Tracking Lemony Snicket: The true story.(Knight Ridder Newspapers)

Byline: Catherine Mallette

Lemony Snicket does not have time to talk to me. The poor man has been on the run, on the lam and on The New York Times children's best-seller list for an inordinately long time, a phrase that here means "somewhere in the neighborhood of three years or more." Plus, Snicket has that nasty history with the Daily Punctilio, a newspaper whose reporters tend to leap to wrong conclusions and tantalize their readers with misleading headlines. Who can blame him for not wanting to talk to the press?

The elusive Snicket has been spotted by photographers, however, in at least one cemetery and at the charred remains of the Caligari Carnival, the site of the unfortunate death of Madame Lulu, the back-stabbing fortuneteller who lied to the three sweet Baudelaire orphans. Because of Lulu, the Baudelaires recently ended up back in the clutches of evil Count Olaf, a distant relative who has been after their fortune since the children's parents were killed in a fire.

For a reason not completely understood by anyone in the Free World, Snicket has made it his life's work to track the tale of the orphans, following their trail from snooty penthouses on Dark Avenue to the icy Mortmain Mountains.

Snicket delivers these manuscripts to his representative, one Daniel Handler, as quickly as he can, and they are published by HarperCollins as "A Series of Unfortunate Events." The 10th book, or "Book the Tenth" in Snicket-ese, called "The ...