COVER STORY Snicket’s ‘Wrong’ does right by noir
Author Handler returns with a Lemony prequel
SAN FRANCIS CO The old house squats high on a hill overlooking a sparkling bay. A substantial man in a suit and tie appears at the front door. He could be a banker, a lawyer, a politician, a mortician. Definitely not a writer. Which he is. “Would you like an espresso?” asks Daniel Handler, 42, not to be confused with Lemony Snicket, the fictitious scribe Handler often “represents” at media events. Snicket is famously the investigative protagonist of A Series of Unfortunate Events, 13 best-selling turn-of-the-millennium children’s books that became a Jim Carrey movie in 2004.
“Forget the interview,” Handler says with the wave of a hand. “Let’s get hopped up on coffee, and you can just tell your readers I’m pro-literature.”
Hang out with Handler and you realize this is one funny man. Not Will Ferrell funny, more Steve Martin funny.
Example: He initially worked on
the Unfortunate Events script but was let go (“I think ‘ fired’ is the word you’re looking for,” he deadpans). But he likes the Hollywood scene and thinks it unfair that literary types often brand movie makers as crazy.
“Literature doesn’t exactly have a strong mental-health track record,” he says, sitting in a breakfast nook of his 105-year-old Victorian home. Whom are you referring to? The head tilts: “Whom am I not referring to?”
That wry humor anchors All the Wrong Questions, a new series aimed at early teens written by alter ego Snicket. The books track a young Snicket’s apprenticeship in a shadowy confederation of sleuths and serves as a prequel to Unfortunate Events. The first of four books, Who Could That Be at This Hour?, arrives today (Little, Brown); it features cartoon-like illustrations by the one-named Seth, known for works such as Palookaville.
Handler has written four books for older readers under his own name; Why We Broke Up is a poignant girl’s-eye-view of a failed relationship. But it’s Snicket fare that has made his name and fortune.
With Questions, Handler has swapped the Snicket books’ Gothic setting for noir, weaving a kid-centric tale of mystery and deceit in the oddball town of Stain’d-by-the- Sea, which is “nowhere near the sea but instead at the end of a long, bumpy road that has no name which is on no map you can find.” Get the fuzzy picture? “The noir world feels like childhood to me,” Handler says. “That’s when you begin to get the notion that the people who are telling you the way the world is actually have no more clue than you do. You get disillusioned with your governing adults and try to find your way.”
Speaking of governing adults, Handler and his graphic-artist wife, Lisa, are overseers of one Otto Handler. He was born in 2003 but apparently is 10 years old.
“Did I say he was 10?” Big sigh. “So here’s the situation. He’s still 8, but Otto has his birthday from an imaginary point of view of maturity.” Come again? “Otto likes Tintin books,” Handler explains. “In them, he read somewhere that you can’t be a cabin boy until you’re 10. It’s his only chance to be in an adventure, so he says he’s 10, and I don’t have the heart to say that’s not really right.”
There’s no better insight into Handler’s whimsical worldview; it’s so honest and pervasive that even his young son has adopted it.
“Daniel is a species of writer I just didn’t know until I met him, an actual larger-than-life personality, a real raconteur,” says his friend Dave Eggers ( A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius), part of a cadre of successful Bay Area writers whom Handler often leans on to talk shop and drink cocktails (more on that later).
“He is just as funny and quick and erudite in person as he is on the page,” says Eggers, who adds that Handler and his wife share Eggers’ passion for promoting youth literacy. “Daniel’s the real deal. He reads everything, he has read everything.”
THAT ‘SOPHISTICATED NOIR’
For this new kid-lit series, Handler spent a year swimming in a pile of classic noir titles by the likes of Raymond Chandler. “I quickly realized I wasn’t interested in super-violent noir, and more the girl in the nightclub slipping into a long black limousine type of noir,” he says.
He also liked the idea of keeping his protagonists in the right period, if not literally (there’s no sense of epoch in Questions) then stylistically.
Characters often call each other formally by last name, they meet in tea and coffee shops, and the object of everyone’s attention, a statue called the Bombinating Beast, recalls nothing if not the totem in that noir film epic The Maltese Falcon.
“I like that sophisticated noir, a secret panel behind the bookcase that leads to where the secret society meets type stuff,” Handler says. “It would in fact feel ridiculous in adult fiction. But it would be entirely possible in children’s fiction, which is fun.”
The author says he isn’t a literalist when it comes to inspiration (“None of the characters are my mom with the name changed”), but he will tweak real-world fascinations to fit his fictional realms (“San Francisco’s coffee culture is so fetishized and strange … which led to the Black Cat Coffee shop in the book”).
That ability to “create strange and beautiful imaginary worlds is what makes Handler stand out,” says Jack Martin, president of the Young Adult Library Services Association, which promotes literature and reading through library programs.
“Take his latest book, Why We Broke Up. The main character Min has a deep love of old movies, which she describes in such detail that as a reader you want to go see them. But they’re all made up,” Martin says. “With A Series of Unfortunate Events, (Handler) had a major impact on children’s and tween literature with that dark, ironic and funny voice of his.”
TWITTER DOESN’T CUT IT
One reason Handler has hit on that happy if droll tone is that he remains enamored of his day job.
“I like writing,” he says, which he does at home but also in an array of Bay Area coffee shops. “A lot of writers act like it’s a plague upon them (to write), which is funny to me. If you’re a basketball player making $30 million a year, well, you have your motivation. But in the case of writing, I just think, why do it then?”
The tech wave — social media to ebooks — hasn’t rocked Handler’s boat. He’s not tweeting, and he checks the news on occasion to make sure he hasn’t missed anything cataclysmic. And neither is he pessimistic about the state of literature in this frenzied 140-character age.
“I just don’t think people are reading Twitter instead of a novel,” he says. “The history of literature has always been interspliced with people worrying about it going away. But it seems to me there are more committed readers than ever.”
Writers, too. The mailman often delivers rough works from would-be scribes. Are they any good?
“You mean so good I have to track them down and kill them?” Handler asks, throwing his head back in a stage laugh.
“No. But it’s often really imaginative, really interesting and really focused. When you’re in fourth grade and you have (sent) 75 pages of the same story, that’s super remarkable,” he says. “But mostly what I see is people who are eager to participate in the whole game of literature. Of being a reader and a thinker. And that makes me happy, because that’s how I feel.”
COCKTAILS WITH YOUR KID?
Here’s something else that makes Handler happy: a nice cocktail party. We’re not talking a get-sloshed and gossip affair, just a bunch of adults sipping fine drinks and sharing laughs.
Handler’s cocktail parties are regular and prized invites, a vestige of his and Lisa’s post-collegiate, pre-success days in New York when their ruse was to invite friends to a themed-drink soiree and then request that guests bring the ingredients.
“We had 10 people over just the other night, and we made a pitcher of something, and we were all having a good time. It’s retro, yes, but not fetishized retro as in, I wish I were in an episode of Mad Men,” he says. “It’s just a nice way to talk to people, and it’s something people don’t tend to do much anymore.”
Dare we ask: Is young Otto hip to the magic of the cocktail hour? Well, of course he is. “He eats early, so after his dinner and before ours, we sit,” Handler says. “The music comes on. The drink is just ice water, but we talk in an established way. Just that idea of sipping something and having a conversation.”
Welcome to the world of Daniel Handler, where children can momentarily shuck the shackles of their lesser family roles and step up to the adult bar. No wonder kids are hooked on his books. Any parting words of advice for those Snickets-in-training ?
“Eavesdrop a lot and take notes,” he says. “It’s a way to begin to think about how the world around you is made of stories.”