Many thought Mr Lemony Snicket's career in journalism was over after he was sacked from the Daily Punctilio. Still others felt that he would be too aloof to patronise mere newsprint after approximately one in three of the world's children had bought copies of his 12 - so far - episodic tomes entitled A Series of Unfortunate Events. And when Jim Carrey, no less, starred in a moving picture based upon said tales of the wretched Baudelaire children and their pursuit by the villainous Count Olaf, it was said Mr Snicket had become too exalted for mere mortals to converse with.

But extensive investigations by the Guardian's most senior editors revealed the existence of a transcript of a long-distance conversation. In said transcript, Mr Snicket was found to be talking to a musician, one Stephin Merritt. Further investigations, conducted in conditions of the greatest secrecy, revealed that this Mr Merritt had recorded a number of record albums under various aliases, and was the writer of many worthy songs, most notably those contained on his 69 Love Songs, credited to a beat group named the Magnetic Fields.

The pair were found to be discussing the plight of the Baudelaires, and Mr Merritt's efforts to write a series of songs about the unfortunate orphans and their adventures. After many attempts to contact the elusive Mr Snicket, we were able to track him down to an Undisclosed Location. "Sir," we told him, "We intend to print your conversation with Mr Stephin Merritt, in full, in our newspaper." He wheedled, he threatened, he bullied, he bribed. But our commitment to truth, dear reader, impels us to publish.

Stephin Merritt: To whom do I have the pleasure of speaking?

Lemony Snicket: This is Lemony Snicket. Is my voice not clear through this rickety sequence of vacuum tubes?

SM: Hello? Mr Snicket? Can you hear me? If you can hear me, this is Stephin Merritt, boy reporter, and I need to ask you some important questions about your work.

LS: There are more than one of us with questions, Mr Merritt. For instance, you have previously devoted your more or less formidable musical talents to collections of songs concerning love, beginning with the letter "I", or designed for some of the world's finest vocalists to sing. Why would you now release an album of songs in tribute to my dreadful and tragic stories?

SM: What? I can hardly hear you. I think you said, why am I disguised as a boy reporter when I am really an illustrious and beloved rock star? Thank you for the compliments, sir, but my recent work under the nom de ukulele of the Gothic Archies, based on your own researches, has placed me in unclear but present danger, so I am trying to remain incognito. It is perhaps best if we omit all mention of my glowing reviews and less flattering, more libellous portrayals in the media, to concentrate on the issue at hand: What on earth has happened to the three Baudelaire children? (Or are they in space? They seem like the sort of children who might find themselves there, by accident or misadventure, or quite deliberately, in order to avoid the clutches of certain nefarious evildoers.) Please speak loudly into the Victrola horn. Transmission might be less crackly if you remain at the same pitch during each syllable, as though you were singing, and as high as you can muster. The Baudelaires, then, if you will, sirrah. I will listen now.

LS: Do you honestly think I would discuss the Baudelaires over technology on which it is so very easy to snoop? The Baudelaires' many enemies are known to lurk in all available corners of the media you mentioned earlier, and who knows what nefarious journal might stoop to transcribe this conversation and publish it where anyone might look upon the details of the Baudelaires' story. Is it not enough that a British publishing house known as Egmont is reportedly printing several copies of the 13th and final volume in A Series Of Unfortunate Events, entitled The End, in which the Baudelaires find themselves shipwrecked on a desert island containing a dystopic utopia and an hysterical history, where villainy slaughters and villains are slaughtered and where seaweed, for what is arguably the first time in literary history, is used as a wig? The atmosphere in Britain is already wretched enough without the redundant dread of the Baudelaires' grim history. I think it might be best not to mention even a single detail of the Baudelaire orphans' circumstances. But on to this collection of Gothic Archies tunes, entitled The Tragic Treasury. Is it true that one of the songs is entitled The World Is a Very Scary Place? What would inspire such a ditty?

SM: Well as you have discovered, Mr S, the world is in fact a scary place, very much so, and I wanted people to know that. I read all about it in your third book, The - if memory serves - Wide Window, in which the Baudelaires continue their progress toward the inevitable fate awaiting them in The End. As you know, The Tragic Treasury features 15 of my songs vaguely about your books, one per book, all originally included on the audiobook versions, but now retooled for even wider distribution to the hapless public. And I have recorded it under the name of the Gothic Archies, so that no one will ever know who really made it. (I have many disguises: the Magnetic Fields, etc.) Sometimes it is necessary to write songs under assumed names and sometimes the situation calls for an assumed persona to sing the song. In the case of The World Is a Very Scary Place, it is the rightly timorous Aunt Josephine, who as it turns out should have been even more careful. Either way, as the song says, the wolf is at the door. Will you excuse me a moment?

LS: But of course. Your brief absence will allow me to add a jigger of brandy to the snifter in my trembling hand. For surely you have heard that the histories that inspired your educational songs have not been received as intended - that is, for the education of the general public. Instead, the books have largely been regarded, astonishingly, as entertainment. I have even heard instances in which children, scarcely as old as the Baudelaires themselves, have been encouraged to read A Series of Unfortunate Events, rather than devoting themselves to looking at photographs of daisies, or composing limericks to be recited by finger puppets. Are you afraid that the songs in The Tragic Treasury might be regarded as catchy rather than cautionary?

