Who Could That Be At This Hour?

All the Wrong Questions Book 1: “Who Could That Be At This Hour?”

By Lemony Snicket

3 out of 5 covers

All the Wrong Questions is a new series that reportedly serves as a prequel to Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events, though there is little in this first book to mark how the two series may be linked.  “Who Could That Be At This Hour?” introduces the readers to Lemony Snicket, an detective-in-training apprenticed to the worst detective in the company as they travel the poor town of Stain’d-by-the-Sea to help recover the missing statue of the Bombinating Beast.

One of the links between the two series is evident in the author’s continued use of the same linguistic flourishes, such as defining difficult words.  That worked very well in the Victorian stylings of A Series of Unfortunate Events, where it allowed the narrator to highlight the plight of the Baudelaire orphans. But it does not mesh well with the straightforward, hard-boiled narration of the detective Lemony Snicket.  This results in a dissonance between the expectation and the execution of the story.

I would say that this dissonance exists only in the expectation of the reader, but it seems to extend to the author as well.  There is a struggle to find a balance between his expressionistic excesses and the type of story for about half the book.  Balance is eventually achieved and the author’s style improves through a series of ludicrous adventures until the story just comes to an end without any resolution.

As the first book in a series one cannot expect everything to be resolved.  But there should be a resolution that leads to more complications that would be explored in later volumes.  Instead all plot threads are left dangling.

Despite all the flaws, Lemony Snicket is an excellent narrator and the the winning grace of the book lies in the author’s whimsical use of language.