P13/36 (Narrative Damage Assessment), I could be bogged down for two whole days. I had thought bureaucracy was bad in the real world, but here in the paper world, it was everything.
“So what do we do?” asked Bradshaw. “Ask politely for them to surrender?”
“I’m thinking,” I replied, pulling out my footnoterphone and pressing the button marked CAT. In fiction the commonest form of communication was by footnote, but way out here ...
“Blast!” I muttered again. “No signal.”
“Nearest repeater station is in The Virginian,” observed Bradshaw as he replaced the spent cartridge and closed the breech before peering outside, “and we can’t bookjump direct from pulp to classic.”
He was right. We had been crossing from book to book for almost six days, and although we could escape in an emergency, such a course of action would give the Minotaur more than enough time to escape. Things weren’t good, but they weren’t bad either—yet.
“Hey!” I yelled from the sheriff’s office. “We want to talk!”
“Is that a fact?” came a clear voice from outside. “Mr. Johnson says he’s all done talkin’—’less you be in mind to offer amnesty.”
“We can talk about that!” I replied.
There was a beeping noise from my pocket.
“Blast,” I mumbled again, consulting the Narrative Proximity Device. “Bradshaw, we’ve got a story thread inbound from the East, two hundred and fifty yards and closing. Page 74, line 6.”
Bradshaw quickly opened his copy of Death at Double-X Ranch and ran a finger along the line “McNeil rode into the town of Providence, Nebraska, with fifty cents in his pocket and murder on his mind....”
I cautiously peered out the window. Sure enough, a cowboy on a bay horse was riding slowly into town. Strictly speaking, it didn’t matter if we changed the story a little, as the novella had been read only sixteen times in the past ten years, but the code by which we worked was fairly unequivocal. “Keep the story as the author intended!” was a phrase bashed into me early on during my training. I had broken it once and would pay the consequences—I didn’t want to do it again.
“I need to speak to Mr. Johnson,” I yelled, keeping an eye on McNeil, who was still some way distant.
“No one speaks to Mr. Johnson ’less Mr. Johnson says so,” replied the voice, “but if you’ll be offerin’ an amnesty, he’ll take it and promise not to eat no more people.”
“Was that a double negative?” whispered Bradshaw with disdain. “I do so hate them.”
“No deal unless I meet Mr. Johnson first!” I yelled back.
“Then there’s no deal!” came the reply.
I looked out again and saw three more gunmen appear. The Minotaur had clearly made a lot of friends during his stay in the western genre.
“We need backup,” I murmured.
Bradshaw clearly thought the same. He opened his TravelBook and pulled out something that looked a little like a flare gun. This was a TextMarker, which could be used to signal to other Jurisfiction agents. The TravelBook was dimensionally ambivalent; the device was actually larger than the book that contained it.
“Jurisfiction knows we’re in western pulp; they just don’t know where. I’ll send them a signal.”
He dialed in the sort of TextMarker he was going to place, using a knob on the back of the gun, then moved to the door, aimed the marker into the air and fired. There was a dull thud, and the projectile soared into the sky. It exploded noiselessly high above us, and for an instant I could see the text of the page in a light gray against the blue of the sky. The words were back to front, of course, and as I looked at Bradshaw’s copy of Death at Double-X Ranch, I noticed that the written word “ProVIDence” had been partially capitalized. Help would soon arrive—a show of force would deal with the gunmen. The problem was, would the Minotaur make a run for it or fight it out to the end?
“Purty fireworks don’t scare us, missy,” said the voice again. “You comin’ out, or do we-uns have to come in and get yer?”
I looked across at Bradshaw, who was smiling. “What?”
“This is all quite a caper, don’t you think?” said the Commander, chuckling like a schoolboy who had just been caught stealing apples. “Much more fun than hunting elephant, wrestling lions to the ground and returning tribal knickknacks stolen by unscrupulous foreigners.”
“I used to think so,” I said under my breath. Two years of assignments like these had been enjoyable and challenging, but not without their moments of terror, uncertainty and panic—and I had a two-year-old son who needed more attention than I could give him. The pressure of running Jurisfiction had been building for a long time now, and I needed a break in the real world—a long one. I had felt it about six months before, just after the adventure that came to be known as the Great Samuel Pepys Fiasco, but had shrugged it off. Now the feeling was back—and stronger.
