100 Years, 100 Creators – Part 7

Over a few posts, I’m choosing different creators or creative teams–novelist, composer, scriptwriter, comic book artist, etc–who have influenced or inspired me, and in most cases brought me a lot of enjoyment.

Favorite Fictional Heroes Countdown–Part 10 (#4-1)

And finally, we arrive at the end of our countdown to my favorite fictional heroes.  On this list of the final four, female characters finally outweigh the male, but only by the narrow margin of 2.0714 to 1.9286…

A Book Within a Book

In one of his Thursday Next series of books, Jasper Fforde had a plot where all the oral story characters – from nursery rhymes and myths and so on – were campaigning for equal rights as characters within classical literature.  The eventual solution?  Create a book in which they could all live and interact together, that could basically serve as their home.  The title of that book?  The Big Over Easy.  The punchline of this joke?  That The Big Over Easy is also a real book, one that Fforde had already written prior to the first Thursday Next story seeing the light of day.

Not in the form we have it, of course.  It was revised and changed in significant ways when he apparently dusted it off to publish it in the wake of his success with Thursday Next books.  But the core concept – a procedural detective story taking place in a world where nursery rhyme characters live and breathe…and die…alongside “normal” people has stayed the same.

Run, run as fast you can. You can’t catch me, I’m the Gingerbread Man!

Only in this case, the Gingerbread man is a two meter tall psychopathic murderer who enjoys pulling his victims arms off…and that’s just one plot element in Jasper Fforde’s The Fourth Bear.