Children's Detective Novel: Lemony Snicket's "All The Wrong Questions"

MINISTERUL EDUCAŢIEI NAȚIONALE
UNIVERSITATEA TEHNICĂ DIN CLUJ NAPOCA

CENTRUL UNIVERSITAR NORD BAIA MARE
FACULTATEA DE LITERE
Specializarea: Masteratul de Literatură engleză pentru copii si tineret
DISERTAȚIE DE MASTERAT
LEMONY SNICKET’ S SERIES

“ALL THE W RONG QUESTIONS "
masterand coordonator ştiinţific
Oana-Camelia Roman conf.dr. Adrian Oţoiu
2019
Oana-Camelia Roman Lemony Snicket’s series “All the Wrong Questions" 2
CONTENTS
CONTENTS ........................................................................ 2
ARGUMENT ....................................................................... 3
Chapter I: Children’s Literature through Time .................. 5

1. Introduction...................................................................................................... 5
1.1. The Power and Evolution of Children’s Literature ..............................6
1.2. Social Development and Educational Purposes in Children’s
Literature .................................................................................................... 20
1.3. Teenage Fiction ................................................................................... 23
2. Daniel Handler AKA Lemony Snicket......................................................... 26
3. Particularly Aspects in All the Wrong Questions ....................................... 29
3.1 Metafiction ............................................................................................ 30
3.2. Teaching the reader and the tools for learning ................................ 32
3.3 The Motif of the Library .......................................................................37
3.4 What’s with the illustrations? ............................................................. 40
Chapter II: Anatomy of Crimes – Mystery, Detective

and Crime Fiction .................................................... 45
1. Introduction................................................................................................... 45
1.1 Crime Fiction as a Revolutionary Type of Literature..........................47
1.2. Mystery Fiction.................................................................................... 49
1.3. The Typology of the Detective and Hard-boiled Fiction ...................52
2. Aspects of the Detective Novel in Young Adult’s Literature ...................... 57
2.1 Introduction........................................................................................... 57
2.2 Emil and the Detectives ...................................................................... 58
2.3 Bittersweet Masterpiece: All the Wrong Questions .......................... 63
Conclusion .......................................................................82
Reference List ..................................................................84

ARGUMENT
The present paper deals with the children detective’s series
named All the Wrong Questions by Lemony Snicket. The series
consists of four books and can be classified as postmodern writing.
The author uses a remarkable style representing through the
sarcastic nature of the classic detective character, the difficulties of
embracing your creativity and opinions as a young individual. The
current form of the young adult’s literature has now developed into a
concept that has been adopted by both children and adults.
One very important function of the children’s literature is and
always has been, to prepare its readers to become the following
generation of adults by making them familiar to the ideas of how the
world around them works and what to expect from the future.
Children’s literature has provided through time different views and
different information on developing new ways of thinking and how
the world could be better shaped.
I have chosen this theme because I have observed in the last
years the major influence adult’s literature had on creating new
concepts in the children’s literature. It helps them create a vision of
their own, being able in the end, to create an opinion and critical
view of their own.
I have begun my work by clarifying what children literature is
and the difficulties it encountered through history until arriving at
the form it has today. The author I have taken into account to help
me see prove how much literature for children has evolved is
Lemony Snicket, nom de plume Daniel Handler. He is an author that
revolutionised the content of a children’s book should have. His
work addressed for children is focused on the harsh reality and not
fairytales based fiction.
Henceforth, I intend to introduce the concept of crime fiction
and its subgenres by presenting their evolution in time and the

modification they have suffered by being adopted by different
cultures. From the British detective novels, we are all familiar with,
to the hard-boiled detective stories created in the American culture
of the 40s and 50s and the typology of the sardonic and cold
detective. Next, I have begun to introduce the adopting of the adult
theme of hard-boiled fiction into children’s literature. I open the
sub-chapter with a classic book for children, which is, in my opinion,
a softer version of this genre: Emil and the Detectives by Erich
Kästner.
Following, I have decided to talk about a newer series of
Lemony Snicket: All the Wrong Questions which has not had the
time to shake the literature. It tells the story of a 13-years-old boy
that was made a private detective without him having a choice, sent
to a gloomy town under the name Stain’d-by-the-Sea to solve the
mysteries that encloses it. The story and the character of the young
Lemony Snicket resemble the cynical nature of the American hard-
boiled detective stories. A very important aspect that imbues the
story is the rejection of adult help. Adults are presented as being
helpless or incompetent.
Therefore, my paper is structured into two major chapters that
also represent the parts of my work. The first one is a little
introduction to what children’s literature is and how it evolved into
being an iconic type of literature today using as a lead Lemony
Snicket’s All the Wrong Questions. The second part deals with the
existence of crime fiction and its development through history into
becoming adaptable for all ages. In the same chapter, I compare the
classic detective fiction, trying to find similarities of the genre in
Emil and the Detectives and All the Wrong Questions. The
discussions also cover how they represent a form of universal
literature disguised for children.
Chapter I: Children’s Literature through Time

1. Introduction
This chapter deals with the origin of children’s literature, the
vast subjects that have been included in it and all the areas that it
embraced, so that they make it likeable not only for children, but for
adults as well, and at the same time making it fit well in the ”grand”
universal literature. It presents also how the author Daniel Handler,
alias Lemony Snicket, managed to cross the line between adult and
children literature.
All the Wrong Questions is the title of four books series pub-
lished between 2012 and 2015. The series, like his previous one A
Series of Unfortunate Events goes against the traditional values
present in the children’s books and open doors for other perspec-
tives of literature.
The series is considered a crossover fiction, meaning that the
author has originally written books for adults but then reconsidered
and passed also to a younger audience but also the passing of one or
more character from one story into another. Crossover literature is
not a new turn since a popular example comes from the 19th century
when the character of Tom Sawyer has an appearance in The
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. It actually started to gain popular-
ity with the Harry Potter series. The trend represented by crossover
fiction is spreading fast as more adults tend to be reading children’s
books. The reason for this is the fact that the line between the two
kinds of literature, adult and children, is thinner with time. (cf.
Beckett, 2)
Lemony Snicket is one of the authors who managed to cross the
border of writing books for adults to writing for children. Prior to A
Series of Unfortunate Events and All the Wrong Questions, he
published three adult books under his real name, Daniel Handler.
Snicket/Handler pokes fun at the cheerful, positive tone of much

traditional children’s literature. Misery and bad luck pervade the
series and are emphasized in the paratext and the publicity of the
books. The metafictional comments and the irony of the intrusive
narrator, who plays a mysterious role in the novels, are appreciated
by older readers in particular, but his playful sense of the subversive
appeals to readers of all ages. (Beckett, 165)
The brilliant new series All the Wrong Questions contains four
books that were well received after the shower given by ASoUE. The
series presents a period from Lemony Snicket’s childhood when he
was an apprentice at a secret organization named V.F.D. The intro-
duction of the mysterious events that he has to solve gives away the
influence of detective fiction, leading to a genre not known: the child
detective novel.
Even as a young boy of only 13 years, he still has an ingenious
and sophisticated language, using humour as a tool to engage not
only children but also adults into finding what mysteries will Snicket
have to solve and the in which he will do it. The series is peppered
with a dark Gothic humour toned down by humour intertwined with
other aspects that give the pleasure for reading.
1.1. The Power and Evolution of Children’s Literature
Children’s literature is a vast section of literature that includes

all types of writings, from short stories to entire novels that were
written for an intended audience: children. One may say reading
such literature has “mysterious powers” that, if introduced correctly
into the children’s daily activities, engage them and create a
compelling “ritual”, that will urge them to read on. This “ritual”
feeds them into growing to learn and benefit from the seeds
knowledge has to offer them.
“For decades, research has concluded that children’s books not only
provide great pleasure to readers, but they can also play a sign-
ificant role in the children’s social, literacy and academic success.”
(Hoewisch qtd. in Prants)
When children discover the pleasure in reading literature, time is
cherished, not wasted, as they have the liberation from the real
world by imagining new places by themselves. We might take us as
an example and go back in time to think whether a story that left a
mark on us from our childhood was told to us or read by us. Litera-
ture helps us as humans learn lessons, to find answers to questions
we didn’t know we had. These answers come from exploring the
depth of the stories we have plunged in, where we find worlds full of
dilemmas, choices and journeys. These stories help us shape
ourselves and construct our life by observing how the characters
react in certain situations. “By reading literature students can relate
to at a personal level and begin to analyse any conflict present, so
that they can develop the skills to resolve it productively in their own
lives.” (Prants)
Children’s literature is made up of texts that “consciously or un-
consciously address particular constructions of the child, or meta-
phorical equivalents in terms of characters or situation (for example,
animals, puppets, undersized or underprivileged grown-ups), the
commonality being that such texts display an awareness of children’s
disempowerment status (whether containing or controlling it, ques-
tioning or overturning it).” (Rudd, 39) Most adults are also caught in
the seductive snares of the discourses that are part of children’s
literature, whether writing or reading it, in the same way as children
engage sometimes with the ‘adult’ discourses. To be recognized by
an individual as part of children’s literature depends on how they are
read and how you can discover yourself in it, how visible is the
hybridity, or border country.
Throughout time, children’s literature has suffered different
alterations depending on what children enjoyed reading and what

made them curious. There were times when what was needed were
stories about adventure, surviving in the wild, uncommon feats that
do not easily happen to anyone. The last thing mentioned –
uncommonality – has not really changed. Indeed it is fairly common
for children to prefer and read books containing fantastic or
uncommon elements: wizardry (like in the Harry Potter series), or
other supernatural backgrounds, including real activities and jobs
that are unlikely to happen to a child; or elements borrowed from
mainstream adult literature that ended up adapted for a younger
audience. Thus, in the series All the Wrong Questions, young
Lemony Snicket had been kidnapped from his parents, along with
his sister and brother, from a young age. They were rhetorically
trained into an organization named V.F.D and sent on seemingly
pointless missions, where connections with all relatives (except his
siblings) have been erased.
Defining children’s literature is a tricky job because not all the
books meant for children had been tagged “children’s literature”
from the very beginning.
‘So far from the works of Scott and Dickens being looked upon as
impositions, they were read eagerly by many juveniles, though some
of their elders were doubtful about Mr Dickens, who wrote about
quite a vulgar folk – even pickpockets.’ (Roe qtd in Banerjee)
Also known as ‘Juvenile Literature’, children’s literature includes

many genres enjoyed by children. (cf. Gorun) It is said that chil-
dren’s literature has its roots in stories told by oral communication
before publishing became available.
Interrogating the true meaning of the possessive in ‘children’s
literature’ Jacqueline Rose suggests the fact that it was actually
never owned by the children. (cf. Rudd, 30)
Children’s fictions rest on the idea that there is a child who is simply
there to be addressed and that speaking to it might be simple … If

children’s fiction builds an image of the child inside the book, it
does so in order to secure the child who is outside the book […].
(Rose qtd. in Rudd, 30)
The novel, in general, went through a period of crisis but which
helped the development of the twentieth-century novel. David Stone
says in the 18th century: “… with the deaths of the established Vic-
torian novelists, not only a younger group of novelists, but an en-
tirely new set of attitudes towards fiction appeared.” (Stone qtd in
Hughes, 542) John Goode comes without another mention that
supports Stone’s statement evoking that “reappraisal of the
possibilities and responsibilities of the novel which is important
because it represents the beginning of the dividing line between the
Victorian novel and the twentieth-century novel.” (Goode qtd. in
Hughes, 542)
At the beginning of the twentieth century the notion we shall call
‘children’s literature’ appeared. Just as D.H. Lawrence’s titles have
proclaimed themselves as “M,” for mature readers, titles more
innocent, for example, Edith Nesbit’s books proclaim themselves as
“C,” for a child audience only. Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure
Island was classified with great pleasure by Henry James as being
“children’s classic” which can be dedicated to “boys of all ages”. (cf.
Hughes, 544)
Even if James did approve of Stevenson’s book, in his manifesto
The Art of Fiction, he claims novelists’ job is to “attempt to represent
life” (544) and that they should not be presented as stories or ‘make-
believe’, supporting at the same time that “it must take itself
seriously if it wishes to be taken seriously” (544). Even though he
enjoyed Treasure Island he still did not take it as a serious book,
reproaching its supposed adventures their ‘make-believe’ scenarios,
noting that: “I have been a child in fact, but I have been on a quest
for a buried treasure only in supposition” (page?). He supports the
criterion for critical approval to exclude all stories except the ones
that the reader can measure with his own reality, it is required, in his
opinion, a “sense of reality” to contain.
In anything fit to be called by the name of reading, the process itself
should be absorbing and voluptuous; we should gloat over a book,
be rapt clean out of ourselves, and rise form the perusal, our mind
filled with the busiest kaleidoscopic dance of images, incapable of
sleep or of continuous thought… It was for this pleasure that we
read so closely and loved our books so dearly, in the bright, troubled
period of boyhood. (James qtd in Hughes, 545)
As a result of the early years of State Education in America in the

eighties and nineties whose job was to spread literacy, literature had
great effect on Henry James and observes the growth of writing
literature for children in the essay called “The Future of the Novel”
published in 1899: As a produce himself of a school system that
aimed at fostering literacy in future citizens, James noted the growth
of a whole publishing industry churning children’s books that
pervert their aesthetic sense.
The literature, as it may be called for convenience, of children in an
industry that occupies by itself a very considerable quarter of the
scene. Great fortunes, if not great reputations, are made we learn,
by writing for schoolboys … The published statistics are extra-
ordinary and of a sort to engender many kinds of uneasiness. The
sort of taste that used to be called ‘good’ has nothing to do with the
matter: so demonstrably in the presence of million for whom taste is
but an obscure, confused, immediate instinct. (546-47)
The idea behind that was that the “child” has no voice in the
designs/plans of society, because “adults” either silence him/her
construct the idea that the child is a helpless being in bad need of
adult supervision. Rex and Wendy Stainton Rogers countered that:
‘To model the child as constructed but not as constructive … permits
us to see the young person as having their identity constructed by
outside forces but not the young constructions their identity out of
the culturally available.’ (Rogers qtd in Rudd, 31) They strongly
sustain the idea that children’s voice should gain more importance,
and should be heard.
The notion of ‘constructed’ child, as a tabula rasa, as a blank
being onto whom society inscribes a certain personality, fails to
convince nowadays and recent voices insist that the child should
become the ‘constructive’ child, able of making choices of his own.
With this, the former uniformity of childhood is discarded. And
indeed the idea of difference is introduced to the children at a very
early stage, as they learn the language through the parent-child
interactions.
As mentioned before, the speech and descriptive manner of the
children is hybrid, mingled with the adult’s language including dif-
ferent nuances and inflexions.
Another author of children’s literature C. Walter Hodges
emphasizes the idea of the borders between adults and children
becoming blurred: ‘if in every child there is an adult trying to get out,
equally in every adult there is a child trying to get back. On the
overlapping of those two, there is the common ground.’ (Hodges qtd
in Rudd, 39) This idea is profound mostly for adults because we all
have sometimes the feeling that there is the child version of us living
within and keeping as safe, without whom we would be permanently
lost. This is an idea also found in Christian thinkers, such as His
Grace Bishop Macarie: “Without the child within yourself, you are a
lost adult’1. (transl. and underl. mine) Without the realization that
half of the world is owned by children, one could not possibly create
anything in children’s literature, as the category would be present in
writing but without action, completely muted.
Many types of literature, especially stories, may be shared by
both adults and children together. As we know from our childhood,
myths, legends, fairy tales are part of your childhood and usually
strongly connected to it. But throughout history we discover that