A low, deep rumble began somewhere overhead. The windows rattled in their frames, and dust fell from the rafters. A crack opened up in the plaster, and a cup vibrated off the table to break on the floor. One of the windows shattered, and a shadow fell across the street. The deep rumble grew in volume, drowned out the Narrative Proximity Device that was wailing plaintively, then became so loud it didn’t seem like a sound at all—just a vibration that shook the sheriff’s office so strongly my sight blurred. Then, as the clock fell from the wall and smashed into pieces, I realized what was going on.
“Oh... no!” I howled with annoyance as the noise waned to a dull roar. “Talk about using a sledgehammer to crack a nut!”
“Emperor Zhark?” queried Bradshaw.
“Who else would dare pilot a Zharkian battle cruiser into western pulp?”
We looked outside as the vast spaceship passed overhead, its vectored thrusters swiveling downwards with a hot rush of concentrated power that blew up a gale of dust and debris and set the livery stables on fire. The huge bulk of the battle cruiser hovered for a moment as the landing gear unfolded, then made a delicate touchdown—right on top of McNeil and his horse, who were squashed to the thickness of a ha’penny.
My shoulders sagged as I watched my paperwork increase exponentially. The townsfolk ran around in panic and horses bolted as the A-7 gunmen fired pointlessly at the ship’s armored hull. Within a few moments, the interstellar battle cruiser had disgorged a small army of foot soldiers carrying the very latest Zharkian weaponry. I groaned. It was not unusual for the Emperor to go overboard at moments like this. Undisputed villain of the eight Emperor Zhark books, the most feared tyrannical god-emperor of the known galaxy just didn’t seem to comprehend the meaning of restraint.
In a few minutes, it was all over. The A-7s had either been killed or escaped to their own books, and the Zharkian Marine Corps had been dispatched to find the Minotaur. I could have saved them the trouble. He would be long gone. The A-7s and McNeil would have to be sourced and replaced, the whole book rejigged to remove the twenty-sixth-century battle cruiser that had arrived uninvited into 1875 Nebraska. It was a flagrant breach of the Anti-Cross-Genre Code that we attempted to uphold within fiction. I wouldn’t have minded so much if this was an isolated incident, but Zhark did this too often to be ignored. I could hardly control myself as the Emperor descended from his starship with an odd entourage of aliens and Mrs. Tiggy-winkle, who also worked for Jurisfiction.
“What the hell do you think you’re playing at?!?”
“Oh!” said the Emperor, taken aback at my annoyance. “I thought you’d be pleased to see us!”
“The situation was bad, but not irredeemable,” I told him, sweeping my arm in the direction of the town. “Now look what you’ve done!”
He looked around. The confused townsfolk had started to emerge from the remains of the buildings. Nothing so odd as this had happened in a western since an alien brainsucker had escaped from SF and been caught inside Wild Horse Mesa.
“You do this to me every time! Have you no conception of stealth and subtlety?”
“Not really,” said the Emperor, looking at his hands nervously. “Sorry.”
His alien entourage, not wanting to hang around in case they also got an earful, walked, slimed or hovered back into Zhark’s ship.
“You sent a TextMarker—”
“So what if we did? Can’t you enter a book without destroying everything in sight?”
“Steady on, Thursday,” said Bradshaw, laying a calming hand on my arm. “We did ask for assistance, and if old Zharky here was the closest, you can’t blame him for wanting to help. After all, when you consider that he usually lays waste to entire galaxies, torching just the town of ProVIDence and not the whole of Nebraska was actually quite an achievement ...” His voice trailed off before he added, “... for him.”
“AHHH!” I yelled in frustration, holding my head. “Sometimes I think I’m—”
I stopped. I lost my temper now and again, but rarely with my colleagues, and when that happens, things are getting bad. When I started this job, it was great fun, as it still was to Bradshaw. But just lately the enjoyment had waned. It was no good. I’d had enough. I needed to go home.
