Lemony Snicket's Unfortunate Friday the th

Seven years, 13 books and 3,387 pages later, The End is nearly here.

As millions of young readers know, The End (HarperCollins, $12.99), the 13th and final volume in Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events, will be published Friday -- the 13th, not coincidentally.

The Dickensian series about the misadventures of three smart, resourceful but unlucky orphans is a publishing phenomenon. More than 51 million copies in 41 languages have been sold.

Only J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter series has caused a bigger stir in children's literature in the past decade. Rowling, in a league of her own, has 300 million copies in print of six books, with one more to come.

But Rowling never advises readers, as Snicket does at the beginning of The End, to "put this book back on the shelf to wither away while you read something less complicated and overwhelming."

That's part of the appeal: Readers join a mysterious world of coded messages, shadowy secrets and inside jokes. It's a story about not knowing the whole story. Letters from readers, up to 1,000 a week, are still addressed to Mr. Snicket, although nearly everyone knows the author's real name is Daniel Handler.

Handler, 36, is a quirky, accordion-playing San Francisco writer who delights in literary allusions and has "an embarrassingly large" collection of drawings and books by Edward Gorey, the master of gloom and dark humor.

Handler can't explain his own popularity: "I've been in the same state of disbelief for the last seven years."

Book 13, in which two characters die and another is born, begins where Book 12, The Penultimate Peril, ended. The Baudelaire orphans are at sea in the same boat, literally and figuratively, as evil Count Olaf, who has been after their family fortune since Book 1, 1997's The Bad Beginning.

Readers seeking a shortcut to the plot can watch an online video at lemonysnicket.com, narrated at record speed (12 books in 120 seconds). But the series is better read than summarized.

"The misadventures are funny, scary, inappropriate, dastardly, naughty, crazy, page-turning, cliffhanging delights," says Esme Raji Codell, a Chicago librarian, author and blogger on children's books (planetesme .com).

To her, the series, with its element of being orphaned, reads "as a parody, less of children's worst fears than that of their parents."

Don't read on

Collette Morgan, co-founder of Wild Rumpus, a children's bookstore in Minneapolis, credits Handler with interjecting "an incredibly wry and witty voice into the world of children's lit," with a "cautionary tone warning kids not to read the books. This, of course, made them want to own that series!"

Handler's editor, Susan Rich, calls it "excellent reverse psychology." Handler "takes the conventions of Victorian children's literature, props them up and turns them on their head," she says.

Brian Monahan, a children's book buyer at Barnes & Noble, which is hosting Lemony Snicket parties in its 797 stores Friday, says the series has "great crossover appeal among adults. It has wonderful use of language and wordplay that works on several levels."

The "elusiveness of Lemony Snicket himself" has been a "brilliant marketing scheme," says Wild Rumpus' Morgan. "His 'representative,' Daniel Handler, would show up for appearances and use an old-fashioned letterpress stamp to 'sign' the books on Lemony's behalf. The performance skills that Handler brought to these appearances was incredible and created even more rabid fans."

The books have inspired a movie and reader websites. The 2004 movie, based on the first three books, starred Jim Carrey as Count Olaf. (More films are possible, Handler says.) At websites such as quietworld.com, readers debate such questions as what is V.F.D., the secret organization whose agents include Kit Snicket, Lemony's sister?

(The Lemony Snicket pen name was invented in the course of research for one of Handler's grown-up novels, when he requested information from right-wing organizations. Using his real name, Handler is a member of the American Civil Liberties Union.)

A fortunate meeting

The story behind the series is about a working friendship that blossomed a decade ago between an unpublished novelist and an unemployed children's book editor.

Handler remembers meeting Rich at a New York book party in 1996. Rich's then boyfriend, now husband, worked for Handler's literary agent.

"The three of us were there to make the kind of connections you're supposed to make in publishing, but we were too intimidated," Hander recalls. "We stood in the corner, drinking far too much wine, asking, 'What are we doing here with all these well-established people?'

"We were making connections. We just didn't know it."

Handler was seeking a publisher for his first novel, The Basic Eight, a tragicomedy about a high school clique that leads to murder.

Rich was an assistant children's editor for Simon & Schuster but was soon downsized out of a job.

"I was unemployed. He was unpublished," she says. "We had free time. It didn't take us long to become friends."

She read and admired Handler's novel, which was eventually published in 1999 and got better reviews than sales. The subject matter wasn't appropriate for children, but "the author's voice convinced me he could write for my audience."

After she was hired as an editor at HarperCollins Children's Books in 1997, she asked Handler, "Don't you want to write something for me?"

At first, he said no. "I thought it was a terrible idea. A bad idea for me. A really terrible idea for her. I didn't want her to get laid off again."

Rich persisted, and Handler "got an idea in spite of myself."

He had about 80 pages of "an abandoned novel, for lack of a better term," about terrible things happening to a family of orphans. Maybe it could be a children's series: 13 books, 13 chapters in each. (Although The End adds a 14th chapter as an epilogue.)

Rich told him, "Put something on paper." He did. Rich liked it. Handler was signed to write the first four books and hoped "they wouldn't cancel the deal after two."

It was Rich's first acquisition. Now, she's executive editor and says, "To tell a 10-year-old, 'I'm Lemony Snicket's editor,' is like saying 'I'm the tooth fairy.'"

'Hilarious and painful'

Rich says the series is a four-way collaboration involving illustrator Brett Helquist and designer Alison Donalty, who have given the books an old-fashioned Victorian feel.

Typical of Handler's readers is Anna Saum, 11, of East Northport, N.Y., who discovered the series a year ago and apologizes that she's only up to Book 9, The Carnivorous Carnival.

At first, "I was a little creeped out," she says, "but then I started understanding it better and found it funnier and funnier." She calls the series "hilarious and painful at the same time." And it has added to her vocabulary "words like cahoots, dowager, xenophobe and couplet."

Handler says he worked definitions of words and phrases, such as moral compass, into his narrative because of "my sheer ignorance of what words you could or couldn't use in a children's book, beyond that short list made famous by George Carlin."

He's working on an adult novel about a modern-age pirate who "wants to be an old-fashioned kind of pirate" and says Lemony Snicket will write again for children. But probably not about the Baudelaire orphans.

The End is the series' first title without alliteration. Handler says, "No adjective could properly describe where it goes."

It answers some but not all questions. The end of The End notes, "One cannot spend forever sitting and solving the mysteries of one's history, and no matter how much one reads, the whole story can never be told."

Handler says he knows some readers "may be frustrated and angry, but then, I've been frustrated and angry myself, so there you go."

Booksellers such as Monahan and Morgan say they're not mourning the end of Snicket or of Harry Potter (no date yet for its final book).

Their success "opened the door to books and reading to an entire new generation" who will be "looking for books that will both challenge and entertain them," Monahan says.

Morgan adds, "One of the problems with series books for kids is that they sometimes go on for so long that their audience outgrows them."

She expects she'll be able to "sell the full set to young readers of the future. ...We have to grow and cultivate our readers, like corn, so it's a fine time for them to move on."

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