Preface A Note of Resigned Acceptance from the Narrator Good Reader I give up In spite of my pleas to you and countless conversations with parents grandparents teachers librarians ministers law enforcement officials and sock knitting aunts both regular and great I have been unable to keep Mr Etter’s woefully improper and thoroughly dreadful fairy books from your hands Why even my own home has been infested by the dratted tomes I suspect it was my son Quimbey the most wayward of all my children who smuggled them into the Quacksworthery after which they swept like a plague vii
throughout the Quacksworth ranks Quentin Jr Quigley Quinn Quentin III Quentin IV Quella Quinten all were caught in some nook or cranny of the ancestral manse reading them And then the cru elest cut of all last week I found my darling wife Quintessa with our youngest Becky sitting on her lap the two chuckling heartily at the misadventures of that malapert Shade the gregarious Ginch and the kleptomaniacal Professor Dreadful dear Reader Truly truly dreadful Thus having failed to dissuade you and my narrator’s union shop steward MacKenzie Blinky Blinkerton having failed to free me from my contract I must with a heavy sigh recount this final dreadful tale of our dreadful little fairies Before I begin how ever I must admit that I did find the last book to be a bit less objectionable than the first and do have a faint hope a very faint one that this will be even less objec tionable than that Perhaps in our time together I have been a morally improving influence on that old repro bate Mr Etter although just this morning over toast and tea he claimed that it was he who was having an viii
influence on me and that I was becoming slightly less of a stuffed shirt as it were Perish the thought good Reader And so I must be for one final time Your Reluctant Narrator Quentin Q Quacksworth Esq United Federation of Narrators Raconteurs Anecdotists and General Tellers of Tales Local 42 ix
the crooked rook 1 In which the password is indeed swordfish Shade’s black curly hair whipped about in the steamy summer night as she streaked through the countryside on the back of Glatis the Questing Beast How much farther she called Glatis raised her serpentine head and squinted her slitted eyes I can see the town lights from here In just a minute for a Questing Beast at full gallop 1