“Thursday?” asked Mrs. Tiggy-winkle, concerned by my sudden silence. “Are you okay?”
She came too close and spined me with one of her quills. I yelped and rubbed my arm while she jumped back and hid a blush. Six-foot-high hedgehogs have their own brand of etiquette.
“I’m fine,” I replied, dusting myself down. “It’s just that things have a way of...well, spiraling out of control.”
“What do you mean?”
“What do I mean? What do I mean? Well, this morning I was tracking a mythological beast using a trail of custard-pie incidents across the Old West, and this afternoon a battle cruiser from the twenty-sixth century lands in ProVIDence, Nebraska. Doesn’t that sound sort of crazy?”
“This is fiction,” replied Zhark in all innocence. “Odd things are meant to happen.”
“Not to me,” I said with finality. “I want to see some sort of semblance of...of reality in my life.”
“Reality?” echoed Mrs. Tiggy-winkle. “You mean a place where hedgehogs don’t talk or do washing?”
“But who’ll run Jurisfiction?” demanded the Emperor. “You were the best we ever had!”
I shook my head, threw up my hands and walked to where the ground was peppered with the A-7 gunman’s text. I picked up a D and turned it over in my hands.
“Please reconsider,” said Commander Bradshaw, who had followed me. “I think you’ll find, old girl, that reality is much overrated.”
“Not overrated enough, Bradshaw,” I replied with a shrug. “Sometimes the top job isn’t the easiest one.”
“Uneasy lies the head that wears the crown,” murmured Bradshaw, who probably understood me better than most. He and his wife were the best friends I had in the BookWorld; Mrs. Bradshaw and my son were almost inseparable.
“I knew you wouldn’t stay for good,” continued Bradshaw, lowering his voice so the others didn’t hear. “When will you go?”
I shrugged. “Soon as I can. Tomorrow.”
I looked around at the destruction that Zhark had wrought upon Death at Double-X Ranch. There would be a lot of clearing up, a mountain of paperwork—and there might be the possibility of disciplinary action if the Council of Genres got wind of what had happened.
“I suppose I should complete the paperwork on this debacle first,” I said slowly. “Let’s say three days.” “You promised to stand in for Joan of Arc while she attended a martyrs’ refresher course,” added Mrs. Tiggy-winkle, who had tiptoed closer.
I’d forgotten about that. “A week, then. I’ll be off in a week.”
We all stood in silence, I pondering my return to Swindon and all of them considering the consequences of my departure— except Emperor Zhark, who was probably thinking about invading the planet Thraal, for fun.
“Your mind is made up?” asked Bradshaw. I nodded slowly. There were other reasons for me to return to the real world, more pressing than Zhark’s gung ho lunacy. I had a husband who didn’t exist and a son who couldn’t spend his life cocooned inside books. I had retreated into the old Thursday, the one who preferred the black-and-white certainties of policing fiction to the ambiguous midtone grays of emotion.
“Yes, my mind’s made up,” I said, smiling. I looked at Bradshaw, the Emperor and Mrs. Tiggy-winkle. For all their faults, I’d enjoyed working with them. It hadn’t been all bad. Whilst at Jurisfiction I had seen and done things I wouldn’t have believed. I’d watched grammasites in flight over the pleasure domes of Xanadu, felt the strangeness of listeners glittering on the dark stair. I had cantered bareback on unicorns through the leafy forests of Zenobia and played chess with Ozymandias, the King of Kings. I had flown with Biggles on the Western Front, locked cutlasses with Long John Silver and explored the path not taken to walk upon England’s mountains green. But despite all these moments of wonder and delight, my heart belonged back home in Swindon and to a man named Landen Parke-Laine. He was my husband, the father of my son; he didn’t exist, and I loved him.
Table of Contents
What People are Saying About This
"It’s easy to be delighted by a writer who loves books so madly." —The New York Times
"Impressive, and arguably Fforde’s best work to date." —The Denver Post
Reading Group Guide
INTRODUCTION TO SOMETHING ROTTEN
With her Lorem Ipsum-spouting son, Friday, in tow, Thursday returns to her Swindon home to resume her quest to reactualize her husband, Landen Parke-Laine. As a final favor to her Jurisfiction colleagues, Thursday also escorts Shakespeare's Hamlet on a public relations field trip to the real world so he can ponder why he has been misrepresented as a "ditherer."