they were initially meant for adults, only to be adopted and modified
for the benefit of children, and then they went to be embedded into
adult literature by authors such as Angela Carter and Salman
Rushdie.
There are numerous proofs that works of literature that are now
meant for children were originally written for adults. Fairytales, for
example, were actually stories told by adults to adults in the pub or
barn after a hard day’s work. The original version of most fairytales
contains violence and sexually explicit content. Over time, collectors
like Charles Perrault reshaped them as tools for educating children.
They took the story re-wrote it, making it appropriate for children.
This course could also go in the reverse. Around the nineteenth
century, some of the greatest children’s books seem to have gained
an ulterior adult audience. There are themes in children’s literature
that are similar to the ones found in adults’ literature, for example,
the themes dealing with emotional and societal issues. (cf. Gorun,
11) In Banerjee's article, U.C. Knoepflmacher senses that authors like
Lewis Caroll, Christina Rosetti, William Makepeace Thackeray, and
others owe much to John Ruskin, explaining that:
The double perspective of child and adult he had implanted in his
1841 text (The King of the Golden River) would be perfected in their
more complicated fantasies for young readers of both sexes. By
turning to such child readers, these writers tried, as had Ruskin, to
confront their own self-division between adult and child selves.
(Banerjee)
Even if in many cases children’s literature has been adopted
from stories initially meant for adults, it remains distinct from the
adults’ literature as it has its own genres, expectation, tropes and
issues: “In fact, children’s literature is a part of the mainstream of all
literature fields, it orders, evaluates, explores, and illuminates the
human experience through imagination […] children, like adults also
do, learn about the breadth and depth of life from literature.”
(Gorun, 8)
Children’s first encounters with stories occur in the adults’
storytelling performance when they are tucked into beds with a good
story, and that happens before they are able to read. It might be said
then that the love for reading began for many of us from a very early
age, even without us realizing it. We are firstly instilled with a
cultural knowledge from the proverbs, sayings, fables or any other
similar kinds that we hear in daily discourse.
‘The complexity of children’s narrative understandings and the
relation of story-telling to the books of their literature become clear
from the records many conscientious adults have kept of how
children grew up with a book’ (Meek, 2)
This is confirmed in Carol Fox’s study on the effect of literature

on young children’s own story-telling before they are even able to
read. In At the Very Edge of the Forrest she presents the fact that
very young children tend to use words, characters or phrases from
the stories they enjoyed, making them learn how to “talk like a
book”. Children, mostly young ones, expect that the books they are
read or they read are about things they are unsure or scared about,
like adults’ behaviour or even little things like the dark or different
animals, and in some cases, they are combined. For children,
literature, stories, are places they use in order to get answers.
Modern studies of narratology have discovered that adult literary
fictions are equally used to describe practices in children’s’
literature. Ursula LeGuin, a great writer of science fictions works for
the young minds, explains the importance and continuity of story-
telling in our lives, presenting also the essential part it plays in our
lives and intellectuals:
‘Narrative is a central function of language. Not, in its origin, an
artefact of culture, an art, but a fundamental operation of the
normal mind functioning in society. To learn to speak is to learn to

tell a story” (LeGuin qtd in Meek, 3)
Serious topics of social and moral contemporary life – sex,

illness, crime, family styles – are topics that have been lately present
on television and increasingly in literature. These, of course, address
mostly older children and help them to understand how life is. The
boundaries of adult/children’s themes and genres relating to
contemporary issues are not yet clear but blurred. There are books
about pollution or global warming disguised as narratives, but
whose real emphasis is there and inevitably enters the child’s mind
making him aware of the real dangers of the world.
In her essay “Children’s Literature: Theory and Practice” Felicity
Hughes observes the fact that the solution proposed around the
nineteenth century was not only to avoid discussing taboo subjects
around children but that children should be excluded at all from
taking part in them. They were supposed to go and do what a child
should do, play, and let the adults discuss their issues about art and
sex. The same happened in writing children’s literature. In that
period most critics and the public alike manifested strong support in
favour of the segregation of adult and children’s literature. “It has
assumed the status of a fact, a piece of knowledge about the world,
that children read books in a different way and have to have special
books written for them.” (Hughes, 548)
Another consequence of how the children’s literature came to be
is really connected to the taboo topics adults have and used to have,
that can’t be heard by children. Neither diseases nor mental
problems could be mentioned in children’s writings, and
counterexamples can be found in William Mayne’s A Game of Dark
(1971) and Philippa Pearce’s A Dog So Small (1962), where the
protagonists are either schizoid, or obsessive, which might be an
opportunity to help children understand strong fears and
resentments. “But shifts are of limited use: one can’t write about
deranged people all the time, nor is it true that only the mad get
frightened” (555), and because they were not allowed to present the
cruel truth of life, they turned to fantasy instead, which of course
was not to be taken seriously. This mechanism was used to still keep
a semblance of truth, in order to deal with the more terrifying
aspects of life.
One of the consequences of this segregation of children’s litera-
ture from mainstream literature can be seen in the theory and
criticism of children’s literature but also in the literature itself.
Cornelia Meigs, introducing a critical history of children’s literature
in explains that:
Just as children, in spite of having long been treated as no more
than smaller and more helpless editions of their elders, have always
been something apart in vigour of personality, of vision, and enter-
prise of mind, so has the reading of their choice, even though unre-
cognized as something separate, had its own characteristics, its own
individuality, and its own greatness. (Meigs qtd in Hughes, 550)
The clear and observable exclusion of children’s literature from

the class of serious literature leads to its classification in that period
into the realm of ‘popular literature’. Because of the strong belief
that adults’ behaviour cannot be part of the children’s stories, a need
to investigate what children do experience was created.
The idea of new identity literature for children is supported by
Rider Haggard, an author admired by the famous writer Rudyard
Kipling in his Autobiography where he tries to “communicate the
incommunicable gift”:
… the story is the thing and every word in the book should be brick
to build its edifice … Let the character be definite, even at the cost of
a little crudeness. Tricks of style and dark allusions may please the
superior critic; they do not please the average reader, and … a book
is written to be read. The first duty of a story is to keep him who
peruses it awake … ‘grip’ is about everything. (Haggard qtd in
Hughes, 551)
Felicity A. Hughes observes in the previous quote that if you re-

place ‘the superior critic’ by ‘the adult reader’ and ‘the average
reader’ by ‘the child reader’ they would go unobserved in any text-
book on children’s literature. (Hughes, 551)
There is the notion that people do not “accept” their native lan-
guage – it is in the native language that they first reach awareness”
(cf. Vološinov qtd in Rudd, 35), as children tend to adopt all the
taboos and cultural symbols of a civilization:
[C]hildren necessarily touch again and again on the adult threshold
of delicacy, and – since they are not yet adapted – they infringe the
taboos of society, cross the adult shame frontier, and penetrate
emotional danger zones which the adult himself can only control
with difficulty. (Elias qtd in Rudd, 35)
The concept described above, hybridity, actually contains both

the worlds of the children and adults together, originally meaning
‘the offspring of a tame sow and a wild boar’ (Young qtd in Rudd,
35). The expression is made to signify the melting of the two
borders, children and adults, gradually brought within. Therefore,
while Rose is sure about the idea of “writers for children” that there
are real “psychic barriers … the most important of which is the
barrier between adult and child” (Rose qtd in Rudd, 35), she is
actually not right and probably would need to embrace the frailty
and elasticity of these barriers. John Gordon admits that
”[t]he boundary between imagination and reality, and the boundary
between being a child and being an adult are border country, a
passionate place in which to work. Laws in that country are
lifelines.’ (Gordon qtd in Rudd, 35)
The close relationship that children’s literature has with the
adults’ literature leads to Jacqueline Rose’s observation about the
‘impossibility’ of children’s literature, worded at echoing
the impossible relation between adult and child. Children’s

literature is clear about the relation, but it has the remarkable
characteristics of being about something which it hardly ever talks
of. If children’s fiction builds an image of the child inside the book,
it does so in order to secure the child who is outside the book, the
one who does not come so easily within its grasp.’ (Rose qtd in
Meek, 9)
One of the features that distinguished English children’s
literature was the quantity and quality of the fantasy ingredient that
was mostly inserted in the past century. While it was well received
by its readers, especially children, its critics viewed fantasy as
confused and superficial. The fact that children’s literature was ex-
cluded from the category or serious literature previously presented
was the accepted version of realism. The consequence of this deci-
sion was fantasy was declassed, since fantasy became the anti-term
of realism. Moreover, for the militants of realism, fantasy was also
seen as the opposite of serious, more like something not taken
seriously, a matter of frivolity. This is precisely Forster’s use of the
term in his study Aspects of the Novel, where he claims that fantasy
“asks us to pay something extra” for it (and that something would be
to relinquish your faith in the solidity of reality).
The readers’ responses to the different social issues described in
books indicated more adult involvement in writing for adolescents.
The ‘positive images’ are expected to be text distinctive, even more,
because the literature for boys and girls has been already divided. At
this moment ‘children’s literature’ no longer refers to the books
purportedly read by a homogenous group of readers, but rather by
different literary provinces each with its separate readership with
distinct characteristics. Another prejudice was that the obvious
difference between boys and girls should be now very clear for all
writers and reader. (cf. Meek, 7) This idea does not apply in every
case, because nowadays literature mingles and contains features that
appeal to both genders, in order to reach to all types of readers. Girls

have always had a tendency in also liking boys’ books, by adaptation
or not, while the reverse is not applicable, because they lacked the
courage to enter the “parallel universe” of girlhood.
At the end of the twentieth century, there were clear evolutions
in children’s books and these could be echoed in the social attitudes
of the period. The dominant “white middle-class elite children’s
books publishers in English-speaking countries” (Meek 7) was
obliged to acknowledge the fact that some children in classrooms
could not find themselves portrayed in the texts they were given to
read. Thus at some point “in Britain, the Children’s Rights
Workshop asked publishers how many books on their lists showed
girls playing ‘a leading part’, and let it be known that there were very
few” (7).
Writers of children’s literature, especially the ones more keen on
writing fantasy stories, turned such criticism to their advantage.
Edith Nesbit talked about this situation in a funny remark meant to
catch the attention of all readers and critics at the beginning of Five
Children and It:
I could go and make this into a most interesting story about all the
ordinary things that the children did – just the kind of things you do
yourself you know – and you would believe every word of it; and
when I told you about the children being tiresome, as you are some-
times, your aunts would perhaps write in the margin of the story
with a pencil, ‘How true!’ or ‘how like life!’ And you would see it and
very likely be annoyed. So I will only tell you about the really
astonishing things that happened and you may leave the book about
quite safe, for no aunts and uncles either are likely to write ‘How
true!’ on the edge of the story. (Nesbit qtd in Hughes, 555)
Fantasy critics were a ‘blessing in disguise’, as fantasy can be

used as a protective cover to save the story from the prying eyes of
the adults, as the writers of children’s literature had reached a point
where they realized how to deal with children’s literature, and how
to protect its essence. Most of the books of the Golden Age of
Fantasy start by describing a real world that has included in them a
pinch of fantasy or discrete portals for transportation into a different
one.
One of the most major impediments to useful criticism is mainly
the acceptance by the critics of the idea that fantasy is a speciality for
children, rather than for adults. Many critics went back to the idea
“that individual human development recapitulates the development
of the race […] According to this view children are primitives and are
most appropriately served by primitive literature – myths, fables,
folk tales and fairy tales.” (Hughes, 557)
A child of today asks ‘why’ and ‘how’ as he wonders about the
natural world which he does not understand. So, in the childhood of
the race, without knowledge of the discoveries with which science
has enlarged our understandings, primitive people made their own
explanations of the physical world in terms of themselves. (Smith
qtd in Hughes, 557)
Lillian Smith also discusses why adults can’t understand and

enjoy fantasy, in words that answer most of the questions we have
asked:
A child’s ready acceptance of fantasy is based on imagination and
wonder. An adult lacking these universal attributes oh childhood is
often at a loss when he is asked to consider seriously a work of
purely imaginative content, far removed from the reality of his
experience of life. Before the adult can feel at ease in this different
world of fantasy he must discover a means of approach. There is an
interesting discussion of fantasy by E.M. Forster in his Aspects of
Novel, in which he says ‘What does fantasy ask us? It asks us to pay
something extra.’ That is to say that over and above what we
ordinarily bring to the reading of a story, fantasy demands
something extra, perhaps a kind of sixth sense. All children have it,
but most adults leave it behind with their cast-off childhood. (Smith
qtd in Hughes, 559)
The whole discussion about the fantasy and the sphere it should
belong to leads to the simplistic assumption that fantasy appeals to
children because they believe it, they live it or they just don’t know
the truth yet, whereas adults reject it because that clearly implies
that they know is not true. Critics were stranded with the questions
“why does fantasy appeal to children and not to adult?” to which
they still expect an answer not knowing that fantasy has been gifted
to the child reader. This assumption does not completely apply to
our contemporary readers, but still, we might think about it
sometimes.
In conclusion, children’s literature is a complex structure that
faced different and difficult challenges throughout time in order to
become what it is today, one of the best-beloved types of literature in
the world, not only for the young audience addressed but also for the
adults.
1.2. Social Development and Educational Purposes in

Children’s Literature
Literature for children represents a unique phase in a young

person’s life that can’t be replaced with anything else, having the
freedom of expression in many ways makes it more accessible for
educational purposes.
Although children’s literature has emerged as an important re-
source in contemporary elementary reading curricula, its role can
be conceptualized in different ways: as an “add-on” or treat avail-
able when children finish their exercises in the commercial work-
book, a pedagogical balancing device, a way of knowing the world,
or a space for critical conversations, used to explore the systems of
power that affect the ways students are positioned as readers and
the meanings available to them. (Banerjee)
Social development is one of the interests in the growth of chil-

dren. Children's literature preserves the time and space of a certain
type of writing was written in, reflecting the norms of a society, its
values, and contributing to the cultural and moral shaping of the
reader. It helps us to escape the stress of the real world and to travel
to remarkable worlds. My first-grade teacher used to say: “You live
as many lives as books you read”2.
Nowadays, children’s literature has regained a high-level
position and enjoys more prestige than ever. More and more people
discover and recognize the importance of children’s reading
children’s literature.
As children are reading and listening more to stories, they start
to enlarge their visions and backgrounds and they increase their
knowledge, which will form the foundations of their understanding
for more complex literature to come in their way. Children’s
literature is the kind of literature that helps children of all ages to
respond and manage their life experiences in a language and
backgrounds that they can easily understand am embrace. None of
this is new. In his Medieval Literature for Children Kilne says that
“modern and Medieval literature for children have common goals:
conveying the values, attitudes, and information necessary for
children and youth to survive or even advance within their cultures.”
(Kilne, 67)
Young adults have a tendency in choosing their reading based on
its popularity, but also from novels containing characters they can
associate with and grow together towards the goal of solving the
problems they encounter in their lives. They are also lured into
reading more sophisticated texts in order to become part of the
adult-fashion. Being at an age where complexities have their part in
both girls and boys, they also undergo peer pressure to read books
describing their issues and to ponder over the world they want to
live in: “Books of quality play their part in changing attitudes as well
as simply reflecting them” (Kilne 7).
Adolescent literature fights with the social stigma that is lain
over every issue present nowadays. It fights and helps others to also
fight and win over their pressure: “It is also to engage with the issues
that emerge, including hypocrisy in social and political engage-
ments, and global debates about how to protect the universe” (6).
Books meant for younger children have usually funny themes
and comic actions, accessible language but with a very great impact
as children reading it will learn something about the rules and many
hidden things about life. This is not completely the case when
moving to the older audience, older children, where the language is
changed into a more complex one, the themes become more serious
matters but the comic is maintained in order to keep the reader
entertained.
The division line for the age category in children’s literature is
hard to draw because the borderline is very thin and in some cases,
they might intersect, but there is a mention in Grenby’s “Children’s
Literature”:
[…] picture book which is appropriate for children 5 to 7, chapter
books appropriate for children ages 7 to 12, and young adult fiction
appropriate for children age between 12 and 18. (Grenby, 56)
For a very long time, the books tended to be more part of the
middle classes. Critics typically believed that their job was to set
standards for the ‘best’ books as to differentiate literature from the
mediocre, simple readings. The academic research for the children’s
literature is a quite new concept including researchers from the
fields of psychology, history.
For the moment, the development of a critical theory of
children’s literature resides heavily on an assessment of the readers’
responses. Many of the observations on the development of
children’s literature come from classrooms where teachers appraise

