Who Could That Be at This Hour?

Who Could That Be at This Hour? is the first novel of the children's series All the Wrong Questions by Lemony Snicket, published on 23 October 2012 by Little, Brown and Company and illustrated by Seth. The series is set before the events of A Series of Unfortunate Events.

The book follows a young Lemony Snicket as he is apprenticed to S. Theodora Markson, who is ranked fifty-second on a list of fifty-two members of the organisation they both belong to, the V.F.D. He begins in the Hemlock Tearoom and Stationery Shop, where he escapes the adults masquerading as his parents after discovering that they were trying to put him to sleep with tea laced with laudanum, and leaves with Markson in a green roadster. The two of them arrive at Stain'd-by-the-Sea, a small town that was once a great exporter of octopus ink and has since fallen on hard times, and their first assignment there is to investigate the theft of a statue.

The series gives the narrator of A Series of Unfortunate Events an adolescence of his own, and it is written in the same dry, deliberately unhelpful voice, with the young Snicket applying his training to a town where almost nobody tells him the truth. The story arrives as a set of documents, opening with a cover sheet addressed to a recipient named Walleye and copied to the organisation's headquarters.