Author 'Snicket's' fortunate career

In 1997, when San Francisco novelist Daniel Handler told an editor that his idea for a children's book was "terrible things happening to orphans over and over again," he was astonished that she immediately said she'd take it.

After having worked for years on his first novel, 1999's "The Basic Eight," inspired in part by his experiences at San Francisco's Lowell High School, "the idea that they would pay me before I'd written a book was like finding money in the street," recalls Handler, 42.

His idea turned into the 13-volume "A Series of Unfortunate Events," a mock gothic series for kids ages 8 to 12 that tracks the travails of the three resourceful orphans - Violet, Klaus and Sunny Baudelaire - who as the series begins are ages 14, 12 and an infant, and whose evil distant cousin, Count Olaf, keeps them in constant peril as he tries to cheat them out of their inheritance.

Handler narrates and appears in the series as Lemony Snicket, an erudite adult member of the secret organization central to the plot, who is given to wordplay and literary allusions.

Launched in 1999 with "The Bad Beginning" and concluded with "The End" in 2006, the series is considered a contemporary children's classic, has sold more than 62 million books and has been translated into 39 languages. The 2004 film adaptation, "Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events," starring Jim Carrey as Count Olaf and Jude Law as Snicket, was loosely based on the first three books.

Snicket is back

Fans were bereft when the series ended (though Handler did go on to publish four Snicket picture books). But now Snicket is back with "Who Could That Be at This Hour?" (Little Brown; $15.99), the first book in a four-part series called "All the Wrong Questions," with a first printing of 1 million copies. Narrated by Snicket as a 12-year-old boy just starting his apprenticeship in the secret organization, it's a prequel to "A Series of Unfortunate Events," told in the style of a noir mystery.

"Part of the theme of all the Snicket books is that a story's always more complicated than you think it is, which dovetails pretty neatly into noir," Handler says over tea at the Upper Haight Victorian home overlooking Sutro Forest that he shares with his wife, author, illustrator and graphic designer Lisa Brown, and their son, 8-year-old Otto. (Brown and Handler fell in love as students at Wesleyan and have been together ever since.)

"A noir detective encounters deceit and corruption across the board - usually in the people who are hiring him and the people he's investigating - and then he finds his own moral course in that shadowy world. That to me felt like childhood and adolescence: You take the word of some adults for a while, and gradually the whole world becomes fallible and you kind of make your own path."

Handler knew he wanted to be a writer from the time he was 8, and read both gothic and noir novels - by Charlotte and Emily Bronte, Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler - in eighth grade. His youthful preferences in literature are apparent in his series. "That probably has something to do with my thinking that they belong in childhood. Because I was a child when I read them."

Libraries are central in both series, as they were in Handler's life. As a kid, each week he and his sister, Rebecca, and father, Lou, an accountant and Jewish refugee from Germany, would walk to the West Portal Library near their San Francisco house. At the end of each library visit he'd put a pile on the checkout counter so large he'd have to stand there and weed it out.

His mother, Sandra, a San Francisco City College dean, also contributed to his love of books. "She would read me books, stop at a suspenseful place, give me a flashlight, and tell me under no circumstances to read past my bedtime," he says.

Susan Faust, the 2005 committee chair for the Newbery Medal, the American Library Association's award for most distinguished contribution to American children's literature, was a librarian at West Portal and remembers Handler coming in as a child. She says he stood out as wise beyond his years and seemed like a serious kid. "My memory is a miniature version of the adult he grew up to be," she recalls.

She applauds what his books have done for young readers. "Just as 'Harry Potter' author J.K. Rowling gave the impetus for kids to read big, fat books, Daniel Handler invites them to enjoy the pleasures of a sophisticated lexicon," says Faust, who reviews kids' books for The Chronicle. "He's not talking down to his audience; he's asking them to reach up. He trusts his audience to meet him."

Handler's real voice is very much like Snicket's. "I'm afraid that pretentious lexicon was something I acquired at a too-young age and haven't gotten rid of," he says. Dave Eggers - the author, McSweeney's publisher and co-founder of the tutoring and literacy program 826 Valencia - calls Handler "the quippiest."