the children’s interactions with the books they had to read:
“By foregrounding the readers’ constitutions of textual meaning,
reading-response theory has become the most frequently quoted
theoretical position in relation to the books for children.” (Meek, 9)
With the above arguments, we are forced to see and accepted the
didactic features children’s literature have, self-taught or in schools.
About twenty years ago, critics of the children’s literature have tried
experimenting with the whole content of the theory derived from
adult literature and tried to see how it goes. Now they all agree that
reading is “sex-coded and gender-inflected” (Meek, 10) and artists
and writers have become aware of the fact that the audience is eager
to try all kinds of texts. Moreover, in school children might be taught
how to read ‘against’ the text in order to establish a critical standing.
1.3. Teenage Fiction
To draw a line between group ages is a rather complicated

matter, a tricky one, especially when young adult’s fiction is
included. The actual problem is not with the readers’ age, the
teenage period, but more with the ‘young adulthood’ of the
protagonists, of the characters. Readers of this kind almost always
expect and search to read about things they themselves are doing, or
thinking, imagining, enjoy if they could. An important aspect is that
the adult presence must be less obvious so that they might not
‘corrupt’ the text by anything too explicit, too adult-oriented.
Most of the popular teams contain issues about changing social
and moral codes, presenting ways of behaving or being treated. The
author Francis Spufford presents in one of his recent book named
The Child That Books Built (2002) the changing from children to
adult books in the following way:
Fiction recomplicates itself for you: you step up a whole level of
complexity. Suddenly you are surrounded anew by difficulties and

riches commensurate with your state of mind. From an exhausted
territory, you have come to an unexplored one, where manners and
conventions are all to find, just like the rules of your own new
existence in your own new lurch-prone adolescent body. (Spufford
qtd in Eccleshare, 542)
The shift presented above is the particular idea that makes

teenagers be seen as a different category. The velocity of what is now
important to them is different from what they have left behind in
their childhoods, and what is laid for them in the future self-adults
that are waiting for them.
The idea of teenagers being a different category is not as new as
we might believe, it was actually implied by the educationalist Sarah
Trimmer around the year 1802. She suggested the line to be drawn
at the age of fourteen and the maximum to go to twenty-one. (cf.
Eccleshare, 542) This is one opinion, but taking into consideration
the contemporary environments the age limit might be even higher.
She also mentions that no specific directions were taken for
publishing these categories of books and that the writers conceived
of them naturally, considering them an eager audience, a hungry one
that needed not only influence but shelter from the restlessness of
this period.
Depending on the time period, the themes that were dominant in
teenage books varied. For example Talbot Baines Reed’s The Fifth
Form at St Dominic’s (1887) had success that was limited to the
period it was published, but books such as Robert Louis Stevenson’s
Treasure Island (1883) and Kidnapped (1886), not only has
tremendous success because it offered adventures for readers of all
ages, but the strength of the protagonists made them popular in the
future generations, including today’s.
Two of the most recent predecessors of these titles were actually
published for adults. I have mentioned in a previous chapter the fact
that there are books written for a more mature audience that also
caught the attention of the younger minds. Such an example is
William Golding’s Lord of the Flies (1954) that shattered the
illusions about childhood innocence, and thus making the reader’s
estrangement from childhood easier. It is a book recommended for
all those that started to feel the same, to feel this loss in themselves
and could not find out what happened. The Catcher in the Rye
(1954) by J.D. Salinger had even a greater impact, mostly because of
its first-person stream-of-consciousness narrative of Holden
Caulfield, describing the detaching of a young boy from the
children’s word all wrapped in a disgusted and detached view about
the adult world’.
Even if Trimmer recognized the teenage group as an individual
in the 19th century, contemporary critics were unable to do it proper-
ly until the mid-20th century: “It was then that teenagers began to be
identified as a distinct if not definite period of transition between
childhood, with its implication of dependency, and the separation
and independence of adulthood.” (Eccleshare 543)
Post-war teenagers had more courage to speak for what they
need and were more vociferous than their predecessors, wanting to
read more than ‘Bildungsromäne’ and ‘rites of passage’ novels that
had been considered until then the ones suitable for them. As
examples we have Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, Charlotte’s
Brontë’s Jane Eyre, Charles Dicken’s Great Expectations and as well
twentieth-century classic Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird that
are exceptional writings that show in different ways the way of
moving from childhood’s innocence to the new mysterious life of the
adult world.
Like all readers, no matter the age, young adults, teenagers es-
pecially need the element of fiction to be blended into their books in
order to sustain the literary interest. ‘Self-knowledge is a spur to
growth, but so too is a wider understanding of all aspects of society,
present, past and in the future.’ (554)

2. Daniel Handler AKA Lemony Snicket
“I thought it would be interesting if

terrible things happened to three
helpless children over and over
again.” – Handler on why he wrote
A Series of Unfortunate Events.
(Snicket Fandom)
Daniel Handler is an American author and screenwriter, best

known for his work under the pen name Lemony Snicket as the
author of A Series of Unfortunate Events and All the Wrong Ques-
tions. Daniel Handler is the son of a Jewish refugee from Germany,
born on the 28th of February 1970 in San Francisco, California.
In his young age, he hated a book that was over-sentimental and
preferred authors that wrote crude plots like Roald Dahl and Edward
Gorey. As personal beliefs he is pro-knowledge and pro-reading,
supporting a series of campaigns that invite people of all age to start
reading. This fact is also visible in his works where most villains lack
reading, knowledge and literature, therefore choosing to remain
distant, some even going into a dystopian scenario, burning the
books. He is also highly supportive of critical thinking, rejecting
complacency when evil interferes which one of the main subjects in
both A Series of Unfortunate Events and All the Wrong Questions,
containing numerous corrupt adult implication and self-admiring
characters. (Snicket Fandom)
As partially Jewish, Handler considers C.S Lewis as being an
influence and describes himself as a secular humanist: “I’m not a be-
liever in predetermined fates, being rewarded for one’s efforts. I’m
not a believer in karma. The reason why I try to be a good person is
that I think it’s the right thing to do. If I commit fewer bad acts there
will be fewer bad acts, maybe other people will join in committing
fewer bad acts, and in time there will be fewer and fewer of them.”
(Snicket Fandom)
Three of his novels, which were made for adults, are written
under his name. The first one, The Basic Eight was rejected no more
than 37 times before being published because it presented a teenage
girl’s life in a dark tone. We might say that the book worked as an
impetus, which here means “something that makes a processor
activity happen or happens more quickly” (Lexico), leading to the
Lemony Snicket works A Series of Unfortunate Events and All the
Wrong Questions.
While carrying out research for his first novel The Basic Eight,
Handler was called on several right-wing religious organizations and
political groups in order to make fun of them and preferred not to
use his real name, and he came up with the name Lemony
Snicket. (Cf. PBS News Hour) At first, it became more like an in-
joke with his friends who were ordering pizza under this name.
When he found himself writing an entire series under this name he
decided to use Snicket name to add an air of mystery to the following
works. Therefore, this is how Lemony Snicket was born. I was
curious if the name really signifies something but what I found in the
Urban Dictionary is the fact that the name has been conversed daily
expressions and is “used to describe situations or scenarios that go
overwhelming wrong.” (Urban Dictionary)
Handler began writing under the pseudonym Lemony Snicket in
1999 with the first volume of A Series of Unfortunate Events. The
books concern three orphan children who experience terrible events
beginning with the death of both parents and the burning of their
home, where Snicket is the narrator and biographer of the fictional
orphans without any personal implication in their choices.
In a video made for the PBS News Hour, Handler admits that as
a young person he liked reading books and the first book he bought
with his own money was The Blue Aspic by Edward Gorey, who also
greatly influences his works starting with ASoUe. When the first two
volumes form the series was ready, Handler decided to send them to
Edward Gorey with a note saying that he admired his work and that
he would forgive him from stealing from, here means that the series
was inspired from Gorey’s writings. As an irony, shortly after the
volumes were sent, Gorey died and Handler says that he likes to
believe that he killed him. He also admits the fact that ASoUE was
part an acknowledgement of the hopeful state of affair which is
childhood. (PBS News Hour)
My young readers are not only finding a diversion in the

melodrama of the Baudelaire’s lives, but they are also finding ways
of contemplating our current troubles through stories… [M]y books
may seem a far cry from the real world, but when children write to
me asking if… the Baudelaires were anywhere near the World Trade
Center… it is clear they are struggling with the same issue as the rest
of us …
Stories like these aren’t cheerful, but they offer a truth – the real
trouble cannot be erased, only endured…
Although it is understandable that some would like to turn away
from this difficult fact, there is a kind of solace offered by stories
that show us how endangered orphans … go on living. (Handler qtd
in Langbauer, 506)
At the beginning of the series ASoUE, Daniel Handler avoids

using his real-life name, therefore, from now on I am going to
mention only the name, Lemony Snicket. In all his recent interviews,
Handler states that he is a legal representative of Lemony Snicket as,
due to the conspiracy that surrounds him, he is unable to face the
public eye. Even though Handler and Snicket are much alike,
Handler admits that his life is boring and rather uneventful. (Snicket
Fandom)
Lemony Snicket is the protagonist and author of the series All
the Wrong Questions, which draw “on events that took place during
a period of his youth spent in a fading town, far from anyone he

knew or trusted”, as Snicket “chronicles his experiences as an ap-
prentice in an organisation that nobody knows about.” (Flood) The
fading place he wakes up into makes him things about “wrong
questions that should not have been on his mind” (Flood) and many
questions incorrectly asked. To be a successful persona in Snicket’s
line of work you need to ask the right questions and this results in a
problem since he finds it difficult to do that. From then on he has
dedicated himself to the hope of uncovering the mysteries of the
world.
It is not publicly known when Snicket was born, but according to
the Snicket Fandom he “was born before you were, and is likely to
die before you as well.” (cf. Snicket Fandom)
As a younger figure in ATWQ, Lemony Snicket has left some
hope for better things to come even if his cynical and sarcastic air
comes naturally to him. With the research started on the Baudelaires
orphans and some other unfortunate events in his life, he becomes
emotionless, using irony as a weapon of defence. “Eternally pursued
and insatiability inquisitive, a hermit and a nomad, Mr Snicket
wishes you nothing but the best.” (Fantastic Fiction)
3. Particularly Aspects in All the Wrong Questions
For this part of my thesis, a very helpful guide to developing my
ideas and source of inspiration was the dissertation written by Diana
(Semeniuc) Țifrac named Thirteen Papery Layers: Irony, metafic-
tion, incongruity in Lemony Snicket’s “A Series of Unfortunate
Events” from which I adopted some theories she had used in her
paper.
3.1 Metafiction
A Postmodern feature Handler uses to challenge the interaction

with the reader in his narrative style is metafiction. In her book,
Patricia Waugh defines metafiction as:
…is a term is given to fictional writing which self-consciously and
systematically draws attention to its status as an artefact in order to
pose questions about the relationship between fiction and reality. In
providing a critique of their own methods of construction, such
writings not only examine the fundamental structure of narrative
fiction, but they also explore the possible functionality of the world
outside the literary fictional text. (Waugh, 2)
As a postmodern feature of literature, metafiction a more like a

contemplation on one’s writing process and it stimulates a similar
contemplation into the readers, the reading process. Handler’s
mechanism of metafiction is to familiarize the child with the harsh
reality that is outside the blissful books as Waugh admits that novels
become “a useful mode for learning about the construction of reality
itself. (cf. Waugh, 3) In Langbauer’s article, we are told the adoles-
cent fiction is by its very definition metafictional. Throughout the
series, Handler uses metafiction as a main tool to help other children
who might be encountering similar situations in real life: “Meta-
fiction keeps both possibilities in play for Handler (maybe there
really is truth, or maybe this is as close as we can get, but trying
counts): he argues that such fiction will ‘restore faiths you didn’t
know you had lost or ever needed.” (Langabuer, 510)
The postmodern writer uses different linguistic structures to
challenge the reader’s mind and imagination. More than that,
because metafiction is a constant reminder to the reader that they
are reading a piece of fiction. Handler used to despise as child books
that tended to be too sentimental and claims that he started writing
books for children to correct the “overwhelming moralistic tone in
all my least favourite [children’s] book.” (qtd in Langbauer, 506)

Metafiction is a literary tool used to cast off the illusion the classical
novels have set on them. It is a tool of empowering the reader, giving
the option to choose and manage by your own text.
As a result, metafiction allows the reader to create a meaning of
his own, therefore in the children’s fiction, it gives the child the
opportunity to use the imagination and knowledge he owns.
Why does this postmodern technique appeal so much to the
young reader? Because by complicating the relationship between the
author and reader, narrator and character, they blur the boundary
between reality and text. Young reader’s sharp mind might observe
and feel the distinction between fact and fiction, but they also might
get lost in the details of a story this why a constant reminder that
what is happening is not real must be introduced.
The relation between the child reader and the adult writer is im-
portant in order to understand and become aware of the fact that
children’s literature is a functional literary genre. (Țifrac, 41)
The author Maria Nikolajeva analyzes the relation mentioned
earlier and proposes a scientific term named “aetonormative hetero-
logy,” which, when applied to a text, it presents the power relations
that are committed to giving privilege to adult subjectivity over child
subjectivity. One of the key features that are associated with aeto-
normative heterology is metafiction. The feature of metafiction
incorporates the book as a product made by some, therefore it in-
cludes the author’s persona. The specific author constantly asks re-
assurance and opinions from the child reader there creating a close
relationship between them and becoming closer to the reader. It
might be said that this relation is necessary for challenging the
children’s interaction and knowledge, offering at the same time bits
of autonomy.
In the series, All the Wrong Questions uses these techniques to
get closer to the child reader by mocking what might be stressing the
reader: the adults’ rules, but also helping the main protagonist and
his friends find answers for the mysteries. Throughout the stories,
Snicket and his friends manage to find answers and solve mysteries
without adult implications that not only complicate de situations but
give erroneous or incomplete information to what is happening and
usually mock or ignore children’s opinions.
3.2. Teaching the reader and the tools for learning
Handler not only uses the metafiction technique to challenge the

reader but his other main point targeted to the younger audience is
to teach the readers how to learn. As children begin to read more
and more, they develop a wide area of imagination and knowledge
for themselves. This technique is defined as ‘meta-teaching’ by
education specialists. (cf. Barton, 105)
Throughout this series ATWQ, Snicket uses various tools to teach
his readers. Such is the case when he explains different sophisticated
words, and the emphasis must be put on the fact that the
explanations given to a specific word are local, it gives the
explanation to what the word means in that context. Other cases
could be wordplays, funny expressions which he does not
understand, but also the character correcting grammatical errors
made by other characters or using repetitions to emphasize a
structure. Another tool of teaching is asking many questions, which
may start in the titles themselves. Moxie Mallahan, the only
journalist left in Stain’d-by-the-Sea, the city where Snicket has to
solve mysteries, always asks numerous questions before going on
checking.
Handler’s two most important features are to teach and to
empower the children who for many years have been considered
tabula rasa and had to be taught everything by adults.
Samuel Johnson once remarked: “Knowledge is of two kinds. We
know a subject ourselves or we know where we can find information

on it.” (qtd in Barton, 107)
Handler takes into consideration the second part of the quote. It
implies that we need to search the information we want and assimi-
late more knowledge ourselves. Handler stated in many interviews
the fact that he is trying to make children become more confident in
their forces and free them from the reliance on adult’s help.
The tools for teaching the child reader used by Handler are the
assimilation of knowledge and metafiction. Wendy Williams defines
the notions as: “fluid intelligence” which is “the ability to know how
to do something” and the opposite “crystallized intelligence is the
possession of information.” (qtd. In Barton, 107) The last one im-
plies a more active implication in the acquisition of facts and the
first one is the application of facts and knowledge to action within
the world. (Cf. Țifrac, 42). Metafiction uses fluid intelligence to
teach the child, where Handler uses this intelligence to teach his
child readers on how to become autonomous.
In All the Wrong Questions, Snicket uses meta-teaching to help
the readers find their own answers to the questions Snicket was
asking in order to be able to solve the mysteries that revolve around
Stain’d-by-the-Sea. He uses numerous tools of language. The
multiple uses of word games are used to enrich the reader’s
vocabulary in a fun way. There is also the repeating of the same
explanations for more than a sentence resulting in the slowing of the
action in the story. The slowing of actions using repetitions has both
a good and a bad part. The good part is that ‘practice makes perfect’
but an exaggeration of this acts infuriates the reader at some point.
It creates a carousel of feelings releasing the reader from the state of
boring. Another fact introduced in ATWQ that must be pointed out
is that Snicket uses a local definition for each structure, giving a
definition valid for the particular context it appears in.
The lexical explanations usually have the role of helping the
protagonist find answers to the mysteries he is researching, even the

name of the criminal he is searching for:
“Do you know why he calls himself Hangfire?” I asked.

