The mysterious Mr. Snicket

The orphans manage to get by on their wits and a few very specialized talents. Sunny, the baby, speaks in nonsense syllables that the other children seem to understand ("'Deluny!' shouted Sunny, which meant something along the lines of 'You're not just a bad foreman -- you're an evil person!"), and also is equipped with very sharp teeth that come in handy as weapons, or as tools when the orphans need someone to say, break up a length of rope. Klaus, the middle Baudelaire, is bookish and can be relied upon to dig up some obscure fact on say, marriage or labor law or advanced ocular science. Violet has a keen scientific mind and is very, very good at thinking up inventions -- a grappling hook for scaling walls, a stapling device, a lock pick made from an electrical plug and a thumbtack -- and implementing them just in the nick of time.

Violet's definitely a girl of action, but her competence isn't described in terms of boyishness -- unlike more conventionally unconventional girls, like Carolyn Keene's George Faye. "I wanted to have a tomboyish eldest girl, but I didn't want a big deal to be made about her being a tomboy," says Handler. "There's not a lot of phrases like, 'Unlike most girls, she could do this or that.'" So there was much discussion when Susan Rich called up Handler during the editing of the first book to say that Violet, to fit in with her siblings, needed more visual description.

"I didn't want to choose some physical detail, because I figured that girls start to get nervous about their own physical details soon enough," Handler explains. "So Susan and I kept joking further and further and kept calling each other and saying things like, 'I know! Big boobs! Or she's shorter than everyone else! Or she's taller than everyone else! Or she cuts her hair short!' We considered giving her a distinctive hair color. But I didn't want to say, 'she's a fiery redhead' or something like that."

Finally, they decided that every time Violet set down to invent something, she would tie her hair back.

The Snicket novels are morality tales, albeit twisted ones. Among other things, Snicket tells children that one should never stay up late on a school night, except to finish a very good book; and he insists that there is nothing worse than someone who can't play the violin but insists upon doing so anyway. Practically every page provides an ingenious and idiosyncratic vocabulary lesson, providing definitions for words like "hackneyed" and "adversity," as well as expressions like "dramatic irony" and "meanwhile back at the ranch." (This is Handler shtick: "The Basic Eight" came with study-guide questions for reading comprehension at the end of every chapter.)

"I was mostly just knocking the heavy-handedness that I remembered from kid's books that I didn't like as a child. That sort of mockery seems to really appeal to kids" says Handler. "I don't make some sort of serious attempt to 'get down to their level.' I'm just sort of a naturally didactic person."

In this same didactic spirit, Handler has packed each Snicket book with characters who take their names from literary luminaries. In addition to the Baudelaires, there's Principal Nero, Mr. Poe, Coach Gengis, Prufrock Prep and a long enough list of others -- enough to fill a Norton anthology by the time the series hits book No. 13.

"There's plenty of literary names and the like," says Handler, "but there's not so many outright jokes. And the literary names are there mostly because I look forward to kids growing up and finding Baudelaire in the poetry anthology and having that be something else to be excited about."

Of course, there will always be the flat-footed parent who believes that books are only useful as pedagogical exercise. One disgruntled parent sent an e-mail after a Snicket reading which read: "I was hoping that my kids would learn something about the writing process and all I got was ego and performance from you."

."And I thought," says Handler, "That is the writing process. You've got ego and performance and that's pretty much all there is. It's you thinking that you have a story to tell, and it's performance, which is going out and doing it. The rest of it is just ink and paper."

Issues of style and pedagogy notwithstanding, certain parents -- probably the same ones who object to "To Kill a Mockingbird" and the witchcraft in "Harry Potter" -- may object to a series in which orphans are subjected to a relentless stream of bad luck, abuse, malnutrition and malaise, not to mention the dangers inherent in a lack of supervision by decent adult guardians.

And then there's that incest thing. Handler's adult novel, "Watch Your Mouth," hit stores in early August. It is probably too early to tell if some parents will link the author of "A Series of Unfortunate Events" with the author of the incest comedy and cause a ruckus.

As far as Handler knows, his books have only been banned at one elementary school -- in Decatur, Ga. -- and it was because of an incest issue. The parents in favor of a ban had objected to the fact that Count Olaf, in a scheme to get the Baudelaire fortune, attempted to marry Violet.

"I'll always have that," says Handler. "They can't take that away from me."

Handler may think that parents who object to his work are misguided, but he doesn't think they're crazy. "I think that they have to decide what's best for their kids. The books are not for everybody; they're for people who find that stuff entertaining."

And in the meantime, as Violet Baudelaire and Daniel Handler know, there are always interesting inventions to be made.

Or as Handler puts it: "And in the meantime, we till the soil. That's from 'Candide,' right?"

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