The Mysterious Taxi Driver ~ SPOILERS

[lauren]

On the note of smoking...is the man on the front cover with the top hat and pipe, the taxi driver with the bowler hat and cigarrette???

[champ103]

No, I highly doubt that lauren. For one thing, the people on the cover don't seem to anyone in particular, and the man on the cover looks like a villain to me.

[lauren]

I didn't think it was him either, but I think I can put a name to almost all the characters on the cover except this main centre piece...it seems odd that we never found out who he was...and frustrating!

[TopHat]

My thoughts are kind of confused but I'll try to sort them out.

In the first chapter Kit goes through the hedges because she didn't want a taxi following them.

After lemony gives us the quote Rock sunner said

"If you are riding in a taxi, you might prefer silence so that you can study your map in peace, but the occasion may require you to shout, "Please turn around! I think they've driven through those hedges."

which show Lemony as the driver or passenger following them. If he was driver then Justice Strauss was passenger due to in the last chapter she says

pg 348 "You've always been just out of my grasp, from the moment Mr. Poe took you away from the theater in his car to the moment Kit Snicket took you through the hedges in her taxi. I won't let you go Baudelaires!"

I think that if Justice Strauss picked up then Lemony couldn't have been the smoke becuase the smoker was in the front picture, but if Lemony was picked up then Justice was driving then it makes a little more sense to me.

"Sorry I'm so jumbled"

[lauren]

I wonder what Lemony was doing chasing after Kit and the Baudelaires???... I guess Kit didn't know it was Lemony so it seemed he was chasing them for evil reasons rather than good....

[Grace]

Yeah, Kit's v. paranoid. If she had known it was Lemony...whoo...

And I'm not even going to go near trying to name the people on the cover. I've only got one--TMWBBNH. And I'm not even sure. If someone could--thanks.

[lauren]

Are you sure that is him??? I always thought he would be too sinister to draw

[Dante]

The cover isn't really on-topic here. If you want to talk about it, you should make a thread either here or in GLooms called something like "The Characters on TPP's cover."

[lauren]

I was browsing through TGG and I just found another reference to taxi drivers pg 39-40 He stomped over to the table and lifted a pile of papers. "A certain taxi driver managed to smuggle these charts to me," he said...

[mat]

He probably just put all those details as to what was in the taxi to make us think it was Lemony but is not. Or reverse-reverse psychology

[lauren]

I was just browsing through UA and found some evidence which supports the rumour that Lemony is the taxi driver.... "His age was given as tall with brown eyes pg 3
However this evidence was published in the Daily Punctilo.....and if you read on, Lemony says that everything in the article was false except the bit about him attending his own funeral.

[celery]

But maybe that bit of info was incorrect because it was as his age.

Height and eye color are not really an age.

I may just be over thinking this though.

[Ennui]

Whoever he is, he has the sugar bowl. In my view that means that if he is Lemony, the sugar bowl has to come back as a plotline. But I find this unlikely for several reasons:

1. The sugar bowl is now too hyped up to be satisfactorily explained

2. The strongest link with the sugar bowl, Esme Squalor, may well be dead

and most importantly-

3. The story of the taxi driver clearly sachays off in a completely different direction to that of the Baudelaires. Lemony says that if they'd entered the taxi, as VFD were probably expecting them to, their series of unfortunate events would have been far longer.

[kittysnicket]

Who knows. Just wait till the 13th book comes out and maybe he'll tell you.

[ieyre]

I thought it might be him.....but now I'm not sure. I don't think the 13th will explain, though.