“Villains always choose spooky names,” Jake said.
“It was weeks before I thought to look it up in the dictionary,” I
said. “It refers to something that takes a bit of time before it works.
It usually describes explosions or blasting. But people use it in other
circumstances, too. It can describe a slow-acting poison or a tree
that weakens for years before it falls. There’s a brand of old-fash-
ioned phonograph called Hangfire because it has a mechanism that
allows the needle to hover over the record until the exact moment
you want the music to play.” (Snicket, Shouldn’t You Be in School?
128-29)
Or the classical local explanation of the words that keep re-

peating in the story, which is a classic procedure also used in
ASoUE:
“This is a fortunate day,” Theodora said to me. […] “’ Fortunate’ is a
word which here means fortuitous, and it’s particularly fortuitous
for you. It’s auspicious. It’s opportune. It’s kismet. It’s as lucky as
can be. (Snicket, When Did You See Her Last, 41)
Another example from the second book of the series when you
don’t have time to waste the words is explained with multiple syno-
nyms, infuriating the reader and slowing down the plot pace. The
synonyms used are exact for ‘infuriating’ but the narrator is
conscious about the fact that this is time wasting:
[…] But if you are in a great hurry and someone uses something like
“skip tracer,” which you are unlikely to understand, then an im-
pressive vocabulary is quite irritating. Another way of saying this is
that it is vexing. Another way of saying this is that it is annoying.
Another way of saying this is that it is bothersome. Another way of
saying this is that it is exasperating. Another way of saying this is
that it is chafing. Another way of saying this is that it is nettling.
Another way of saying this is that it is ruffling. Another way of

saying this is that it is infuriating or enraging or aggravating or em-
bittering or envenoming, or that it gets one’s goat or raises one’s
dander or makes one’s blood boil or gets one hot under the collar or
blue in the face or mad as a wet hen or on the warpath or in a huff
or up in arms or in high dudgeon, and as you can see, it also wastes
time when there isn’t any time to waste. (9)
Another use of teaching vocabulary is the introduction and
verbose discussion of expressions, inserting also the element of
humour as a distraction from the frightening moment, and the direct
address to the reader:
Good with a knife means nothing, I said to myself. It’s just an ex-
pression. Think of another expression. The cat’s pajamas, that’s a
funny one. Why should it mean something wonderful, what a cat
wears to bed? Get scared later. (160)
Asking questions is another technique that mimics teaching the

reader; when confused, the reader asks questions, but this does not
guarantee an answer, or it might obtain just a sarcastic answer if the
question is wrongly asked:
[…] And the, while my chaperone licker her fingers, I asked the
question that is printed on the cover of this book. (When Did You
See Her Last?)
It was the wrong question, both when I asked it and later when I
asked the question to a man wrapped in bandages. The right ques-
tion, in this case, was “Why was she wearing an article of clothing
she did not own?” but this is not an account of a time when I asked
the right questions, much as I wish it were. (27)
This series’ response to the ethical dilemmas throughout the

story is to offer books about books – “a universe … governed entirely
by books.” (Handler qtd. Langbauer, 507) This points out another
method used to boost the child reader’s knowledge: the mentioning
of books titles, given as tips to the taxi drivers friends of Snicket,
who would not accept money, but good books to read, because the
Bellerophon brothers to believe money is useless. This statement
summarizes Handler’s belief about money, as he believes money
negatively affect people. (Snicket Fandom) A writer with a vast
imaginative sphere who enjoys the pleasure of words is tempted to
invoke other literary works. Snicket has little mentions in the series
from various fields of literature but mostly known authors like Roald
Dahl, J.R.R. Tolkien, or Harper Lee.
“Snicket,” Squeak said, braking and breaking the silence, “how

about you give us a tip like you do?”
I had a system with the Bellerophon brothers, recommending
books in exchange for their services. It’s a system I wish were used
more widely in the world. […] (Snicket, Why Is This Night Different
from All Other Nights? 47
Besides this language teaching, Snicket inserts in the book subtle

mentions of things that you should not do, which is the case in the
third book with tattoos for which he gives an eye-opening
explanation. When a writer chooses to share a taboo topic with
children, he is impelled by the desire to influence the reader’s
thinking and to present the dangers. The tattoo he has is the sign of
a secret organisation he is part of:
“It is unwise to make something permanent when the whole world
is shifting. There may be a time when this symbol means something
treacherous and terrible, rather than something noble and literate.”
(Snicket, Shouldn’t You Be in School? 209)
At the end of the third book Snicket says something to Ellington

that might sum up the fact that even if you do mistakes you can
atone by making things good, and that it depends on you if you want
or not: this motivational speech goes like this:
“[…] We may ask the wrong questions, but we know the right an-
swers. We might not always have an actual compass” – and here I
stole a look at Ellington and then a look at the floor – “but we have a
moral compass, something inside ourselves that tells us the proper
thing to do.” (302)
The influence of didacticism will always be present in literature.
Yet the level of acceptance depends on the reader, but the pleasure is
diminished when “the moral seems more important than the charac-
ters and their significant experiences.” (Lukens, 231) This series is
not a case on which the statement can be applied.
3.3 The Motif of the Library
While the library is a recurrent motif in all kinds of literature, its

presence in a detective series such as ATWQ is unusual and
surprising. When Lemony Snicket finds himself stuck into an almost
empty city named Stain’d-by-the-Sea with his chaperone Theodora
S. Markson, they are hired to recover a stolen statue, then the
problems start to appear just when the statue is discovered. Snicket
makes friends and foes there, experiences different situations – from
laughter to tears, from solving mysteries to discovering more
enigmas: “They say in every library there is a single book that can
answer the question that burns like a fire in the mind.” (Snicket,
Who Could That Be at This Hour? 75-76)
In all the four books of the series, Lemony Snicket as the main
character in the story is an active user of knowledge. He finds refuge
from all the evil in the world and answers to some of his questions in
the only library in the city. Libraries are used by Snicket as a
metaphor of knowledge. The series gives the child reader the power
to become to his own librarian and to choose the answer to a specific
situation. Or in Julie Barton’s terms,
He puts his faith in the ability of the child reader to learn what she
needs to know. Indeed, he is letting her know that libraries equal
knowledge, which equals power. Power to the child means she is
equipped to leave a childlike world of being controlled and instead

meditate her way through an imperfect multi-layered adult world.
(Barton, 115)
In the series, the library becomes synonymous with knowledge,
as it means in real life for book lovers. The library is also used once
or twice for secret communication with his sister Kit, that is in the
city and to whom he can’t be caught talking to. In an indirect way,
Snicket restricts access to adults in the library. Throughout the story,
the only adult-like figure is the sub-librarian Dashiell Qwerty who
qualifies for the literary trope as the ‘the only sane man’, but he was
also much younger than any adult in the story.
The moths were fluttering all over the sign at the desk that read
DASHIELL QWERTY, SUB-LIBRARIAN. He was younger than I
think of librarians as being, younger than the father of anyone I
knew, and he had the hairstyle one gets if one is attacked by a
scissors-carrying maniac and lives to tell the tale. (Snicket,
WCTBaTH, 74).
When reaching the library for the first time, Snicket implies that
the library offers an important element, it must have the quietness to
find any answer you are searching for: “The library was one
enormous room, with long, high metal shelves and the perfect quiet
that libraries provide for anyone looking for an answer.” (Snicket,
WCTBaTH, 73)
The fact that there is only one library in the city does not make it
less important. On the contrary, it is the place where Snicket goes to
get away from Theodora’s nagging and to have some time of his own
to meditate upon the way to solve the mysteries of the city.
In the third volume of the series, there is another library at the
Wade Academy, where all the children from the city are taken, but
that library is full of books that have blank pages. So it is a library
only in the name; again this is also used as a secret meeting place for
Snicket as his friends, where the enemies could not find them, as
they would never approach a library. Just in case an intruder found

them, they had security questions to make sure about the person’s
identity. These refer to two of Handler’s favourite pastimes: reading
and singing:
“Who wrote The Wind in the Willows?” asked one of them.
“Who plays the trumpet on Out to Lunch?” shot back Ellington.
There was an awkward pause in the dark.
“It’s Kenneth Grahame,” I offered finally. “And Freddie Hubbard
on trumpet, I think.” (Snicket, SYBiS, 192)
The importance of libraries as a ground of knowledge, that

eventually give one being power, represents an important tool in
Handler’s process of meta-teaching the child reader. Even if
indirectly expressed, the idea that is instilled to children is that
knowledge from libraries will free them from adults’ authority. The
delightful and peaceful atmosphere of the libraries is in contrast
with the gloomy and lonely Stain’d-by-the-Sea and the misfortune it
was brought to along with its citizens.
“[…] All anybody knows about him is that he is a leper.”

“He’s sick?” I said.
“No,” Harvey said. “He studies moths.”
“Then he’s a lepidopterist,” I said. “A leper is someone with a
terrible skin disease.”
“Nobody likes a know-it-all,” Mimi said. (Snicket, SYBiS, 54)
Snicket always uses libraries as a shelter, a place of safety,

insulated from all the evil outside. In a metaphorical way, this is a
luminous space compared to heaven in opposition to the insecurities
and questions young Snicket has. Libraries are places where
solutions could be provided and safety could be found. (cf. Barton,
116-18)
The world is swirling with so many mysteries and secrets that
nobody will ever track them down all of them. But with a book you
can stay up very late, reading and rereading until all the secrets are
clear to you. The questions of the world are hidden forever, but the
answers in a book are hiding in plain sight. (Snicket, SYBiS, 186)
Handler does not only describe the library as a comfortable and
desirable place but it presents it with such a fire as a dear friend.
Handler emphasizes the fact that in order to be moral it is not
enough to be smart, one must also be well-read.
3.4 What’s with the illustrations?
Contemporary children’s literature is organized and classified

in order to eliminate the obscurities and difficulties of finding a book
that is right for a certain group of age or taste. It is classified
according to several criteria, including genre or the intended of the
age group.
Usually, the books intended for younger children or even tod-
dlers are known to be accompanied by as many pictures as possible
and little text, those for a bit older kids have more text but are still
written in a simple language without any complex words or struc-
tures, in large print and with many illustrations, while the books for
older children start having more complex language and fewer
illustrations. As we go on, we discover there are visible differences
between the various age groups, because if a younger child would
read a book intended for older ones s/he might get bored because
s/he would not understand much. An older one reading a toddler-
intended book might laugh and let it aside, even if he might enjoy
the story.
Having illustrations is not a bad idea for a book, provided they

are used properly. Picture books might also be enjoyed by an older
audience, meaning adults. Illustrations used wisely might enhance
the imagination of the reader,
taking him beyond the story of
the book. In Peter Hunt’s The
International Companion
Encyclopedia of Children’s
Literature quotes Joyce Whalley:
‘An illustrated book differs from a
book with illustrations in that a
good book is one where the
pictures enhance or add depth to
the text”. (Whalley, 318)
Illustrations and books, in
general, are used to explain
different real-life situations in
order for children to understand
the issue, for example, the Fig.1 Lemony’s sister, Kit, is
procreation moment, a still taboo caught stealing from a museum.
He worked in a similar case with
subject when it comes to
him, but in a different case.
children. This subject has been (WDYSHL, 279)
illustrated in different manners,
usually using humour: “humour
releases delight and increases children’s confidence in understand-
ing the metaphoric nature of language. It is also memorably
serious”. (5)
The 4-volume ATWQ series contains illustrations depicting
different situations described in the book. Interestingly, these
illustrations are black and white, which emphasizes the mystery
element, in a dark atmosphere dotted about with shadows.
Sometimes these images also contain details we only discover after
reading the story.