Much has changed in Swindon since she left—the Goliath Corporation has branched out from corporate domination into religious domination, rogue book character Yorrick Kaine has mysteriously risen to power as right-wing chancellor of England, and thirteenth-century saints are resurrecting themselves all over the country. Swindon's very own patron saint, the foulmouthed St. Zvlkx, returns to Swindon in front of a shopping center just as he predicted in his Book of Revealments. St. Zvlkx's uncannily precise Revealments also predict that the downfall of the mighty Goliath corporation is inextricably linked to a seemingly impossible Swindon Mallets win at the upcoming SuperHoop championship.
Upon her return, Thursday finds herself at the wrong end of a sniper's rifle. Her would-be assassin turns out to be a deadly hitwoman who goes by the name the Windowmaker and also happens to be her good friend Spike's wife. Thursday suspects that Yorrick Kaine has contracted for the Windowmaker's services, because Thursday is one of the few people in the real world who can reveal his true identity and deport him back to the BookWorld. Kaine seems to have the entire country under his spell, and even Thursday finds herself being charmed into confusion by his unnatural charisma. Kaine and his conniving pals at Goliath will stop at nothing to make sure St. Zvlkx's prediction doesn't come true. As the octogenarian President of England's death draws near, Thursday must find a way to take Yorrick Kaine back to fiction before the Windowmaker takes her out of action.
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
Something Rotten
- After two years of being head of Jurisfiction, Thursday decides that she needs to return to the real world. What are her reasons for returning to the real world? What does the real world have to offer her that the BookWorld does not?
- Is Hamlet a "ditherer"? Is he the most indecisive character in Shakespeare? Why do people find him so fascinating? What are his "inner motivations"?
- Thursdsay explains the imaginotransference technology of books to Hamlet by saying, "Well, each interpretation of an event, setting, or character is unique to each of those who read it because they clothe the author's description with the memory of their own experiences." Do you agree with this statement? What characteristics do the best novels have in common? Is the readers' ability to connect the characters to their personal lives the most important aspect?
- In this alternate reality, the politically ambitious Yorrick Kaine chooses Denmark as the totally improbable scapegoat for all of England's ailments, in order to deflect attention from the real issues plaguing the country. Politicians have faux debates on a show called Evade the Question Time. Is this satirical bit an overly cynical view of government or a social commentary based on truth?
- Why does Granny Next decide to serve her sentence living in young Thursday's time? Without her help, how would Thursday's life have played out differently?
- Why do Stig and his Neanderthal comrades agree to play for the Swindon Mallets? What does the Neanderthal community have at stake? Why is this important to them?
- Goliath has become a corporate religion, complete with professional apologists. Is this more or less frightening than its previous incarnation as a multinational, omnipotent corporation? What does Goliath gain from re-actualizing Landen Parke-Laine, Thursday's previously eradicated husband?
- In a character battle such as the one that Kaine and the Cat formerly known as Cheshire fight, the battling possibilities are endless. What characters would you call upon to fight for you?
- Though Thursday and her father are in very different lines of work—he's a ChronoGuard officer and she's a Jurisfiction officer—both police the progression of time and fiction in order to preserve the integrity of the outcome. Are time and fiction linear? What are the similarities and differences between their two lines of work?
- Does Thursday have the right to escape death by trading places with Cindy? Is there such a thing as fate in Thursday's world, a world in which ChronoGuard officers police history and the almost dead may escape "the way station of Southside"?
ABOUT JASPER FFORDE
Jasper Fforde is the author of The Eyre Affair, Lost in a Good Book, (both from Penguin) and The Well of Lost Plots (Viking), the first three books in the Thursday Next fantasy/detective series. He lives in Wales
AN INTERVIEW WITH JASPER FFORDE
Thursday Next seems to be descended from a long line of British crime stoppers like Sherlock Holmes and James Bond, and her name is a clear homage to G. K. Chesterton's classic The Man Who Was Thursday. Who are your favorite fictional detectives and how, if at all, did they shape Thursday Next?
