Today, however, Lemony Snicket sits in a San Francisco cafe signing autographs. He is not wearing a suit or a trench coat, but a red satin bowling shirt dotted with black velvet devils. The autographs are not for patrons of the cafe, but for children in Canada.

Lemony Snicket is a big star in Canada. At his last reading in a Canadian children's bookstore he was held captive, made to sign books for nearly five hours. Apparently he didn't sign enough books to go around because the bookstore has sent along a stack of 600 Lemony Snicket bookplates, each wreathed in sinister-looking vines with thorns. Snicket is to autograph each one for eventual distribution to all the children in Canada who simply must have an autographed copy of "A Series of Unfortunate Events," Snicket's mock-Gothic serial novels for children, which now number five, but will number a very unlucky 13 when the series has been completed.

Lemony Snicket is a big star in the United States as well. (And in Italy and Germany and soon to be in Denmark, Norway, England, Israel and Japan.) His name is often mentioned in those roundups by newspaper writers speculating about the identity of the next wizard to dominate the bestseller list. When the New York Times Book Review introduced its new bestseller list for children's books, Snicket debuted at 15; now all five of his books have made the top 25.

Nickelodeon has optioned the movie rights for the series (which, if all goes according to Snicket's plan, will result in "a live-action, mock Gothic, dismal musical.") His readings -- at bookstores, schools and libraries -- are frequently mobbed by children, their parents and the stray teen Gothette (he has already been interviewed for a Goth zine, and received a very long fan letter from a Goth teenage girl written on orange construction paper), all craning for a look at the new hero of the unhappy ending.

No reader of Lemony Snicket expects a happy ending, because each and every book in the series takes great pains to explain that Snicket will not provide one. The disclaimer debuts on the first page of the first chapter of the first book in a passage which just may become every bit as classic as Tolstoy's take on unhappy families:

If you are interested in stories with happy endings, you would be better off reading some other book. In this book, not only is there no happy ending, there is no happy beginning and very few happy things in the middle. This is because not very many happy things happened in the lives of the three Baudelaire youngsters. Violet, Klaus, and Sunny Baudelaire were intelligent children, and they were charming and resourceful, and had pleasant facial features, but they were extremely unlucky, and most everything that happened to them was rife with misfortune, misery and despair. I'm sorry to tell you this, but that's how the story goes.

The children who like stories with unhappy beginnings, middles and ends devour Snicket's books, despite the disclaimer, and when they show up to his readings, they find that Lemony Snicket isn't there. Instead they meet some guy named Daniel Handler who gives them a long, convoluted story about the many misfortunes that befell Lemony Snicket, preventing his arrival.

In the absence of Lemony, this guy Daniel reads from the Snicket books, plays the accordion and sings a song that just happens to have been written for him by Stephin Merritt of Magnetic Fields, a band that Daniel happens to moonlight for when he isn't busy filling in for that misfortunate flake, Lemony Snicket.

Snicket first appeared when Daniel Handler had an attack of paranoia while researching far-right-wing organizations for a book. He didn't want his name on the groups' mailing lists, but he wanted to receive their materials. So when asked to whom his packages should be addressed, Handler answered: "Lemony Snicket."

Much frivolity ensued. Handler and his friends had pizzas delivered in care of Lemony Snicket. They made up business cards for Lemony Snicket (sure to fetch a fetching price on eBay, Handler assures me) which they distributed in bars. And, years later, when Mr. Handler wrote a children's serial novel and the narrator started to take on a life of his own, Handler's editor suggested he write under a pseudonym. Lemony was there to take over.

Actually, Daniel Handler didn't expect to be a writer of children's books in the first place. When his first novel, "The Basic Eight," was released in April 1999, some editors and critics considered it to be a young adult novel because its protagonists were eight high school students. Nevermind that these were high school students coming to terms with the murder-by-croquet-mallet of one teenager by another. Nevermind that the book was viciously panned by an actual student in the school newspaper at San Francisco's Lowell High School, which is Handler's alma mater and closely resembles the fancy San Francisco public high school in the book. ("It was the sort of review," says Handler, "that you hope never to receive for anything.")

Those editors who liked the voice of "The Basic Eight" (and presumably did not mind a bit of bloodshed in stories about children) contacted Handler and asked him if he would be interested in writing children's books.

"I said that I really hate children's books, that I thought all books for children were crap," says Handler. To which his current editor, Susan Rich at HarperCollins, replied, "Isn't that a good reason for writing the book you wish you had when you were 10?"

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