SAN FRANCISCO--Nine of us crowd around a couple of tables at the back of a bar called Toronado. It's 2 in the afternoon. We're in the Lower Haight neighbourhood, down the hill from the more famous Haight-Ashbury; this end is poorer and dirtier--Hipster Central, in other words.

The men at the table (we're all men) work through a tsunami of artisan beers. The place doesn't serve food, but you can bring in sausages from Rosamunde's next door. My wiener and Pliny the Elder IPA are courtesy of Lemony Snicket, the world-famous author of A Series of Unfortunate Events. I guess he can afford the gift: the 12 installments to date have sold-- according to media estimates--50 million copies worldwide. That said, he's notably generous, leaving good tips at the bar, picking up beer for the circle of regulars, among whom are a composer, two conductors, and several writers. While their womenfolk work (their words), we debate politics, engage in pop culture one-upmanship, and gossip. Somebody's wife made him promise we'd talk porn, so we do, about how porn has been a driver of technology since the invention of photography, if not sooner.

It's a circle of smart guys, but his comments make it clear the smartest of us all is Lemony Snicket, born Daniel Handler. The final book in the tragic doings of the Baudelaire orphans' lives, fittingly called The End (HarperCollins, $16.99), comes out Friday (October 13), and it's in anticipation of that august conclusion that I've come to the home of Handler, who used to claim he was nothing more than a spokesman for the elusive Snicket.

We have a private coffee first, and I start by asking how he wants to be interviewed: as Snicket or Handler? “Full disclosure,” he answers with a laugh. He laughs a lot, as a satisfied author with a successful series under his belt and a national tour set to kick off in Manhattan the next day might be expected to.

The contents of The End are a mystery still, but I've reread No. 12, The Penultimate Peril (2005), in anticipation of our talk. Like its predecessors, it's full of wordplay, lighthearted menace, and unlikely complexity. Not every 10-year-old realizes, for instance, that its structure mirrors Herman Melville's The Confidence-Man; Illinois's Dalkey Archive Press got the joke, though, and asked Handler to write the introduction to their edition of the Melville classic, which he's just submitted. “It's difficult for me to lollygag when writing,” he explains. “I sort of feel if it it's not related to something [larger than itself], I don't know what it is.”

Gleefully intelligent and self-referential writing has made the books an unlikely mainstream success. Handler bristles, though, at the suggestion that they're anything more than books for children. “It actually annoys me when well-written books get plucked out of kids' literature and put into the world of adult literature, so children's literature gets paltrier and paltrier and paltrier.

“I've said it a million times, but you never love a book the way you love a book when you're 10. When you bring up the entire Snicket period, it feels like I'm in that very sacred space. When someone waits in line for hours in order for me to put some ink into a book I'm claiming not to have written, that's one thing. But when they use their free time in front of me to recount for me the plot of the book, that's really astonishing....I get immersed in books and I love them and reread them, but I'm working with them in some way. I'm putting them to some purpose. I'm not necessarily just basking once more. And that's really a privilege to be part of that basking.”

The End is therefore a bittersweet accomplishment for the author, who fortunately still has lots of projects up his sleeve. In the meantime, though, some habits are hard to break. “Those idiomatic expressions,” he says, “I keep picking them up. My first moment of genuine loss came shortly after I finished The End, when I was in an automobile with a friend of mine. I used the expression called on the carpet and she didn't know what it meant, and I thought, 'Oh, what a wonderful expression to put into one of the Snicket books.' And I thought [he shakes his head sadly]. It sounds overdramatic, but the closest analogy would be 'Oh, I can't wait to go home and tell that to this person, and then realize that's gone.' It wasn't that kind of deep grief, but it was a strange, unbalanced moment. Those things may come in handy and will, I'm sure, in later work.

“I can't imagine I'll stop my investigations into the peculiarities of the language. But there was a list that I kept checking and crossing off and bumping to future volumes, and it was very odd to get to 'If you're not going to use this now, you're not going to use it.' I had a small sign I made [while writing The End] that said Now or Never taped above where I was working.”

For the short term, Handler is touring The End with Stephin Merritt of the gothic pop band the Gothic Archies, with whom Handler sometimes collaborates. Merritt has written 13 songs in honour of the Unfortunate Events books called The Tragic Treasury; when the two come to town Merritt will play ukulele, Handler will handle the accordion, and Lemony Snicket is expected on percussion. “If he doesn't show up,” Handler explains, “young people will be brought up from the audience to play percussion and sound effects to a reading from the book.”

Next up is a “collaboration with a composer ...called The Composer Is Dead, which is a work for narrator and orchestra, not unlike Peter and the Wolf?”. This seems ambitious, but Handler just shrugs: “I had a lot of musical training when I was a child, so it wasn't as much unknown territory as it would be for a lot of people. But I think, 'Why not do things?' I'm at a loss for what I would do if I were not doing things.” Plus he was just in Vancouver to direct a video for the band Memphis, which they shot on the stage of Bard on the Beach. And there's so much more pressing down on him: an adult novel about pirates is waiting, he's got to pack for his 16-city The End tour, and””more immediately””we all need more beer and chips.

Daniel Handler and Stephin Merritt perform at John Oliver secondary (530 East 41st Avenue) on November 14 at 6:30 p.m. For information and tickets, $18 (book included), call 604-738-5335.