Actually, the name wasn't drawn from Chesterton at all; neither, as a reader suggested, from Paris's line in Romeo and Juliet:
Paris: What may be must be this Thursday next.
Juliet: What must be must be.
Friar Lawrence: Now there's a certain text.
Much as I would like to claim either as the truth, sadly not. The real influence was much closer to home and infinitely more mundane. My mother used to refer to days in the future in this manner: "Wednesday week, Tuesday next," etc., and I just liked the "tum-te-tum" internal rhythm of "Thursday Next." It intrigued me, too. What kind of woman would have a name like this? I'm not sure which detective Thursday is drawn from—perhaps all of them. My favorite detective was always Miss Marple, and perhaps Thursday has Jane's strict adherence to duty and the truth. There is undeniably a bit of James Bond, Sam Spade, and Richard Hannay about her, although as character models I have always drawn on women aviators from the golden age of aviation, as these extraordinary characters (Bennett, Earhart, Markham, Coleman, Johnson) had not just a great passion and zest for life and adventure but also an overriding sense of purpose. In a word, Spirit.
You worked in the film industry for nineteen years before becoming a full-time writer. In our society, film is a more popular and lucrative medium than books, but in Thursday's world, the novel is king. Having had a finger in each pie, would you prefer to live in Thursday's world or ours? Did your work in film affect the narrative of the novel?
I think I'd prefer to live in Thursday's world—and I do, six months a year when I'm writing the books. Mind you, if I were a writer in Thursday's world I'd be writing about a heroine who doesn't do extraordinary things at all and lives in a UK where not much happens. And when I was asked in THAT world which world I'd prefer to be in, I'd say... Oh, lawks, we've entered a sort of Nextian "closed-loop perpetual opposing answer paradox." Better go to the next question. Yes, film did most definitely affect the narrative. Because I have been educated in film grammar, I tend to see the books as visual stories first and foremost, and describe the story as I see it unfolding. That isn't to say I don't play a lot with book grammar, too, but I can't shrug off my visual origins. Mind you, I would contend that reading is a far more visual medium than film, as the readers have to generate all of the images themselves; all I do is offer up a few mnemonic signposts. I am always astounded by the number of readers who can describe the Nextian world in profound detail—perhaps this is the reason why movies-from-books tend to be such a huge disappointment.
What are your favorite classic novels?
Jane Eyre was probably my favorite of that type of "literary" classic. Dickens is great fun, too, although to be honest I still prefer Carroll's Alice in Wonderland for its high-quality nonsense virtuosity and Jerome's Three Men in a Boat for its warmth, observation, and humor. Both were written in Victorian times and are classics—just a different sort. Swift's Gulliver's Travelsis another firm favorite, as is Grossmith's Diary of a Nobody.
Why did you choose Jane Eyre for Thursday's first jump into literature?
Three reasons. First, it's a great book. The characters of Jane Eyre, Rochester, Mrs. Fairfax, Grace Poole, Bertha, and Pilot the dog are all great fun to subvert in the name of Nextian entertainment. Second, it is well known, even 150 years after publication. For The Eyre Affair to have any resonance the featured novel had to be familiar and respected. If potential readers of my book haven't read Jane Eyre they might have seen the film, and if they haven't done either, they might still know that Jane is a heroine of Victorian romantic fiction. I don't know of many other books that can do this. Third, it's in the public domain. I could do pretty much what I want and not have to worry about copyright problems—given the premise of the novel, something that had to remain a consideration!
Your novels have been described as a sort of Harry Potter series for adults. Why do you think fantasy and magic tales are enjoying so much popularity right now? Why do adults find the stories so satisfying?
I'm not really sure why fantasy is popular right now, but the tastes and moods of the book-reading public do tend to move around, so in a few years we might all be reading "Squid Action/Adventure" or "Western Accountancy," so who knows. Mind you, I've never been one to make such a huge distinction between children and adults—I have remained consistently suspicious of people who describe themselves as "adults" from a very early age. We all enjoy stories—it is a linking factor between all humans everywhere, that strange and uncontrollable urge to ask, "Yes, but what happens next?" Perhaps fantasy offers imaginative escapism more than other genres. I was very happy when I learned that Harry Potter was being sold in "plain covers" in the UK so adults could read it on the train without feeling embarrassed. "Ah," thinks I, "there is hope yet!"
