Lemony Snicket

Lemony Snicket is the pen name of American novelist Daniel Handler (born February 28, 1970). Snicket is the author of several children's books, also serving as the narrator of A Series of Unfortunate Events (his best known work) and a character within it and All the Wrong Questions. Thus, "Lemony Snicket" may refer to either the fictional character or Handler. As a character, Snicket is a harried, troubled writer and photographer he wrote the famous series called The Series of Unfortunate Events that is now on Netflix, falsely accused of felonies, and is continuously hunted by the police and his enemies (the fire-starting side of the secret organization Volunteer Fire Department (VFD).) As a child, he was kidnapped and inducted as a "neophyte" into VFD, where he was trained in rhetoric and sent on seemingly pointless missions, while all connections were severed from his former life, apart from his siblings Jacques and Kit (who were also kidnapped and inducted). In the organization, he met and fell in love with a peer named Beatrice, whom he almost got to marry. He was falsely accused of murder and arson after a series of unfortunate events (after which the real-world series is in some ways named). Eventually, the fallacies grew so much that The Daily Punctilio reported his death. Beatrice eventually moved on and married Bertrand Baudelaire, becoming the mother of Violet, Klaus, and Sunny Baudelaire, the protagonists of A Series of Unfortunate Events. Fourteen years thereafter, Beatrice and Bertrand were supposedly murdered in a house fire, leaving the Baudelaire children orphaned and then pursued by Snicket's former associate, Count Olaf. Snicket feels indebted to his former fiancée and embarks on a quest to chronicle the lives of the Baudelaire children until they become old enough to face the troubles of the world on their own. Snicket is the subject of a fictional autobiography entitled Lemony Snicket: The Unauthorized Autobiography which contains an introduction from a fictionalized version of Daniel Handler. A pamphlet called 13 Shocking Secrets You'll Wish You Never Knew About Lemony Snicket was released in promotion of The End. Other works by Snicket include The Baby in the Manger, The Composer Is Dead, Horseradish: Bitter Truths You Can't Avoid, The Latke Who Couldn't Stop Screaming, The Lump of Coal, All the Wrong Questions and 13 Words. In the film, Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events, Lemony Snicket is portrayed by Jude Law, who documents the events of the film on a typewriter from inside a clock tower. In the video game based on the film his voice is provided by Tim Curry. In the Series of Unfortunate Events Netflix series, Snicket is interpreted as a Rod Serling-esque omniscient narrator chronicling the events of the Baudelaire children several years after they had occurred; he is portrayed by Patrick Warburton. The name Lemony Snicket originally came from research from Handler's first book The Basic Eight. Handler wanted to receive material from organizations that he found "offensive or funny" but did not want to use his real name, so he invented "Lemony Snicket" as a pseudonym. The name's similarity to Jiminy Cricket was "likely a Freudian slip". Handler described Jiminy Cricket as "exactly the kind of overly moralistic, cheerful narrator who I despise." “A library is like an island in the middle of a vast sea of ignorance, particularly if the library is very tall and the surrounding area has been flooded."- Lemony Snicket