Nursery Crime is a series of humorous fantasy / detective novels written by meta-fiction maverick Jasper Fforde. They are a loose spin-off of the same author's Thursday Next series: the world it's set in existed within an unpublishable Police Procedural novel that Thursday occupied in The Well of Lost Plots, wherein the characters worried they would be deleted. It was turned into a refuge for characters from Oral Tradition lacking a proper ink-and-paper home to call their own, and thus Nursery Crime was born. Think of it as Shrek meets Law and Order, without the Court bits.