The illustrator of this series is Canadian cartoonist Gregory
Gallant, but better known by his pen name Seth. He has portrayed
and shady characters in suspicious circumstances in much of his
work. Most of his works, including the illustrations in this series, are
done in dark or faded colours, sinister looking. Seth has a special
affection for early and mid-20th-century popular culture and this af-
fection is recurrent in his works, both in terms of character and
artistic style. In an interview for Bookslut, Seth admits that: “A well-
designed book is one of the most perfectly beautiful things in the
world.”
His works are mostly postmodern, which requires the reader to
engage with the text in new ways: “Author and illustrator con-
sciously employ a range of devices that are designed to interrupt
reader expectation and produce multiple meanings and readings of
the book.” (Anstey, 447)
While the traditional picture book was meant for the
inexperienced reader, the postmodern picture book applies to a
wider range of age categories and reading abilities. To summarize
the postmodern picture book is meant to look different because it is
meant to be read differently. (Anstey 448)
In my opinion, these black and white images aim to construct a
visual language without any boundaries regarding, the colour of the
skin, or race. The only visible and intended boundary that is drawn
intentionally is between the child and the adult. Images of black
figures inevitably invoke a visual vocabulary increasing the mystery
element, as the shadows do no show us clearly who is there.
The illustrations are both

set as headlines for each chap-
ter of the book, presenting an
important part of the chapter
that follows the image, and they
occupy an entire page.
Sometimes such oversized
images have nothing to do with
the main story or they show a
scene that needs to be
emphasized. I will attach here
some illustrations from the
book:
Fig. 2 The back cover of the last book in Even if the picture tends to
the series, Why Is This Night Different
from All Other Nights? It presents have a cheerful centre, its edges
different relevant scenes in the book. are steeped in the darkish,
shadowy atmosphere that is
present throughout the story.
Children seek books from which they could draw their own
inferences about future plot twists, rather than be told what should
be happening. Children seek freedom of imagination, liberty to
create their own expectations and plots. And these ambiguous
images offer just that.
As a conclusion to
this subchapter: even if the
story contains multiple
illustrations in a manner
reminiscent of picture
books, this does not deter
the book from keeping its
seriousness, and the noir
scenery of a true detective
novel.
Fig.3 The first page of the first book in the

series Who Could That Be at This Hour? In
the picture we have illustrated the train sta-
tion and The Hemlock Tearoom and Station-
ary Shop (WCTBaTH, 1)
Fig.4 “It is my great hope that this

portion of the story, should it ever be
published, is not illustrated, as a
person looks like a fool with a bowl
over his head.” (Snicket, WDYSHL,
69-70)
Chapter II: Anatomy of Crimes – Mystery,

Detective and Crime Fiction
1. Introduction
The discussions in the previous chapters proved the fact that
children’s literature developed through time, while also encoun-
tering numerous difficulties, into types of genres suitable for
children of different ages. One of the characteristics to stand out in
the children’s literature is the imitation of adult’s behaviour or
careers which resulted in the type of crime fiction for older children
or young adults.
Daniel Handler is part of Generation X, which are the people
born between 1962 – 1980, which is characterized by a sarcastic,
pessimist vision of the world, implicitly children’s literature wanting
to present the child reader the harsh reality: “X … defines not a
chronological age but a way of looking at the world” (Coupland qtd.
in Langbauer, 504). Generation X “are stereotyped as traumatized
castoffs, paralyzed by irony […] highlighting technology’s culpability
for their dehumanization: parental neglect and abandonment to TV,
videogames, and (later) the Web supposedly caused by their numb-
ness.” (Comhen and Krugman qtd. in Langbauer, 504)
The parental neglect and abandonment might be placing
Snicket’s books within this “vogue of childhood misery” as some
critics believe that the dehumanization of this generation
foreshadows/anticipates the epitome of the literary fiction to come.
Crime fiction is mostly known to have been a genre wholly
unsuitable for children, because it deals with crime, criminals and
their sinister motives, including dangerous actions. The most
common structure of a crime novel fiction advances from the (blood)
crime committed, its investigation, and the final outcome, the
villain’s arrest or death. The genre has high flexibility, making it easy
to be shaped for a younger audience.
When a lover of “crime fiction” enters a bookstore, s/he would go

the appropriate shelves and start to browse and they are going to
find a variety of different genres. It is impressing the fact that even
though they have the same line, crime, detection and in many cases
the end of the criminal, the genres are shaped for different worlds,
for different audiences, they still hold together.
As most of the great genres of literature, the “crime fiction” has
been profusely screened, especially in the American cinema under
the name “American Film Noir”. According to Encyclopaedia
Britannica, film noir is a “style of filmmaking characterized by such
elements as cynical heroes, stark lighting effects, frequent use of
flashbacks, intricate plots, and an underlying existentialist philo-
sophy”. (Encyclopaedia Britannica, np) The definition given
includes a mood of cynicism, pessimism and darkness that entered
the American cinemas, giving the name to the genre: noir. It mainly
refers to the Hollywood films of the 40s and early 50s that portrayed
the word of dark city streets, crime and corruption.
One of the motifs that led to the creation of this type of film-
making, and its eventual mimicking in literature, is the war and
post-war disillusion manifest after the instalment of Prohibition and
the Great Depression with their wave of gang criminality.
The genre of the crime fiction, especially the hard-boiled detec-
tive novel initiated a similar sub-genre, named the American noir. It
is said that:
[…] noir emerges from a cultural crisis following World War II.
Returning soldiers came home to a changed world where the girls
next door they left behind became the women who took their jobs
and their agency. The result was a dark current of books and films
about men facing a world over which they have no control. The
system – organized crime, police, government, fate, all of the above
– is out to get them, but it usually takes the form of a woman. […]
women are revealed to be duplicitous, treacherous, annihilating.
(Abott)
1.1 Crime Fiction as a Revolutionary Type of Literature
“Are you saying that being a crimi-

nal is a matter of opinion?" I asked.
Qwerty smiled, but it was sad
around the edges. "No," he said. "It's
a matter of handcuffs.”
Lemony Snicket, Shouldn’t You

Be in School?
Crime fiction spread into a variety of sub-genres, maybe because

it had enjoyed so much attention in history, branching off into
detective fiction (with the classical whodunit), legal thriller, hard-
boiled fiction and many more. Formally, all of these include a
committed crime as a leading motivator of the plot.
Even if today it is so widespread, the genre actually became
popular only around 1900. Crime fiction has its roots around 1841
with the apparition of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Murders in the Rue
Morgue”.
A well-known, and maybe the most famous of crime fiction
authors is Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and his remarkable character
Sherlock Holmes. The Sherlock Holmes mysteries are said to be the
ones responsible for the wide-spreading popularity of this ‘locked
room mysteries’ genre (a true landmark in the history of the crime
fiction). (Bennett).
Another important landmark personality in the history of crime
fiction is Agatha Christie. She is most known for her detectives Her-
cule Poirot and Mr Parker Pyne.
The evolution of printed mass-media in Britain and America in
the latter half of the 19th century contributed greatly to the
popularisation of crime fictions and related genres. From its origins
until the present day, the crime fiction has crossed many borders
everywhere where more and more writers appropriated and
rewritten it to concern the different space and time.
In one of his studies about literary formulas, John Cawelti has
theorized the relations between order and disorder, fiction and
reality. He says that each work of art contains both “mimetic” and
“formulaic” elements:
The mimetic element in literature confronts us with the world as we
know it, while the formulaic elements reflect the construction of an
ideal world without the disorder, the ambiguity, the uncertainty,
and the limitations of the world of our experiences. (Cawelti qtd in
Malmgren, 117).
In contrast with the real world, I would consider that the real
world is both orderly and disorderly, shapely and shapeless, plotted
and plotless, it just depends on how we visualize it.
The works of crime fiction helped raise awareness on a variety of
crimes and if we read stories from authors from different cultures we
would clearly observe that the maybe there a few differences, but the
pattern remains the same. This pattern is named by Franco Maletti
the “law of literary evolution” (Maletti qtd in King, 9) by which all
these different culture stories become bounded. Analysis of this
pattern tends to start with the translation of the fathers of this genre
– Edgar Allan Poe, Arthur Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie, Dashiell
Hammett, and Raymond Chandler.
Crime fiction depicts a dismantled and corrupted society,
focusing its attention on a violation of a set of rules implied in that
society. Heather Worthington speaks:
[a] crime implies the violation of community code of conduct and
demands a response in terms of the code. It always depends on a
legal definition and the law. As a result, in representing crime and
its punishment, whether evoked or merely anticipated, detective
novels invariably project the image of a given social order and the
implied value system that helps sustain it. By naming a place and by
evoking the socio-economic order that prevails within it, they
confirm, in fact, that there can be no transgression without a code,
no individual criminal act without a community that condemns it.
(Worthington qtd in Kind, 14)
The crime novel, in particular, provides answers, bring the
understanding of the relationship between the crimes committed
and the society in which happened. A community’s understanding of
a crime revolves around questions like “who?”, “why?”, “by whom?”
and “how?” leading into solving the case and punishing the villain.
This is a typical crime fiction story. According to Cawelti, the
“criminal act disrupts the social fabric, and the detective must use
his unique investigative skills to sew it back together again. In the
process, the skilful writer can reveal certain aspects of a culture that
otherwise remain hidden”. (Cawelti qtd in King, 15)
The protagonist of most crime novels experiences a radical dis-
ruption “between the social person playing in his social role and the
invisible person admitting with horrid resignation that there is no
role for it to play” (Cassill qtd in Malmgren, 129) Caught up in the
confusion created, in some cases, the detective protagonist is caught
between being himself and acting, which leads to a series of other
issues: mistrust, low integrity, no moral standards.
As a conclusion, crime fiction is a complex structure, mostly
answering, in the end, the questions that in the beginning had no
sense. Not all crime novels have closure: there are cases when we are
left in suspense with other questions that will not be answered.
Being such a large genre, I will present the next two of its subgenres
that have been adapted for an audience that is younger than
originally: mystery fiction and detective novel hard-boiled fiction.
1.2. Mystery Fiction

Every subgenre of the crime fiction contains a dose of mystery

but there is a type that is characterized by this point: mystery
story.
[…] murder mysteries are generally concerned with the restoration
of order. A criminal distorts the fabric of society by committing a
crime, and it is the purpose of the detective to restore order and see
that justice is done. Sometimes “justice” does not mean “punish-
ment” of the guilty party (whose crime may seem justifiable), but at
least the guilty party is found and held to account. (Barnhill)
Essentially, the mystery story handles the popular tales that deal
with the unknown that can only be revealed through human
dilemmas and solutions. The narrative might be presented classic-
ally as a horror story, or containing fantasy elements or connected to
the crime fiction that I spoke about in the previous chapter, a crime-
solving story or any situation involving solving a mystery.
This type of story has its origins in the Romantic era when E.T.A
Hoffman and Edgar Allan Poe included this element of mystery in
their writings “to a level far above mere entertainment through their
skilful intermingling of reason and madness, eerie atmosphere and
everyday reality”. (Encyclopaedia Britannica, np) They filled the
stories with such symbolism that made them more real than any-
thing, increasing their credibility with each scene. The popular type
of mystery is the one involving a number of crimes and paths to
follow in order to solve them but without the interaction with the
well-known private detectives.
Even though, by the description provided above, there are also
clear differences between the worlds of mystery and detective fic-
tion: “mystery fiction presupposes a centred world” (Malmgren,
119), it requires a static world where neither the human nature nor
the social order is faced to a radical change. While the detective
novel is the opposite, it requires a decentred world, with crime and
disorder thriving.
The setting of a mystery story is quite isolated, ensuring the

disruptions that are going to happen, the setting “abstracts the story
from the complexity and confusion of the larger social world” (Ca-
welti qtd in Malmgren, 121). The narrator is also an important part
in heightening the mysterious element in the story by misreading or
overreading the clues. Detection is the chief term central to this
genre that introduces the drama in the stories. Even if the
investigation is centred on the character trying to solve the
dilemmas, his “existence is a mere function of the mystery he is
solving” (Grossvogel qtd in Malmgren, 121
There are mainly three, possibly more, forms of an enigma that
the crime initiating the mystery must contain. Their forms must be
present in particular in all crime fictions. The question for the first
form is who, which might be the most important, helping finding the
Truth. A second one is how, the technique used for the crimes. And
the third of them is why which in some cases might be answered
fully. (Cf. Malmgren, 121) In a series, the questions asked in order to
find the line of the story might have clues in the titles and in the
story of each book but the true answer is found only at the end. “The
investigator secures mystery’s dominant sign – Truth – by showing
how all the case’s seemingly wayward signs bespeak it.” (122)
Tzvetan Todorov found out that there are two main plots in a
mystery story: the story of the crime and the story of its detection, or
solution:
We might further characterize these two stories by saying that the
first – the story of the crime – tells “what really happened,” whereas
the second – the story of the investigation – explains “how the
reader (or the narrator) has come to know about it.” But these defi-
nitions concern not only the two stories in detective fiction but also
two aspects of every literary work which is Russian Formalists
isolated forty years ago. They distinguished, in fact, the fable (story)
form the subject (plot) of the narrative: the story is what happened
in life, the plot is the way the author presents it to us. (Todorov qtd
in Malmgren, 121-22)
The connection of the two plots is clearly the crime itself, which
initiates the detection, leading to the plot of the story. To clarify the
situation we must explain the status of the two stories. The first one,
the crime means that the narrator, the one introducing the scenes
can’t describe us the actions and the conversations of the one or ones
implicated in the crime, and so the clues must be presented to us by
an intermediary. In this second story, the actions and conversations
are observed, but it has no important meaning, being just a mediator
between the reader and the story of the crime.
Cawelti even recognizes the fact that the pleasure for this sub-
genre comes from “seeing a clear and meaningful order emerge out
of what seemed to be random and chaotic events”. (Cawelti qtd in
Malmgren, 120) The dominant element of the mystery story is a rage
for order, “serving the deity that presides over the motivated worlds
of mystery – the god of Order” (120).
1.3. The Typology of the Detective and Hard-boiled Fiction
Detective novels are still called

mystery stories in English.
(Alewyn qtd in Malmgren, 118)
Most of the classical works in the literature have in their element

a literary canon implying myths and legends, symbols. Writers such
as Raymond Chandler do not take part in this canon. The characters
in these kinds of stories are “hard-boiled” detectives with many
regrets in life, having their origin in their past, plagued by vices,
smoking, drinking etc.
It is said that the first detective story was “The Murders of the
Rue Morgue” by Edgar Allan Poe, published in April 1841. (Encyclo-
paedia Britannica, np), who also stands as the base for the other
genres of the crime fiction and the plot lines. The detective pro-
fession had only appeared a few decades earlier before this writing
and some believe that Poe was influenced the Mémoires (1828-29)
of François-Eugène Vidocq, who founded in1817 the world’s first
detective bureau, in Paris. (Encyclopaedia Britannica) One of the
greatest fictional characters of all time is Sherlock Holmes, along
with his companion Dr Watson created by the author Sir Arthur
Conan Doyle, who has remained until now symbols of the detective
stories. Conan had almost nothing to do to keep Holme’s style of
investigation going, because several writers still take into
consideration the original works, attempting to carry on the Holmes-
ian tradition. We can compare the American and British types of
writing detective novel, as the British being a soft boiled egg and the
American detective fiction as a hard-boiled egg. In the American
type, the actions take place in the city where the detective has to
survive the criminality and strive for justice. (Colombo)
The 1930s eas the golden age of the detective fiction with famous
writers such and Agatha Christie and her fictional character Hercule
Poirot. The decade was marked also by Dashiell Hammett who
inserted in his workings personal experiences as a private detective,
notably The Maltese Falcon. Dashiell Hammett is also the creator of
the hard-boiled fiction, which is “a tough, unsentimental style of
American crime writing that brought a new tone of earthy realism or
naturalism to the field of the detective fiction.” (Encyclopaedia
Britannica, np) By combining his personal experiences as a private
detective with the realistic influences received from writers such as
Ernest Hemmingway, he managed to create an American type of
detective story in an urban setting filled with corruption and
disorder, distinct from the English classic whose pattern had been
followed by American writers for generations. A successful successor
of Hammett is Raymond Chandler, a revolutionary persona in the
field of crime fiction, emphasizing the tough but sensitive character,
Philip Marlowe. (Encyclopaedia Britannica)

