"The Big Over-Easy: A Nursery Crime" - from May 2013

From July / August  2014

Oh my goodness!  What fun! I had grown tired of Thursday Next - though never of her name - but loved both this and "Shades of Grey: A Novel".  Pick up a copy.  You deserve it.  Meanwhile, off to order "The Fourth Bear" from Amazon.

"..Well, there's usually a rule of three somewhere.  Either quantitative, as in bears, billy goats, blind mice, little pigs, fiddlers, bags of wool or what-have-you, or qualitative, such as small, medium, large, stupid, stupider, stupidest.  If you come across any stepmothers, they're usually evil, woodcutters always come into fame and fortune, orphans are ten a penny, and pigs, cats, bears, and wolves frequently anthropomorphize."

...

"Do they know?"
"Do they know what?"
"Do they know they're nursery characters?"
"I think sometimes they suspect, but for the most part they have no idea at all.  To the Billy Goats, Jack and Jill and the Gingerbreadman, it's all business as normal.  Don't worry-- you'll get into the swing of it."

...

"What happened to your last DS?"
"His name was Alan Butcher.  A good man.  He died in a car accident."
"I'm sorry."
"Not as sorry as I was; I was the one that ran over him in my wife's Volvo.  But it wasn't my fault--he stepped out in front of me."
"Was he...tall?" asked Mary a bit recklessly.
Jack shook his head sadly.  "You've heard about the giant killing already?  Sometimes I think the station talks of almost nothing else.  Well, hear it from the horse's mouth: Aside from Butcher, they were all self-defense.  When someone that big comes at you with a knife, you don't stop to worry about using lethal force.  It was him or me.  Same as the other two.  Mind you, only one of them was technically a giant--the rest were just tall. .."

...

"...By the way, how many giants have you killed?  I ask only by way of curiosity and self-preservation, you understand."
"Technically speaking, only one," replied Jack with a sigh.  "The other three were just tall."
"To kill one giant might be regarded as a misfortune," said Brown-Horrocks slowly.  "To kill four looks very much like carelessness."