The Tie-seller in Victoria says, "There are two schools of thought about the resilience of time. The first is that time is highly volatile, with every small event altering the possible outcome of the earth's future. The other view is that time is rigid, and no matter how hard you try, it will always spring back toward a determined present." Which do you think is more likely?
From a narrative point of view, the notion of time somehow wanting to keep on a predetermined course is far preferable. It makes the ChronoGuard's job that much harder. It's not easy to change things, as Colonel Next often finds out. Personally, I think time is highly volatile—and out there for us to change, if we so wish it. Most of the time we don't. Our notions of self-determination are, on the whole, something of a myth. We are governed almost exclusively by our own peculiar habits, which makes those who rail against them that much more remarkable.
If time travel were a reality, do you think it would be possible for people to visit other eras responsibly?
Of course not! When have humans ever behaved responsibly? That's not to say I wouldn't be first in the queue, but mankind is far too flawed to resist wanting to use this new technology to deal with other problems, such as radioactive waste disposal or something. Given mankind's record so far, it wouldn't be long before the criminal gangs moved in to steal items from the past to sell in the future. The ChronoGuard refer to this sort of crime as "Retrosnatch," although the upside of this is that you can always catch the person red-handed after the event. Before the event. During the event.
If you could travel in time, when would you want to visit and why?
Good question! The choice is endless. Since I'm a fan of nineteenth-century history, one of the times I would visit would be during a conversation that took place between Nelson and Wellington in September 1805. It was the only time these two historical giants met. Failing that, the day Isambard Kingdom Brunel launched his gargantuan steamship the Great Eastern into the Thames or, further back still, 65 million years ago when an asteroid hit the earth—must have been quite a light show. Closer to home, I suppose I'd like to revisit the first time I learned to ride a bicycle without stabilizers—a more joyous feeling of fulfillment, freedom, and attainment could only be equaled by the time one learns to walk or read.
Acheron Hades may be the third most evil man on earth, but he's also a charming, seductive adversary with some of the best lines in the book. If Acheron Hades is only the third most evil man on earth, who are second and first, and will Thursday get to face them?
The "third most evil man" device was to hint at a far bigger world beyond the covers of the book. Since I made this rash claim many people have asked the same question, and I can reveal that the Hades family comprises five boys—Acheron, Styx, Phlegethon, Cocytus, and Lethe—and the only girl, Aornis. Described once by Vlad the Impaler as "unspeakably repellent," the Hades family drew strength from deviancy and committing every sort of debased horror that they could—some with panache, some with halfhearted seriousness, others with a sort of relaxed insouciance about the whole thing. Lethe, the "white sheep" of the family, was hardly cruel at all—but the others more than made up for him.
Acheron Hades isn't the only personification of evil in your novels. Just as evil, and much more insidious, is the English government's indentured servitude to the Goliath Corporation and Goliath's willingness to sacrifice human lives for wartime financial gain. Why did you choose a corporation as the other major villain in the story? Do you think a relationship like the one between England's government and the Goliath Corporation could exist in real life?
I like the Orwellian feel of Goliath—oppressive and menacing in the background. As a satirical tool, its use is boundless. I can highlight the daftness of corporations and governments quite easily within its boundaries. Goliath is insidious, but what I like about it most is that it is entirely shameless in what it does—and that no one in Thursday's world (except perhaps Thursday herself) seems to think there is anything wrong with it. Perhaps the fun with Goliath is not just about corporations per se, but how we react to them.
The Eyre Affair, Lost in a Good Book, and The Well of Lost Plots have all been great successes, and I'm sure your fans will make a success of their follow-up, Something Rotten. If you could retire now and live in any book, which book would you like to spend the rest of your days living in?
An all-book pass to the P. G. Wodehouse series would be admirable. Afternoon teas, a succession of dotty aunts, impostors at Blandings Castle—what could be better or more amusing?
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