The writers of American detective fiction in the thirties created a
“tough”, cynical way of emotions. “The hard-boiled hero was, in
reality, a soft egg compared to this existential counterpart, but they
were a good deal tougher than anything American fiction had seen”
(Schrader).
Some critics and theorists have agreed on the fact that this kind
of fiction needs special attention. Tzvetan Todorov points out the
“whodunit”, the element of the crime fiction with the stories in one:
the story of the crime and the story of the investigation: “detective
fiction manages to make both of them present, to put them side by
side” (Todorov qtd in Malmgren, 115). The “whodunit” is named by
George Grella the “formal detective novel”, and another term for the
mystery story (Grella qtd in Malmgren, 118) and there is the other
one, the “mean streets”, named by the same person “hard-boiled
detective novel” (118).
As Raymond Chandler suggests in his essay “The Simple Art of
Murder” suggests that “detective fiction came into existence as an
oppositional discourse, a form which finds its identity by breaking
with the conventions of the dominant discourse (mystery fiction)”
(Chandler qtd in Malmgren, 123). The difference between mystery
and detective fiction is the fact that the latter counteracts to the basic
principles of the former: order and stability, the regaining of them,
and the solution to the enigmas while the detective story does not
always follow this path.
The detective is the agent or vehicle by which the reader explores
the city; through him, the setting and characters are filtered and
interpreted rather like a prism or looking-glass. The focus of ‘our’
agent is that the author endeavours to immerse his protagonist in a
world that resembles that of his readers’. (Bird, 115)
As a genre of crime fiction, the detective novel has its traditional
elements that can need to be found in all stories according to the
Encyclopaedia Britannica:
a. the presumed ideal crime;

b. the character wrongly accused or suspected;
c. the mistakes and wrong evidence found by the police;
d. the superior intelligence and wit of the detective;
e. the surprising ending, in which the detective reveals how the
culprit was there all the time; (Encyclopaedia Britannica,
np)
A hardship that the detective, along with with the reader,

encounters is unstable or misinterpretations of the signs, the clues
we are given. The signs being unstable “undercuts the ultimate
disclosure of the Truth” (Malmgren, 125). Even if the detective
manages to find a solution to the crime, it is narrated by
uncertainties. The crime may be identified but the truth is not
entirely revealed.
“Detective fiction, in other words, documents the erosion of basic
mystery signs, such as Truth, Justice, and Resolution.” (Malmgren,
125) Because the classical conventions are no longer available in this
genre, the detective finds himself creating “his own concept of
morality and justice.” (Cawelti qtd in Malmgren, 125) These values
reflect the identity of the detective character becoming the origin of
the meaning, creating in the same and Individual and confirming
the idea that “justice finally depends more on the individual than on
society.” (Malmgren, 125)
“The story [of detective fiction] is [the detective’s] adventure in
search of hidden truth” (Chandler qtd in Malmgren, 125) emphas-
izing the idea that the character that is the detective has become a
knight in search of the truth.
The ideas presented previously point out the fact that detective
fiction is “more preoccupied with the character of its hero, the
society he investigates, and the adventures he encounters than with
the central mystery, which gets pushed aside by individual scenes

and situations.” (Grella qtd in Malmgren, 126)
As it is normal, the mystery element remains present in the

story, but the focus is not entirely on it. The interest, in comparison
with the mystery story, has switched to the main protagonist, his
character and fate. The reader is now eager to know what happened
to the detective, his past and the future he seeks, along with his
emotional interests living in a decentred world. One of the most
important elements to keep the reader’s interest focused on the main
protagonist is having him narrate himself his adventures. “First
person narration necessarily entails a degree of identification be-
tween reader and protagonist” (Malmgren, 126) and the first person
narration does not diminish the mystery factor because “the hard-
boiled detective is usually as befuddled as the reader until the end of
the story.” (Cawelti qtd in Malmgren 126)
The first person narration is essential also because it forces the
reader to get into the detective’s shoes, to identify with the
protagonist. This perspective might present the story in a different
manner for each reader and “even as it invites readers to identify
with its central character, this kind of fiction calls into question his
or her integrity, honesty, or stability, thereby undermining the Self
as a stable sign.” (Malmgren, 126)
The reader’s interest in the narrative is different in the detective
story than in the mystery story, as Todorov discovered that curiosity
is central to the mystery story, but suspense drives the detective
story. (126)
As a conclusion, even if the sub-genres of the crime fiction seem
similar, they differ some elements of reality, by their treatment of
the adventures that occur in the story:
Offering the integrity of the investigator, the locus of value and
meaning, as compensation, detective fiction finally divides its
interest between the heroic detective and the squalid world he or
she inhabits. (131)
2. Aspects of the Detective Novel in Young Adult’s

Literature
2.1 Introduction
In the following chapter, I am going to present how the revolu-

tionary American detective novel has emerged in children’s litera-
ture and how the stereotypical characteristics of the genre were
filtered down into its younger sibling.
As I specified in the beginning, this type of fiction, the crime
fictions was not part of children’s literature as it mainly contains
subjects not suitable for children: theft, corruption, murder.
Throughout time, authors popped-up and considered this an oppor-
tunity to revolutionize the children’s literature and make it more
adventurous, also realizing the performance of gaining both adult
and children audience.
Most of the detective stories for children include a high dose of
mystery, as it is the main ingredient into creating a suspenseful and
breath-taking story that will make you want more: “A mystery is
solved with a story.” (Snicket, WCTBaTH, 73) The most successful
detective stories even went on being series as reader kept on won-
dering what their favourite character might be into next time. They
start putting themselves into their shoes, with the adoption of the
first person narrator, which is a step forward from the classical
stories and more personal. The cheerful and happy-ending detective
stories for children of all ages tend to have a moralizing part where
the reader learns to do or not to a certain thing
Some of the detective stories are influenced by Sir Conan Doyle’s
famous Sherlock Holmes, or by a younger figure, such as The
Deadwood Stage by Mike Hogan or Young Sherlock Holmes Adven-
tures by Drew Castalia. But there are also classical ones that used
information just from the period it was published in, as Erich

Kästner’s Emil and the Detectives published in 1928 and about
which I am going to also talk in this chapter.
Besides the less dark setting stories which are avoided in stories
like Emil and the Detectives, appears a more caliginous perspective
brought by the author Lemony Snicket in the series All the Wrong
Questions which I am also going to discuss in the following chapter.
Lemony Snicket’s perspective is more realistic, maybe too realistic,
being able to compare it to the classic American detective novel. This
series might be included in a “postmodern literature movement”,
which was adopted after the World War II and borrowed elements
from the modernist’s brothers: “a heightened focus on formal
experimentation, non-linear narratives, irony, stream-of-conscious-
ness, and a sense of alienation and fractured identity.” (Cruz) It
takes these elements further, developing them, but including ele-
ments of humour.
When trouble strikes, head to the library. You will either be able to
solve the problem, or simply have something to read as the world
crashes down around you.
Snicket, Lemony. A Series of Unfortunate Events
2.2 Emil and the Detectives
Emil and the Detective, by the German author Erich Kästner, is

one of the first child detective stories and can be characterized as a
novel describing an event of a boy’s childhood. The novel was pub-
lished in 1928 in Germany and some critics also believe that it could
divert the direction of the children’s literature that focuses on
dealing with unrealistic characters and places. It is unusual for many
because the background is set into a contemporary Berlin with some
rough characters and not into an idealistic setting, more suitable for
a child.
It is one of the first child detective books which becomes so

successful that it influenced other upcoming authors to write on the
same pattern. Emil and the Detectives is also one of the first books
to picture us a mono-parental family of little means, but still being
able to portray the beauty of childhood and the meaning of
friendship: “[…] it appears to approve of the actions of children
working together for a common purpose without the guidance of
adults.” (Rosen)
It is a more introductory story into the field of detective fiction
for children, it is an innocent one compared to the classic detective
novels, but it includes the crime element. The novel might be a sort
of guide into becoming a detective, a funny and entertaining way for
children, but also an introduction to the raw detective fiction. The
boys in the story take their job very seriously, passing the step of a
make-believe scenario, which caught the attention of all readers.
The story begins in Neustadt, a provincial city, where the prota-
gonist, Emil Tischbein is living only with his mother because his
father died when he was little. They live a modest life and where the
money is a problem.
Emil is on the summer break and his mother decides to send him
to his grandmother in Berlin, along with a sum of money. He is very
careful not to lose the money, therefore, he pins them to his jacket.
On the train to Berlin, he meets a stranger named Grundeis who
offers him chocolate and starts telling Emil made-up stories about
Berlin, that there are people who sometimes leave their brain at the
bank to get a loan. The method used by Grundeis is trope named
Tall Tale that means “a story with unbelievable or outright impos-
sible elements, told as if it were true and factual.” (TV Tropes)
[…] And if one has no money one can go to a bank, get fifty pounds
and leave one’s brain in exchange. No human being can leave longer
than two days without a brain, and he can’t get it back from the
bank unless he pays sixty pounds (Kästner, 26)
Even if Emil tried not to fall asleep, he eventually does and after
a few moments realizes that his money is gone and that Grundeis
stole them. He gets off the train in a different part of Berlin, from
where he spots the thief and starts following him. Emil is afraid to
seek police help because of an act of vandalism he did in his home-
town and feels that he is “a kind of criminal” himself. Following
Grundeis through the big Berlin, he meets a boy about his age,
named Gustav, who, after hearing Emil’s story, is willing to help him
retrieve his money and catch the thief.
‘Well, you see, I’m not playing hide-and-seek,’ said Emil. ‘I’m
watching a thief.’
‘What? Did I hear you say “thief”?’ the other boy replied. ‘Who’s
been stealing from?’
‘Me,’ answered Emil, feeling rather proud of it. ‘On the train,
while I was asleep. Seven pounds, which I was to give my grand-
mother here in Berlin. Then, when he had stolen it he sneaked into
another compartment of the train and got off at the Zoological
Gardens Station. Then he got into a tram. And now he’s over there
in that café – it’s that man in the bowler hat who is looking so
pleased with himself.’ (71)
By describing the events up to the moment he meets Gustav we

can observe how deeply involved Emil is in the investigation and is
willing to do whatever it takes to take his money back. Gustav went
to seek for other boys willing to help and came back to Emil with a
bunch of them, who also call themselves “the detectives”. Every boy
in the group is assigned a job to do, they make a detective plan and
they all try to do their best, truly willing to help Emil even if they
don’t know him very well: one of them has to stay all time besides
the phone in order to communicate to others the information on the
separate groups, they made plans that the culprit will be watching all
time and even they had some sent to bring food.
“But watch your step,” called the Professor, “The crook need not
need to know that there are detectives on his trail. That would make
it harder to get him.” (111)
The word “detectives” in the title signifies the group of boys that
are helping Emil, but this is an actually a reversed detective novel, as
Emil and the boys know who the culprit is and what he has done,
proving him guilty after they caught him, rather than before.
After following Grundeis to a hotel, they watch him all night in
order not to get away, and the next morning even more boys come in
to help, making a huge group that follows Grundeis to a bank where
he wants to change Emil’s money. Arriving there, Emil tells a police
officer that Grundeis stole his money and the proof they were his
money is the small hole made by the needle used to pin it to his
jacket.
In detective fiction, the sleuth is an adult who will try to make
the world a safer place for all people. This might be a symbolic
contradiction to the fact that children are the bearers of innocence,
but can as clever and sharp as their fellow adults. This is a bigger
part of the book, the idea that real children with flaws manage to
adapt their job and save the entire society from a perilous criminal
without the adult’s help. This points out the Free-Range Children
(TV Trope) trope as there are few people who would allow a 12-year-
old boy to go alone to a big city to deliver a sum of money. This type
of children will wander the place without or a little adult supervising.
One may point here the fact that when they needed to stay all night
to watch over Grundeis, not all boys were able to stay because their
parents did agree to it. The Professor confesses to Emil the fact that
he has an open relationship with his parents and can stay how much
he wants outside as long as he does not lie to them or does
something to put himself in danger.
“Oh, well, the average one is all right,” answered the Professor. “It is
the most sensible way to be. This way we don’t lie to them. I’ve
promised my parents not to do anything that’s wrong or dangerous.
And as long as I keep my word I can do what I want to. He is a

splendid fellow, my father.” (122)
This is proof that children can do anything they set their mind to.
As they are the smaller part of the human race, it’s impressive that
their literature presents that the heroes are capable of acts beyond
their usual capabilities, they just need motivation and support. Emil
had the motivation to get back the money his hard-working mother
gave him, and the support of the group of boys willing to help him
without expecting anything in return.
Kästner was born in 1899 in a small town, similar to Emil’s
hometown, and like Emil, he lost his father when he was young.
Kästner managed to make his way to Berlin where he started writing
stories and poetry when he was approached by a publishing house in
Berlin, asking him to write a detective novel for children. Emil and
the Detectives is the book that made him famous. We can also find
the Creator Cameo trope in the book, which means that the author
himself makes an appearance in the story to write an article about
the boys’ investigation.
Then Herr Kästner took a taxi for Emil, Gustav, and the Professor,
and they went first for a pastry shop. On the way, Gustav honked.
And they were delighted when Herr Kästner jumped. (188)
Being a pre-Nazi book, it was in danger of being burned down,

but it managed to escape by competing against it with “a story of a
martyred hero of the Hitler Youth.” (Rosen)
As a pre-Nazi book Emil and the Detectives maintains an optim-
istic approach of the fact that even if adults might do wrong things,
children come to sort it out, as a hopeful book for a better future,
that children can bring the good back in the world.
In conclusion, with the elements presented above it results that
the story Emil and the Detectives is a child detective novel, even if
more in a reverse manner (known in adult detective movies as police
procedural) because the culprit is known and the detectives, point
out that there is a group of them, not just one, are following him in
order to catch him and retrieve the stolen item. Emil is following
him alone until he meets Gustav, until then he picked up some
information about the criminal to prove he is guilty and catch him in
the end, proving Minor Crime Reveals Major Plot (TV Tropes). Not
only Gundreis stole from Emil, but after he is arrested for this theft,
further investigation reveals him to be a bank robber searched by the
police.
2.3 Bittersweet Masterpiece: All the Wrong Questions
In the following part, I am going to discuss the similarities

between All the Wrong Questions series and the classic detective
novel and how Daniel Handler AKA Lemony Snicket managed to
revive and adapt the mystery subtype of detective fiction into
becoming suitable for children. The discussion starts from the reality
that this series is so widely acclaimed and read not only by adults but
young adults themselves, how he managed to revive a genre that was
most popular in the forties and the fifties in America.
On an interview made by The Masters Review, he is told that the
fact that terrible things are happening to children draws more of a
reaction. His response is one of distancing, as he acknowledges that
it is absurd that such things are happening to children, making that
the line between terrifying and funny be easily crossed. (cf. The
Masters Review) When mentioned R.L. Stine’s opinion that the
borderline between funny and frightening has become blurred,
Daniel Handler does not completely agree. He corrects saying it’s
more like the line between funny and sad, he believes his books are
not that scary, but they contain emotional catharsis as they are both
sad, and funny. (The Masters Review)
This new series of detective fiction for young adults named All
the Wrong Questions by Lemony Snicket is a different, yet darker
perspective of the previous story discussed Emil and the Detectives.

