Issue #655

If you are interested in stories with happy endings, you would be better off reading some other book. In this book, not only is there no happy ending, there is no happy beginning and very few happy things in the middle.
--''Book the First: The Bad Beginning''

Daniel Handler would like to dispel a virulent -- a word that here means ''rather nasty'' -- rumor: He is not Lemony Snicket.

This should be apparent to all but the most visually impaired of readers, he argues. Mr. Snicket is a tall man with brown eyes who is almost always cloaked in shadow or obscured by some large object. Like an elephant or, say, a coatrack. He is also widely rumored to be dead. Mr. Handler, on the other hand, has green eyes and doesn't at all seem the sort to have had intimate contact with the villainous elements and grievous tragedy that Mr. Snicket chronicles in his books, ''A Series of Unfortunate Events.''

''I understand the confusion,'' deadpans the definitely not-dead 32-year-old author. ''But my primary occupation is as the literary, legal, and social representative of Lemony Snicket. Not writing the books.''

He's lying, of course. No matter what wild story Daniel Handler may spin, or how many glass-encased poison spiders he may unveil and claim nearly killed Lemony Snicket, he is indeed the devilish wit behind the biggest children's publishing sensation since ''Harry Potter.'' Eight installments into a planned 13-part series, his beautifully bound novels have sold over 4 million copies, sparked a movie deal with Nickelodeon and producer Scott Rudin, and made a mockery of the New York Times Children's Chapter best-seller list. ''As of May 5, seven of the eight books were on the list, and that's before we released 'Lemony Snicket: The Unauthorized Autobiography,''' says Handler's HarperCollins editor, Susan Rich. ''The one not there was the fifth, 'The Austere Academy.' I e-mailed Daniel immediately and said, 'Well, I never liked that one anyway.'''

To think that it started as a sophomoric prank. A large man with a quick mind and a rolling, staccato laugh, Daniel Handler -- the son of Sandra Handler, the dean of behavioral sciences at the City College of San Francisco, and Lou Handler, a CPA -- was researching his first novel when Lemony Snicket appeared in his life. ''I was calling right-wing organizations and religious groups, anybody that would send free brochures of weird conservative thought,'' he explains, over a soda in a sleepy Bay Area coffee shop. ''But I was paranoid. What would happen in two years, if I'm a major novelist, and I'm exposed as a member of the John Birch Society? So I was on the phone with some organization and they said, 'What's your name?' And I said, Lemony Snicket. I have no idea where it came from.'' (The book -- a high-school-set comic drama titled ''The Basic Eight'' -- was published to largely positive reviews in 1999.)

It snowballed from there. Soon, when Handler and his friends made a dinner reservation, it was under the name Lemony Snicket. Business cards? Lemony Snicket. Cranky letters to the editor? Lemony Snicket. (They even invented an alcoholic drink: The Lemony Snicket has white rum, mint, powdered sugar, and -- of course -- lemon juice; it's quite similar to a Mojito.) And so when, at the urging of his friend and editor, Rich, he decided to rework a failed neo-Victorian novel for adults into a kids book, the name surfaced again.

''I had started a mock-gothic novel called 'A Series of Unfortunate Events,''' he says. ''I had about 100 pages.... I hadn't sold anything yet, so the idea that after all that work I would abandon it? Well! I thought I might as well try to sell it [first] and then abandon it.''

Beginning with the passage at the top of this article, the books tell the story of the Baudelaire children -- Violet (the inventor), Klaus (the bookworm), and baby Sunny (the one with very sharp teeth)--who have lost their parents in a mysterious fire. Mired in a dark conspiracy, the orphans find themselves dodging death, floating in and out of the care of comically inept guardians, and consistently on the run from the evil Count Olaf.

''We had mothers in our publicity department telling us: You put a baby in a cage in this book. You. Put. A. BABY. In a CAGE!'' says Rich, alluding to Sunny's fate in book 1. ''But pretty quickly that complaint went away.... The design [by Alison Donalty and illustrator Brett Helquist] helped. We wanted them to look like they came out of someone's dusty old library. We looked at dime novels and penny dreadfuls. The kind of stuff that carried literature in the Victorian era.''

Children -- as they always have with authors like Roald Dahl and Edward Gorey, two of Handler's biggest influences -- got the joke immediately. Parents and teachers were slower to warm to the literary wit and schoolmarmish charm of the books, which offer clever vocabulary lessons and are prone to winking advice like ''never, under any circumstances, let the Virginian Wolfsnake near a typewriter.'' Reasonably priced at under $10, supported by an author more than willing to do promotion and write at a fantastic three-a-year clip, Lemony Snicket has attracted a following that's grown exponentially since the first two books' release in fall 1999. With each new installment, the backlist has boomed and more children have come to readings and logged on to lemonysnicket.com, where Handler has indulged in a little bit of pop theater, pretending to be Snicket's representative and delighting tots with in-character, personal responses to letters.

''It's a phenomenon,'' says Mitchell Kaplan, owner of Books & Books in Coral Gables, Fla. ''I have a daughter who discovered Lemony Snicket early on and single-handedly converted her whole elementary school. The books have a sarcastic, ironic tone, which sets them apart from someone like [Harry Potter author] J.K. Rowling, who is a little more earnest. Kids love it.'' The marketplace mastered, Handler and Rich seem happy to mess with a good thing with the release of ''The Unauthorized Autobiography.'' The new book is, in her words, an ''interesting, multilevel, interconnected, coded text'' -- a description sure to have more folks flashing back to a failed senior thesis than ''Harold and the Purple Crayon.'' (In reality, it's an odd connection of pictures, diary entries, scraps of other children's books, and clues to the central mystery of the series.)

''It's aimed at the older fans, but kids are curious about Lemony Snicket,'' says the writer, who lives with his wife, Lisa Brown -- an artist and graphic designer -- in a hip San Francisco enclave. ''It's certainly the first book in a while where I feel nervous about its reception.'' HarperCollins is shipping a sizable 200,000 copies, and if ''The Unauthorized Autobiography'' misses, fans will have to wait for the next installment: When not promoting, Handler's working on the movie (which will telescope the first, second, and third books), a hort-story collection, a new pirate novel, and a movie musical with friend and frequent collaborator Stephin Merritt of the band the Magnetic Fields.

'''The Carnivorous Carnival' will come out October 29 and then it'll be one book a year," he says, swirling the dregs of his soda mournfully. "It was really hard to make that decision. I have a very clear memory that as a kid I would go to the library once a week to look for books by Zilpha Keatley Snyder [author of ''The Egypt Game''], who wrote pretty quickly, but never quickly enough for me.... It's hard when kids ask when the next book is coming out. You want the answer to be 'Oh, well, it's right here!' So to say next year is a bummer, but it also feels good to, uh, sleep, which I wasn't doing for a while."

Just imagine how he'd feel if he actually wrote the books.
(Posted:05/23/02)