Gideon Gander Solves the World's Greatest Mysteries

Gideon Gander is as thick as half a dozen sacks of wet cement, but considers himself the intellectual giant of the detecting world. For the purposes of this book, that world is the land of nursery rhyme, where the gander strains his meagre resources of intelligence and probity in striving to solve the mysteries of Solomon Grundy's death, the disappearance of Little Bo Peep's sheep, the theft of Miss Muffet's curds and whey, and the precise nature of the fiddling that Old King Cole experienced. Mr Wilson sustains the groaningly corny, mock-Chandlerese prose marvellously well, loading almost every other line with a gag. Anybody who finds the Rolling Rock advertisements funny will feast on this book.