It is a more complex storyline, closely related to and influenced by
the famous American hard-boiled detective fiction.
The writing style of Daniel Handler is not very common for an
author of children’s literature, as he adopts a more realistic
approach, veering even to a pessimistic view of life and thus turning
against the traditional stories ending in “…and they lived happily
ever after”. His writing contains dark, pessimistic elements that
suggest that the good has vanished and there is no hope left. This
sounds like a scenario no children’s literature author should ever
approach, but his seductive style of presenting the events still lures
the readers into going on with the story.
On an interview for The Guardian Handler was asked: “How old
does a child need to be to appreciate Lemony Snicket?”, and he
answers that there is a simple test to find out who will go on: “If
there was a small child here who said, ‘Can I have one of those
cookies?’ I might say, ‘One of those cookies is poisoned. We have no
idea which one.’”, and he goes on like “there’s the sort of child who is
alarmed by that and the sort of child who delights in it.” (Jeffries)
This also proves the fact that his writing put emphasis on the
imagination and thinking of children, not only on the real things.
Going on the same subject Handler mentions: “People say, ‘How old
does a child need to be to appreciate Lemony Snicket?’ And I say,
‘It’s not how old, it’s the arrival of irony.’”(Jeffries) Irony is one of
the most powerful weapons against evil, admitting that when he was
young he was taught the power of the written word and the
importance of exposing evil wherever there were.
He summarizes his kind of literature by saying that: “If you can
understand that a book can contain machetes and minor inconven-
iences, be horrific and funny, then you’ll enjoy my kind of literature”.
(Jeffries) He sums up the idea that his literature must contain bits
from everything, whether bright or dark: “I think all of my work has
a certain tone: it looks askance at the world, it understands that it

can be serious and hilarious at the same time.” (Jeffries)
Snicket’s books explore children’s suffering in a distinctive voice.
As an author for young adult readers, his genre of writing includes a
certain Gothic strain of depressiveness and an unusual emphasis on
style, that are idiosyncratic traits of Handler’s writing. His series
very much resembles the dark fiction of the detective novel, and
Handler’s irony in his writings provides a view on what people might
offer each other for survival. The series ATWQ provide a response to
the death of morality of a fallen world: “The inability to distinguish
good and evil haunts the series.” (Lanbauer, 507)
The adaptability of this genre first intended for adults, the
detective novel, has been possible because children’s literature
leaves ample room for experimentation. (507) The story in the
ATWQ revolves around a series of mysteries that young Lemony
Snicket has to solve. The mysteries are solved without adult
involvement because children do what they have to do, it’s their
protectors who get stuck “in the casuistry of parsing our justice or
blame.” (507)
One of the traditional qualities of common mystery stories is “the
clever planting of foreshadowing; those who read the genre over
time acquire skill in putting together the bits of foreshadowing to
predict an outcome.” (Lukens, 18-19) Snicket’s series All the Wrong
Questions plot is carefully drawn and has strong themes, various
typologies of characters, and a style that is distinctive from the
traditional mystery story for children and young adults. The mystery
is the element that must be part of the well-written stories, not only
for children but also adults. It creates suspense related to characters
or plot.
While the first series A Series of Unfortunate Events worked as a
tribute to and parody of the Gothic literature, All the Wrong
Questions does almost the same to the noir detective fiction. Young
Lemony Snicket’s descriptions are enough to make Philip Marlowe

proud of him.
The young Lemony Snicket resembles the stereotypical detective
character that can be found in the American hard-boiled detective
novel, resembling Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe that I have
chosen as his hallmark. Not only do characters seem alike, but what
we have is the adaptation of a children’s book to the tropes of a genre
created for an older audience.
One of the most typical figures of hard-boiled detective story,
Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe is a product of the ruthless
polemic with the iconic figures of police literature until its
apparition. He manifests this character trait especially in his use of
the language. His callousness is present more in the language than in
attitudes, but despite this, he always succeeds in solving the mystery
and triumphing. Solitude is a mandatory trait for this type of
character, it’s the essence of a new typology of human. In his The
Metaphysics of Detective Marlowe, Mircea Mihăieș cites Robert B.
Parker on the character’s separateness: “Loneliness is the price
Marlowe has to pay in order to keep his integrity.” 3 (transl. mine, 16)
This integrity is finding the truth in a world where an entire
conjuration has been created around it in order to hide it.
These characteristics can be easily found in Lemony Snicket’s
attitude, who keeps a certain distance and harbours secrets from his
associates. Besides the fact that he is part of the V.F.D which is a
top-secret organisation, he finds clues that he refuses to share with
his group and even with the reader, as he does not fully trust anyone
around. The hard-boiled detective refuses the emotional attachment
to anyone in order to control his identity and his own beliefs, which
is what young Lemony Snicket also does when he hides secrets from
his friends and his chaperone. This might also happen because he
thinks that they might not believe him. He tries to form a group of
detectives, but then he always finds himself working alone.
Throughout the story, Snicket meets different types of people

above his age: a journalist, a cook, a chemist, taxi drivers and others,
with whom he makes his associates since they are willing to save
their city from disappearing: “The world is a puzzle and we cannot
solve it alone. (Snicket, WDYSHL, 142)
Besides the friends, there is a romantic attachment that is not
clearly described but can be interpreted from Lemony’s actions. As
every hard-boiled detective novel, there must be a romantic
attachment to complete the pattern. We have two types of girls that
need to be mentioned here. First is Moxie Mallahan, the only
journalist left in Stain’d-by-the-Sea who is willing to help Snicket
save the city. She is the good girl type that is rejected by Snicket
because he does not see in her anything but a friend. And then we
have Ellington Feint, who is a bit older than Lemony but to whom he
promises he would help her find his father. This promise will get him
in many troubles with her, since she is capable of doing anything,
stealing and lying to anyone in order to find her missing father.
Ellington Feint is the younger version of the femme fatale, fille
fatale. By the following queer description, it might be interpreted
that Snicket is starting to feel something for her.
The something else was a girl, taller than I was or older than I was
or both. She had curious eyebrows, curved and coiled like questions
marks, and she had a smile that might have meant anything. Her
eyes were green and her hair black it made caviar look beige […]
(Snicket, SYBiS, 9)
Following the actions after meeting her, he realizes she is the

doom of him but keeps having faith in her until the end, even if he
suspects her of every crime that is happening in town. She becomes
a motif in his life, good and bad since his life is changed forever after
having met her:
I’d learned long ago, as everybody learns, that the earth turns
around something called an axis, which is a word for a line that goes
down the middle of something. It’s not a real line. The axis is
imaginary, a line that exists only in your mind. I had never under-
stood it until that moment in the train compartment. Ellington
Feint was a line in my mind running right down the middle of my
life, separating the formal training of my childhood and the territory
of the rest of my days. She was an axis, and at that moment, and for
many moments afterwards, my entire world revolved around her.
(Snicket, WITNDfAON, 161-62)
Every book has printed on the first page a little text which posits
the book you are about to read is really a file that Lemony Snicket
has mailed to somebody in the fictional town Stain’d-by-the-Sea,
containing keywords from the story that is about to be narrated.
TO: Eratosthenes
FROM: LS
FILE UNDER: Stain’d-by-the-Sea, accounts of; arson;
investigations of; Hangfire; pedagogy; Haines
family, suspicious concerning; et cetera
¾
cc: VFDhq
(Snicket, SYBiS)
The curious thing about these reports is the fact that why they
even exist. As a curious reader I have asked myself “what’s going to
happen this time?” but as Snicket would say, this is the wrong
question, because instead, I should have asked: why does he need to
mail the reports instead of meeting the certain person to talk? Could
there be a reason why he can’t go there? He begins each of the
stories in the same pattern: with a little introduction of the crime
that happened.
There was a town, and there was a statue, and there was a person
who had been kidnapped. While I was in the town, I was hired to
rescue this person, and I thought the statue was gone forever. I was
almost thirteen and I was wrong. I was wrong about all of it. I
should have asked the question “How could someone who was
missing be in two places at once?” Instead, I asked the wrong
question – four wrong questions, more or less. This is the account of
the second. (Snicket, WDYSHEL, 1)
He is a 13-years-old boy who had been kidnapped when he was
little and trained to become a secret agent but who does not own any
special traits besides his sharp mind an ironic tone. In the detective
novel, the emphasis has been moved on some details about the
events, and also on what the protagonist feels.
I used to be that young man, almost thirteen, walking alone down
an empty street in a half-faded town. I used to be that person, eating
stale peanuts and wondering about a strange dusty item that was
stolen or forgotten and that belonged to one family or another or
their enemies or their friends. Before that, I was a child receiving an
unusual education, and before that, I was a baby who, I’m told, like
looking in mirrors and sticking his toes into his mouth. I used to be
that young man, and that child, and that baby, and the building I
stood in front of used to be a city hall. Stretched out in front of me
was my time as an adult, and then a skeleton, and then nothing
except perhaps a few books on a few shelves. (Snicket, WCTBaTH,
72)
For Lemony Snicket, being a detective is everything, even if he

tells us he is just a volunteer and does not make a living out of this.
He has other hobbies which keep him sane and in balance, he finds
peace reading books, and this is why the motif of the library is
omnipresent in the series
“I’m not a detective at all,” I said. I was something they told us again
and again, over the course of our childhoods, from the day we could
understand what the words meant to the day we graduated and we
were sent out into the world. “It looks like I’m solving mysteries, but
I’m not.” (Snicket, WDYSHL, 213)
In ways like the detective’s character, the crime committed, the

gloomy and dark city that is similar to the details noted by Mircea
Mihăieș in his study on Raymond Chandler, Snicket’s target goes
beyond the usual detective novels aim – entertainment and maybe a
moralizing end. It is metaphysical. It includes themes as loneliness,
disillusionment, uselessness, disgust, horror, fear. For example, we
have the moment he felt numerous emotions after Ellington showed
him the monster in the pond.
I felt sick. It was a sickness in my stomach and in my mouth and
even in my heart. The symptoms were nervousness and dread. I
don’t know what the illness is called. I’ve had it since I was a child.
(Snicket, SYBiS, 245)
The detective figure envisioned by Raymond Chandler is the
character placed in disadvantageous situations, portraying moments
of weakness in the character that tried to keep a hard steel grip on
his true self. In these situations, the character loses his heroic aura
and instead of the sensible man, a boy in this case, with his regrets,
imagining different scenarios if his like were different.
There is no point in delaying crying. Sadness is like having a vicious
alligator around. You can ignore it for only so long before it begins
devouring things and you have to pay attention. (Snicket,
WITNDfAON, 147)
We might insert here the moment Snicket remembers the way he
was playing with his siblings at their home, before being taken by
V.F.D. The only weapon against the cruel world that wants to
destroy him is his cynicism, his use of irony and sarcasm, his not
allowing his interior to be visible. In the case of ATWQ the detective
is 13-year-old boy who might still need the help of his parents, but
who, because he was deprived of this gift, has to learn to live on his
own in a world where adults tend to be more against the children
than being willing to help them: “My parents can’t help me,” I said.
“They’re helpless.”
Snicket had no other choice than to become a detective in the
V.F.D, and, whenever alone, he longs for the good old days. But he
feels the need to justify the fact that the V.F.D. is not a mere secret
group, but they fight for the world’s good. At this moment in his life,
Lemony Snicket still has some hope left about the outcome of doing
the right things and helping those in need.
We represent the true human tradition, the one permanent victory
over cruelty and chaos. We’re an invincible army, but not a
victorious one. We’ve had different names throughout history, but
all the words that describe us are false and all attempts to organize
us fail. Right now we’re called V.F.D., but all our schisms and
arguments might cause us to disappear. It won’t matter. People like
us always slip through the net. Our true home is the imagination,
and our kingdom is the wide-open world. (Snicket, SYBiS, 208)
And there is another optimist note at the end of the first book
when he sounds hopeful that justice might be possible:
I had been wrong over and over and over again, wrong every time
about every clue to the dark and inky mystery hanging over me and
everybody else. It rang like a bell in my head – wrong, wrong,
wrong. I was wrong, I thought, but maybe if I stayed in this town
long enough, I could make everything right. (Snicket, WCTBaTH,
258)
Fighting against chaos and evil is his true purpose in life. Yet
apparently, his cold unintimidated look AND his boldness towards
whoever he has to dace do not distinguish HIM from the “bad guys,”
his sworn enemies. What distinguishes him however is his
acceptance of failure, of knowing that not everything will end
happily. Most of the time, the bad guys in the series are the adults,
who are not evil in themselves, but just seem to do the wrong things
all the time, and so they inadvertently do more to aid evil than any
genuine bad guy could ever hope for. In the second volume, he says
that people don’t do things because they are good or bad, they do
them because they can’t think about anything else to. (80). He seems
to blame evil on a lack of imagination. He fears he might grow up to
become someone he would not want to:
It seemed to me that every adult did something terrible sooner or
late. And every child, I thought, sooner or later becomes an adult.
(176)
The innate state of the detective, the one that separates him from
other types of characters, is the state of revolt, which can be seen in
every mission he undertakes. The classic detective is revolting
against the entire world. As Mihăieș states the fact that “the
character does not need to be real, because the author struggled to
make him plausible.”4 (Mihăieș, 53) The revolt Snicket is having in
the series is a constant repulsion of the adult controlling and the de-
cisions they take.
The children of this world and the adults of this world are in entirely
separate boats and only drift each other when we need a ride from
someone or when someone needs us to wash our hands. (174)
Taking the clue from him and his chaperone, Theodora, Snicket
clearly knows that she is an awful detective. When Theodora decides
that the case is solved and does not need further investigation,
Lemony knows that it’s the moment the investigation just begins. He
starts looking for the criminal on his own. He is not a pawn
controlled by the grown-ups and believes in the virtues of honour,
honesty and kindness. Children still have hope and seek solutions
long after adults have given up.
He smiled at me. “You can’t tell them everything,” he said.

“They wouldn’t understand.”
“Who taught you that?”
“You did, Snicket. Remember? You said we could make our
organisation greater than ever, but only if we stopped listening to
our instructors and found new ways to fix the world.” (Snicket,
WDYSHL, 274)
Like in the most famous hard-boiled detective novel, the story is

narrated in the first person, which brings the advantages of direct
expressing, communication, but also packs in the possibility of
reader manipulation. The convention of the first person narratives
for older readers once adopted in this children’s detective novel
seem to explore the tensions of growing up in a child or a young
adult. (Lukens, 181) Snicket thus becomes a tool used for the direct
observation of reality. Just like in Raymond Chandler’s books, we
have two novels rolled in one: one that is built around the criminal
events that require the detective’s emergence and the other that is
the novel of the detective’s dilemmas and troubles. The same pattern
is applied to Lemony Snicket, who, besides introducing us into the
almost abandoned town of Stain’d-by-the-Sea and how he reveals
the mystery little by little details about Snicket’s life outside his
detecting job. Thus, we learn that, instead of meeting Theodora, he
should have gone with his sister Kit and help her on a mission;
failing that, he was not there to help her, and as a result, she got
caught. He still blames the adults and himself:
The reason it made me furious was that I knew my sister was
probably standing in front of a hatch with etched initials, perhaps at
the very same moment. […] It felt the same. Adults etching initials
into a hatch and then shutting a hatch so nobody could reach the
important secrets… (242)
All the volunteers are doing their jobs – all of us except you. You
threw a wrench in the works, Snicket. Instead of drinking your tea
like a good boy, you left your sister to do a two-person caper all
alone … (Snicket, WITNDfAON, 281)
Reinforcing the prevailing stereotype of the series that Adults

are Useless, the policemen Mimi and Harvey Mitchum intervene but
prove to be not only useless but also incompetent. The police couple
has a boy named Stew, of the same age as Lemony, who is a devil in
disguise Stew acts outwardly as an obedient loving child whenever
around his parents, but becomes a murderer whenever on his own,
and stays so until the end of the story.
As in most of the detective stories the police force is introduced
just to get in the detective’s way or inadvertently to help the
criminal, or even turns out to be the criminal. In this case, the police
officers are just incompetent and blind, as they don’t get anything
right and always interfere in Lemony’s investigation and blame him
for the crimes. The police force considers the private eye to be
intruding in their territory and thus become antagonistic. The ones
that should keep the order are the ones protecting the criminal, even
if they know he is guilty.
“Yes,” Eratosthenes said and pointed one of his long and bony
fingers to Stew Mitchum. “He’s the one.”
The Mitchums could not look at each other, or at their son.
“You’ll leave our boy alone,” Harvey said quietly.
[…]
“We’re not going to arrest our own son,” Harvey said.

