Posted on: Thursday, October 21, 2004
Lemony Snicket finds another hit in latest book
By Lisa Leff
Associated Press
Lemony Snicket is running late. Or is he?
Jeff Chiu • Associated Press But as often happens in his books about a trio of exceptionally unlucky and plucky orphans, nothing is quite what it seems with Snicket. The man offering profuse apologies for his tardiness, as well as observations on the fickleness of Hollywood and the nature of good and evil, is not the storyteller with the mouth-puckering moniker, but his impresario, novelist Daniel Handler.
"Both of us pride ourselves on being on time," says Handler, 34, a wry smile rippling across his full, clean-shaven face.
It turns out that the pseudonymous writer with $25 million in worldwide sales never shows up in public. So while the 11th installment in Snicket's saga, "The Grim Grotto" (published by HarperCollins) has topped best seller lists since it hit bookstores three weeks ago, and an all-star movie based on the first three volumes is high on Hollywood's holiday lineup, Lemony Snicket won't be part of any publicity tour.
"Mr. Snicket would have a lot more good excuses for being late, due to the workings of his enemies, whereas I have nothing to blame but my own stupidity," Handler explains, employing a schtick he's perfected at author events where kids want to know why some guy they've never heard of is autographing their book.
• Books in series: 11 so far • Latest book: "The Grim Grotto" • Books sold: more than 22 million, worldwide • Newest development: "Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events," starring Jim Carrey, Jude Law and Meryl Streep, scheduled for release Dec. 17 Handler disapproves of children's authors who get too preachy, but says maintaining good manners in the face of adversity is something of an obsession for both him and his nom de plume. The orphaned siblings at the center of each tale, Violet, Klaus and Sunny Baudelaire, remain unfailingly polite despite the obstacles set before them by feckless or evil adults.
"An overall theme of the Snicket books, I guess, is that your behavior has no bearing on what will happen to you," he says. "So behaving well is its own reward rather than a far too common lesson in children's literature, which is if you behave well, you'll be rewarded. That's not something I see happening a lot."
In an interview, Handler comes off as a lot more funny than morose, despite his relentlessly disastrous plots. Yes, he's deep into book No. 12 (13 are planned in all). Yes, he was replaced as screenwriter of the upcoming movie after slogging through eight drafts. The movie stars Jude Law as narrator Lemony Snicket and Jim Carrey as recurring villain Count Olaf.
The author insists that he's not bitter about his exit from Hollywood.
The way he tells it, a "changing of the guard" replaced the producer, director and ultimately him as well. He says he was offered a screenwriting credit, but declined.
"I'm not convinced that if authors always had absolute control over films made from their books that movies would be better necessarily," he says.
He hasn't seen the finished product, but says he was tickled by the sets and the cast.
"Some of it differs vastly from the book and some of it is very faithful," he says. "It's very strange to walk into a former airplane factory and see they have built a lake inside just because you sat down a few years ago and wrote a story about a lake."
Even in a city as eccentric as San Francisco, it's easy to spot the author of "A Series of Unfortunate Events." Who else but the creator of this best-selling children's series known for its dark humor would wear a heavy black suit and oversized faux-velvet sunglasses when it's 80 degrees outside?
Novelist Daniel Handler, better known as Lemony Snicket, shown here recently in a fortune-teller's booth at Cafe Flore in San Francisco, has released the 11th installment of "A Series of Unfortunate Events."
The same deft balancing act between fact and fantasy, tradition and high camp, tragedy and comedy helps explain the huge success of the series, says Brian Monahan, a children's book buyer for Barnes & Noble. The stories have both an appealing forbidden quality — each starts with a disclaimer warning readers why their time would be better spent on something else — and toss off vocabulary lessons with a wink and nudge. Readers of "The Grim Grotto," for example, are told that "passive" means "accepting what is happening without doing anything about it."
"A Series of Unfortunate Events"