SM: Catchy, well, yes - the wolf has gone away whistling Crows, one of the more memorable of the tunes to which I was obliged to fit, however awkwardly, my desperate messages of horror and woe, drawn faithfully from life. The wolf, by the way, has a message for you. But my gravest concern is not that children and others will hum or whistle these melodies, but that the lyrics (or what may at first seem to be lyrics to the untutored eye) will provoke sensitive listeners to early and violent suicide ... or late and violent, which is worse.

LS: Perhaps, for the benefit of prospective ears of The Tragic Treasury, we might list the songs in ascending order of gloom, so that listeners sensitive to suggestion can avoid an early death. For instance, I would place We Are the Gothic Archies in the 15th slot, as it is dreary but not overmuch, and is unaffiliated with any of my unnerving works. In the 14th I might place Smile! No One Cares How You Feel, as it is something of an etiquette lesson and something of a philosophical inquiry, but contains little in the way of emotional narrative - the potential suicide's gravest pitfall - despite its inspiration, The Hostile Hospital, which has a great deal of emotional narrative and quite a bit of unnecessary surgery. But what is 13th on the presciently titled Tragic Treasury?

SM: Oh, it may be that Walking My Gargoyle, though describing a person so frightening as to prompt observers to scream, is perky enough in the bassline to set the self-poisoner's hand to wanly tapping the fingers, foiling any deadly intentions long enough to get help, if there is such a thing. And gargoyles, while real, become mythical when you walk them. Or so I prefer to believe, though you do not mention them in The Carnivorous Carnival, which inspired the song.

LS: Next, naturally, is Crows, based on The Vile Village, Book the Seventh in A Series of Unfortunate Events, in which dreary circumstances fail to extinguish the protagonist's love-fuelled optimism. And 11th is Shipwrecked, in which the circumstances are quite bad, but the protagonist appears to be enjoying himself despite the song being based on events in Book the Last. Then is Freakshow, the album's second tribute to Book the Ninth, which is quite grim but contains a happy ending. After that I'm a bit stuck. Help.

SM: One can at least say of Scream and Run Away that release through vocal ejaculation and immediate escape are still a possibility in an admittedly meaningless world quivering with stark terror and all that - as described in the series's first book, The Bad Beginning - and there is an accordion, played, despite everything, by yourself. Nevertheless, it is very depressing. Book the Second, In the Reptile Room, details the more threatening aspects of our seemingly harmless reptile cousins, taking the "pet" out of "herpetology" and putting it back into "strumpet". Reptiles in general are charming and diverting - if not to converse with, at least to converse about - but some are so venomous and sneaky, camouflaged in trees above us and under our chairs, waiting to lunge at us and disable our central nervous systems with untraceable exotic poisons, that they give the whole reptile kingdom a bad name. In fact, the reptile kingdom is not a kingdom at all of course, but a class (the kingdom is Animalia), and it is called Reptilia. But you knew that, of course.

LS: Naturally - or, unnaturally (as is the case in The Reptile Room). The seventh most distressing song is When You Play the Violin, as listening to the sort of musical ineptitude the Baudelaires suffer throughout Book the Fifth, The Austere Academy, is more distressing than vicious reptiles, but less distressing than motion sickness, as described in How Do You Slow This Thing Down? and inspired by the very tough sledding in The Slippery Slope, Book the 10th.

SM: Next, then, might be Things Are Not What They Appear, based on The Penultimate Peril.

LS: I agree. Duplicity abounds in that particular song, but it's more or less balanced by the accordion. Which would necessitate awarding the fourth-place ribbon to A Million Mushrooms, which describes the sinister Medusoid Mycelium, first encountered by the Baudelaires in The Grim Grotto (Book the 11th). And the tarnished bronze medal of third place goes to The World Is a Very Scary Place, which we've already rehashed.

SM: And the silver medal, allegedly made from the teeth of certain fallen heroes and possibly laced with mercury, to This Abyss, which not only stares into the chasm described in your terrifying sixth volume, The Ersatz Elevator, but into the chasm which exists inside all of us, particularly when we are hungry.

LS: And so we're in agreement that Dreary, Dreary is the most tragic gladiola in the bouquet that is The Tragic Treasury - a lament you were kind enough to write to accompany The Miserable Mill (Book the Fourth). I have heard from several musical scholars that its description of my love, Beatrice, and the ensuing grief over her loss - and, arguably, the loss of any great love - is quite moving, but I confess that after the first few notes my sobs are the only thing ringing in my ears.

SM: I quite understand. I found myself in similar circumstances when I opened The Beatrice Letters, which collects correspondence between you and Beatrice. I had been planning on composing a song in honour of this work, but found myself unbearably distraught and flabbergasted at the 1/13th mark, and had to curl up on an ottoman and hum Billie Holiday and Visage songs to myself until I felt strong enough to place the book on a very high shelf.

LS: That, in essence, is our collaboration: two anguished artistes unable to console one another, let alone an audience. Is there any hope at all?

SM: Please wait a moment. There's another knock on the door.

LS: ...

SM: ...

LS: Hello?

SM: ...

LS: Hello?

SM: ...

LS: And now a knock on my door. I fear the worst.

SM: ...

LS: ...

SM: Sorry about that. It was a gentleman from Porlock, and ... Hello?

LS: ...

SM: Hello?

LS: ...

SM: ...

LS: ...

SM: ...

· The Tragic Treasury, Songs from A Series of Unfortunate Events as Executed By the Gothic Archies is released by NoneSuch on October 9. The 13th and final book in A Series of Unfortunate Events by Lemony Snicket is published by Egmont on October 13