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''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.)