“It’s not natural,” his wife agreed. “It’s this Ellington girl who
committed murder.” (WITNDfAON, 245)
Another aspect present in the classic hard-boiled detective is the

ironic, even sarcastic, tone with which he usually answers, mostly to
the persons he dislikes. This is a weapon used to hide his true senti-
mental nature, more like defence weapon than of attack. Lemony
Snicket’s character is defined by his sarcastic nature even in extreme
situations. The sarcastic tone in the following situation is meant to
slow down the pace of the action. Here’s an example: the moment
Moxie and Lemony hear a woman scream in a house:
There’s an easy method for finding someone when you hear them
scream. First, get a clean sheet of paper and a sharp pencil. Then
sketch out nine rows of fourteen squares each. Then throw the piece
of paper away and find whoever is screaming so you can help them.
It is not time to fiddle with paper. (Snicket, WCTBaTH, 169)
The line presents a technical solution in a tensioned moment, it
looks more like an exercise of controlling the anger. The first line
reveals to be just useless, used only to revert to the most basic of
human reactions, reacting when someone is in danger. It is an
example of the ironic answers Snicket gives us.
As mentioned before, his ironic comments are used as a weapon
of defence. A clear example is a response Lemony gives to the bully
in the story, Stew Mitchum. He believes that if he is the son of the
police officers he has the right to do whatever he wants. He is a brat
who blames all his misdeeds on Lemony and gets away with it. But
this does not help him, because Lemony can verbally beat him up
with his repartees proving the dumbness of the bully. He has clever
quips, sharp repartee and memorable one-liners: “Do the scary thing
first, and get scared later” (Snicket, WDYLSH, 129) or “I do what I
do," I said, "in order to do something else.” (WCTBaTH, 123) He can
disentangle himself from any sticky situation and make use of an
attitude that reminds us of the superiority theory of humour
targeted at stupid people:
“That’s an old question,” Stew said. “If I were you, I wouldn’t

worry about my education. I’d worry about your chaperone. She’s
trapped, like a spider caught in a web.”
“Spiders make web,” I said. “They don’t get caught in them.”
“I meant a fly,” Stew growled.
“How in the world could a spider get caught in a fly?”
(WITNDfAON, 130)
One of the characteristics of the detective novel is the fact that it

must contain a dose of humour because the entertaining element
would be missing if between crimes pieces of funny scenes weren’t
present.
The dry humour used by Lemony Snicket goes hand in hand with
his sarcastic nature. In his semi-autobiographical book Palm Sun-
day, Kurt Vonnegut once stated: “The beginning [of a good joke]
challenges you to think… the second part of a joke announces that
nobody wanted you to think.” (Vonnegut qtd. in Britt) In ATQW the
opposite is happening as in the beginning everything seems like a
joke that should not be taken seriously, but things get dark by the
end of it
Besides the fact that they represent the Police are Useless trope
(Cf. TV Tropes), such attitudes provide a type of humour that is
different from the usual sarcastic dry-humour of Lemony Snicket. As
a married couple that tends to engage into arguments whenever they
are on duty, the two policemen crack jokes on their married life that
might be funny for the older audience who gets the point:
“Mimi, you’re my wife whether we’re on duty or not.”

“Don’t remind me,” his wife replied. “I’m having a bad enough
day as it is.”
[…]
“When have you ever seen a pack of wolves?”
“Well, not actual wolves, but I’ve visited your sister’s house, and
her kids– “(87-88)
A noir environment pervades the novels’ setting, the crime

scenes and haunts of the investigator. In most realistic novels actual
cities are described, but the town in the series does not seem to have
any actual correspondent. Lemony Snicket finds himself in a small
abandoned town named Stain’d-by-the-Sea, which used to have a
beautiful seafront. Like in some post-industrial dystopia, the sea was
drained in order for the last octopi from it to be collected and ink to
be extracted from them. This decision led to the complete extinction
of the octopi, and now a failed city, Stain’d-by-the-Sea is slowly
losing its inhabitants who are leaving for a better life. Because of its
gloomy story, the city is a shady place crossed with empty streets like
many cities in detective fiction. The post-industrial side of the city,

its dilapidated Ink factory, strongly alter the town’s perspective.
“Ink,” Theodora corrected. “The town is called Stain’d-by-the-Sea.
Of course, it is no longer by the sea, as they’ve drained it away. But
the town still manufactures ink that was once famous for making
the darkest, most permanent stains.” (Snicket, WCTBaTH, 27)
The introduction of the Ink factory is the clear statement that the
city is part of a wholly fictional place in a detective novel, inhabited
by people, whose blinding selfish ambitions had consumed them
entirely, leaving place for nothing.
It felt like the wrong thing to do, standing at the wrong door in the
wrong place. We did it anyway. Knowing that something is wrong
and doing it anyway happens often in life, and I doubt I will ever
know why. (33)
The draining of the sea might seem an impossible thing, but

we should not forget that this is a book for children, so such flights
of imagination are permitted here. The apparition of the Clusterous
Forest replacing the sea that once bordered the city might be a
symbol for lifelessness and emptiness since water symbolizes life in
many cultures. According to Eom, water represents the origin of all
possibilities because of its strong association with life and birth. (cf.
Eom) The disappearance of life from the city leads to the series of
misdeeds that occur once despair set in.
Mircea Mihăieș notes that cities in detective novels often seem
inspired by nouveau-art drawings, a queer world in which
corruption comes from selfish ambitions that turn a city into a place
of despair and darkness.1 (Cf. Mihăieș, 49)
The majority of scenes happen at night or on gloomy weather
under constant heavy rain. The rainfall tends to increase in direct
proportion to the mystery. Having more nocturnal scenes than
diurnal scenes contributes to the overall atmosphere of the story.
I don’t know why wicked places generally look wicked. You’d think
they’d look nice, to fool people, but they hardly do. Even the sky was
helping out by looking like it would rain. Even the bushes, even the
flowers on the bushes, looked like they wanted to hurt somebody.
(Snicket, WDYSHL, 212)
The forsaken city of Stain’d-by-the-Sea seems to be taken out of
the classical detective stories fraught with caliginous imagery
underneath there is but corruption and degradation. This is the case
of the villain that haunts the city: Hangfire. From a once honest and
intelligent naturalist, Armstrong Feint has turned into the enemy of
the city, blinded and dehumanized by despair.
I wonder if villainy was like Armstrong Feint, someone once kind
and gentle who lowered himself into treachery, or more like a
mysterious beast, hidden in the depths and summoned to wicked-
ness. But all these questions seemed wrong. They weren’t my job
[…] my job was not to ask questions about villainy but to try and
repair its damage. (Snicket, WITNDfAON, 290)
In the case of the bully Stew Mitchum, stupidity turns to villainy.

He qualifies for the trope of Took a Level in Jerkass (Cf. TV Tropes)
as he starts out as mean kid but becomes a murderer at the end, and
this without regretting anything. He does not feel bad for killing
Qwerty and even gets away with it because the police officers happen
to be his parents. Stew Mitchum is thus on another level of villainy.
The act of murder committed by him eliminates the most important
witness of the crime, making it difficult ever more to solve.
We are all told to ignore bullies. It’s something they teach you, and
they can’t teach you anything. It doesn’t mean you learn it. It
doesn’t mean you believe in it. One should never ignore bullies. One
should stop them. (Snicket, When Did You See Her Last, 184-185)
Leaving aside the shown cold shield of carelessness, the true

detective’s character goes hand in hand with his inside identity: the
image of the saviour.6 (Mihăieș, underlining mine, 22) The loneli-
ness the detective feels might be the only ally he has in the de-
generate universe he must live in. Throughout his journey, he might
have found some friends who only pursue their desires and abandon
the character after they managed to fulfil their dreams. Although he
preserves his traits until the end – courage, wisdom, and irony –
they fall in the second place, replaced by repressed sadness,
weariness. The only weapons of defence he has left are his
callousness and cynicism, creating a shield to protect his
weaknesses.
Snicket is the embodiment of the stranger, of the loner misfit.
Even if full of flaws, he does not give up his job, friends and not even
himself. The detective’s feeling of dignity is stronger than giving up.
Even at the moment when his friends abandon him for killing the
villain.
My own associates saw me, but they didn’t say anything. Nobody
did. I would have liked if they’d said something, but I do not
volunteer expecting gifts or thank in return. It was not necessary for
the denizens of Stain’d-by-the-Sea to help me, just as it was not
necessary for me to tell them all I knew […] It was not necessary to
say anything at all. My heart ached to say something to them, but it
wasn’t my job. (Snicket, WITNDfAO, 289)
Usually, the classic detective novel ends in a gay tone that

celebrates the triumph of light on darkness. Contrary to this,
Lemony Snicket’s ending is devastating and bittersweet. He does not
receive the gratitude for his actions, instead, he is blamed for the
mistakes he has done, but he does not give up and moves on doing
his job. Lemony Snicket has found his designation and he wants to
proudly do it alone in other places that needed his help. The attitude
Snicket adopts in the end, the hopeful mask might be a mockery to
the hard-boiled detective novel that kept the dark sarcastic setting
until the very end.
I turned and kept moving. I walked away from the city, where I’d
had my early training, and I walked away from Stain’d-by-the-Sea,
where I no longer belonged. I walked away from the tracks and into
the wild and lawless territory of the Clusterous Forest. I moved
quickly. I moved quickly. The beast shivered in my coat. My
apprenticeship was over, but there was still work to be done. (291)
As a conclusion, the presented elements above prove that a genre

made for adults was successfully adapted for a younger audience.
Adults and children have different tastes in how a detective should
be, but with the apparition of this new type of sleuth, one of the
party’ taste might change. All the Wrong Questions might be
interpreted as a hard-boiled detective fiction for children but with
elements from both children and adult repertories.
ENDNOTES
1 “Fara copilul din tine esti un adult pierdut” (Activitatea

Misionara)
2 “Cate carti citesti, atatea vieti traiesti.”
3 “Singuratatea e o trasatura obligatory a acestui tip de personaj
…” (Mihăieș, 16)
4 “Nici nu e nevoie ca Marlowe sa fie un personaj real, de vreme
ce autorul s-a straduit sa faca din el unul plauzibil.” (53)

5 “Exista ceva stilizat, ca in desenele nouveau-art, de lume
inaccesibila si straina…” (49)

6 “În ciuda indiferenței afișate, privirea detectivului e atrasă de
ceea ce corespunde identității sale adânci: imaginea salvatorului.”

(22)
Conclusion
The creation of this paper can be considered a journey
for I have explored different fields, crossed the field of children’s
literature and went into the adult’s one and vice versa. Lemony
Snicket’s All the Wrong Questions was a challenge since this was my
first encounter with this type of literature for children.
The main focus of this paper was to lighten the relationship
between child and adult as a power relation. I have presented how
Snicket managed to overthrow this relation between the two groups
and change the focus of the story more on the younger characters in
a story, giving them the power to decide. I have also pointed out
some of the techniques he uses to engage not only children but also
adults, into reading.
In the first part of the paper, I managed to clarify concepts
about what is children’s literature, how it came into being and how it
developed through time encountering different adult boundaries.
Children’s literature has a base in the adults’ stories and in time it
grew into becoming an independent entity.
In the second part, I present the crime fiction genres and how
it managed to survive in time, suffering modifications and
adaptions. Due to its adaptability into different structures, it
managed to survive and become a self-contained structure in
literature. It also the central part of my work that deals with the
adaptability of the American detective fiction’s adaptability into
children’s literature. Lemony Snicket is not only the mysterious
cynic detective totally devoted to solving the cases but also an
individual that seeks sympathy.
All the Wrong Questions presents the harsh reality that stories
do not always have a happy ending, using pieces of humour to make
it more enjoyable and easy to digest. This might be one of the
reasons why this series is read not only by a child audience but
adults as well. It tells the truth in a story, which not all children
literature authors’ have the courage to do.
The conclusion I draw about this series by Lemony Snicket is
that children need to learn to let their imagination and creativity fly,
have pieces of independence in order to solve the mysteries in their
lives. The main idea the series expresses is that it’s never time to give
up, no matter how many obstacles are there or questions to be
asked. In the end, all will make sense and the questions answered.
You need to believe in your true forces.
Reference List
Acronyms
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ASoUE – A Series of Unfortunate Events
WCTBaTH – Who Could That Be at This Hour?
WDYSHL – When Did You See Her Last?
SYBiS – Shouldn’t You Be in School?
WITNDfAON – Why Is This Night Different from All Other
Nights?
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Children's Detective Novel: Lemony Snicket's "All The Wrong Questions"

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Children's Detective Novel: Lemony Snicket's "All The Wrong Questions"

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MINISTERUL EDUCAŢIEI NAȚIONALE

UNIVERSITATEA TEHNICĂ DIN CLUJ NAPOCA

LEMONY SNICKET’ S SERIES

masterand coordonator ştiinţific

Oana-Camelia Roman conf.dr. Adrian Oţoiu

Chapter I: Children’s Literature through Time .................. 5

Chapter II: Anatomy of Crimes – Mystery, Detective

Reference List ..................................................................84

and its subgenres by presenting their evolution in time and the

Chapter I: Children’s Literature through Time

Snicket/Handler pokes fun at the cheerful, positive tone of much

1.1. The Power and Evolution of Children’s Literature

Children’s literature is a vast section of literature that includes

alterations depending on what children enjoyed reading and what

Also known as ‘Juvenile Literature’, children’s literature includes

there to be addressed and that speaking to it might be simple … If

As a result of the early years of State Education in America in the

strongly connected to it. But throughout history we discover that

This is confirmed in Carol Fox’s study on the effect of literature

normal mind functioning in society. To learn to speak is to learn to

Serious topics of social and moral contemporary life – sex,

The clear and observable exclusion of children’s literature from

Felicity A. Hughes observes in the previous quote that if you re-

The concept described above, hybridity, actually contains both

the impossible relation between adult and child. Children’s

appeal to both genders, in order to reach to all types of readers. Girls

Fantasy critics were a ‘blessing in disguise’, as fantasy can be

Lillian Smith also discusses why adults can’t understand and

1.2. Social Development and Educational Purposes in

Literature for children represents a unique phase in a young

the meanings available to them. (Banerjee)

Social development is one of the interests in the growth of chil-

children’s literature come from classrooms where teachers appraise

1.3. Teenage Fiction

To draw a line between group ages is a rather complicated

complexity. Suddenly you are surrounded anew by difficulties and

The shift presented above is the particular idea that makes

present, past and in the future.’ (554)

“I thought it would be interesting if

Daniel Handler is an American author and screenwriter, best

My young readers are not only finding a diversion in the

At the beginning of the series ASoUE, Daniel Handler avoids

a period of his youth spent in a fading town, far from anyone he

A Postmodern feature Handler uses to challenge the interaction

As a postmodern feature of literature, metafiction a more like a

all my least favourite [children’s] book.” (qtd in Langbauer, 506)

3.2. Teaching the reader and the tools for learning

Handler not only uses the metafiction technique to challenge the

know a subject ourselves or we know where we can find information

protagonist find answers to the mysteries he is researching, even the

“Do you know why he calls himself Hangfire?” I asked.

Or the classical local explanation of the words that keep re-

Another way of saying this is that it is ruffling. Another way of

Asking questions is another technique that mimics teaching the

This series’ response to the ethical dilemmas throughout the

“Snicket,” Squeak said, braking and breaking the silence, “how

Besides this language teaching, Snicket inserts in the book subtle

At the end of the third book Snicket says something to Ellington

3.3 The Motif of the Library

While the library is a recurrent motif in all kinds of literature, its

equipped to leave a childlike world of being controlled and instead

they would never approach a library. Just in case an intruder found

The importance of libraries as a ground of knowledge, that