"I think Daniel's Lemony Snicket series, along with 'Harry Potter,' is probably the most significant series for young readers in the last 30 years," Eggers says. "His writing is highly literary, and manages to greatly increase any reader's vocabulary without the reader knowing they're being educated. He's got the kind of innate gift for what kids like ... that Theodor (Dr. Seuss) Geisel and Maurice Sendak had.

"I teach high schoolers, and when I ask how many of them have read all the Snicket books, it's usually about 90 percent. That's pretty incredible."

Children's view

San Francisco 11-year olds Madison Kjeldgaard and Eve Spalding have read all 13 books and will read the new series. "They have tragedy and then something good happens. Over and over and over again," says Madison. Eve says the Baudelaire orphans always "solve problems in smart ways."

Handler collaborated, as Lemony Snicket, with author-illustrator Maira Kalman on the 2010 picture book "13 Words" and the best-selling 2011 young-adult novel about a high school romance, "Why We Broke Up." With a screenplay by Handler, it is in development as a film.

When he returns from his 15-city book tour for "Who Could That Be at This Hour?" he'll write the final draft of a novel for adults about a group of people who steal a boat in San Francisco Bay and try to become modern-day pirates - the Errol Flynn kind, not the Somalia kind. And he's working on a commissioned musical for London's Royal Shakespeare Company with Nathaniel Stookey, his friend since high school and partner on "The Composer Is Dead," which has been performed by the San Francisco Symphony and more than 100 orchestras worldwide. It was also a theatrical production for Berkeley Rep and a Snicket picture book.

To indulge his musical side, he occasionally sits in on accordion with Stephin Merritt's band Magnetic Fields. Handler grew up with music. His mother had been an opera singer, and in the '80s, he sang with the San Francisco Boys Chorus.

Even with his demanding schedule and staggering success, Handler leads a surprisingly low-key life. He remains close to his parents, frequently visiting his father, who is in assisted living and suffers from Alzheimer's. He works in a small home office with walls covered in framed art and photos of Otto, knocks off at 6 and cooks dinner for the family, and volunteers at Otto's public school. He shops regularly at San Francisco's Green Apple Books, for which he created a hilarious book-versus-Kindle video spot.

On the scene

He's an enthusiastic - and unassuming - member of the San Francisco literary scene and a fixture at the annual book lovers' shindig, Litquake.

"Daniel is remarkable among authors who sell hundreds of thousands of books," says author Jane Ganahl, Litquake co-founder and co-director. "He never cops an attitude, he doesn't ask for money to appear, and he's all about community."

Handler helped form LitPAC, which raises money for Democratic candidates and registers voters through literary events. He caused a stir last November when he posted a piece on the international Occupy Writers website in support of Occupy Wall Street and the worldwide Occupy movement. It went viral and was picked up by the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal and MTV, and he appeared on "The Rachel Maddow Show" to talk about it.

Titled "Thirteen Observations Written by Lemony Snicket While Watching Occupy Wall Street From a Discreet Distance," it included such trenchant observations as: "People gathering in the streets feeling wronged tend to be loud, as it is difficult to make oneself heard on the other side of an impressive edifice," and "People who say money doesn't matter are like people who say cake doesn't matter - it's probably because they've had a few slices."

Laden with wit and irony, in the Snicket voice, "Thirteen Observations" explained the movement in words his readers could appreciate. He told Maddow he wrote it because even adults didn't seem to get why inequities had driven people to the streets.

"I was puzzled by people's puzzlement over it, when it seemed simple to me," he said. "I didn't seek to explain (the movement), but I thought maybe if I said it in a form with many examples using cake, that some people would get more relaxed about it."

Handler's beliefs are family bred. "I was raised in a family that was very moral," he says. "My father was an accountant, and he would come home frustrated by his clients who would say, 'Oh I have to pay so many more taxes this year.' And he would say, 'They're not understanding that it's because they made that much more money.' I grew up in a family that had strong opinions about that. And I married someone who has strong opinions about that. And I've passed them on."

He says he can't understand writers who choose not to participate in the public discourse. "If you ask me my opinion on something, I usually give it."

He's chuckles at the notion that he would ever hole up behind closed doors just because he's successful:

"It's lonely behind my closed door - just me and my success buying each other drinks."

Freelance writer Regan McMahon is the book editor of Common Sense Media. E-mail: datebookletters@sfchronicle.com