It’s not easy, getting people to laugh in the presence of murder. It’s also hard to cut a list down from fifty brilliant novels, and I’ll admit my picks are completely subjective—some for their humanity, some for consistency, some for their sheer originality. Everyone owes a debt to Elmore Leonard and Donald Westlake, who in turn owed a debt to Raymond Chandler and P.G. Wodehouse and Dorothy Parker.
And what is funny, anyway? Wanting to kill someone can be funny, at least in hindsight, and writing is all about hindsight made real. The ritual humiliation of the hero is funny, whether you’re watching Peter Wimsey suffer for love of Harriet Vane or watching the truth dawn on a Lawrence Block protagonist. Janet Evanovich’s resilient heroine Stephanie Plum is the detective equivalent of a weighted clown balloon, forever dusting herself off, and Laura Lippman does terrible things to her characters. The original Scandinavian crime novels, the Martin Beck series by Max Sjowall and Per Wahloo, were lusty and sly and human, as opposed to the affectless recent trend. And the Brits rule for humor: I want people to read Nicholas Freeling and Bill James, Jonathan Gash and Peter Lovejoy and Peter Dickinson, Colin Cotterill and the early Martha Grimes.
Taking anything apart can strip away the mystery, though. I came up with a list based on the way I remembered these books making me feel, and circling back around was confusing. What was so funny about Mouse the killer in Devil in a Blue Dress, or Ayoola’s dead lovers in My Sister the Serial Killer? You’ll have to read them to believe it, and please also read singular novels like Jonathan Lethem’s Motherless Brooklyn, Dwyer Murphy’s An Honest Living, and Robert Plunkett’s My Search for Warren Harding. Read Sara Gran and Lisa Lutz, Paco Ignacio Taibo II and James Crumley. And let me know what I’m missing.
Uncivil Seasons by Michael Malone
As Justin Savile, a wayward, well-born stress-drinker, peels back the layers of a North Carolina town with white trash fellow homicide detective Cuddy Mangum, each layer is stranger. The complexity of the plot and the rich social insight never get in the way of the action, or the humor. Malone wrote two other Justin-Cuddy novels, as well as some excellent stand-alones, and they’re all believable, witty, and humane. They deserve to be back in print.
Devil in a Blue Dress by Walter Mosley
Mosley’s pitch-perfect debut gave noir a new rich world in Easy Rawlins, the man who just wants to keep his damn bungalow, and whose friends are often deadlier than his enemies. What’s funny? The sly dialogue, the innate deadliness of Mouse as a very non-Watson sidekick (“You killed him?” asks Easy. “So what? What you think he gonna do fo’you?” answers Mouse) and Mosley’s pithy, fatalistic voice, with beautiful echoes from everything from Chandler to Fitzgerald to Stan Lee.
Stormy Weather by Carl Hiaasen
There was no Florida Man until Carl Hiaasen peeled the sunburn; he’s so altered our perception of Florida that his version has now become reality, from John D. Macdonald to a cascade of shit in a dozen funny steps. I could have picked any of the novels between Tourist Season to Squeeze Me but I’m fond of the way Stormy Weather’s retinue of con artists, deranged politicians, and problematic lovers react to the approach of Hurricane Andrew (in a word, badly) and suffer from Hiaasen’s environmental wrath. I’ve also picked Stormy Weather because I was reading it years ago on a book tour when a plane engine caught on fire. I kept reading, and I kept giggling.
Case Histories by Kate Atkinson
No one can can layer looping threads and tragedy and glee like Kate Atkinson—a plot can feel exuberant, almost out of control, and then it clicks into place like a final watch gear—and few writers are as empathetic and stylish as they torture their protagonist in amusing ways. I wrote four novels in the mid-nineties, and for a long time forgot the joy in reading mysteries. Case Histories and the four other novels in the series gave it back to me. Spending time with Jackson Brodie—sad, lustful, dented, and often very, very, wrong—is an undiluted pleasure.
Gangsterland by Tod Goldberg
Tod Goldberg wins for best premise, and a gimlet eye: would Sal Cupertine, hitman, rather be dead, or in a mob-organized witness-protection program as a rabbi named David Cohen? At points Sal’s really not sure: it’s not easy to visit the sick between gruesome hits and learning holy texts, but there’s no lazy moralism to be found in the novel, the first of three in a series. Goldberg’s Las Vegas is a rich, terrible stew of conniving and bungling, and the echoes of Leonard and Westlake and Block add to the joy. Unhinged, smart, and resonant.
My Sister, the Serial Killer by Oyinkan Braithwaite
What can you do about a sister like Ayoola—beautiful, amoral, blithe and deadly for her lovers? If you’re her sister Korede, a pragmatic nurse in a Lagos hospital, you mop up, literally, each time Ayoola loses her patience and pulls out her knife, and you watch in dread as she turns her attention to the very kind man you’re in love with. Actually, what was funny? I’m not sure. Korede’s weary fatalism? Ayoola’s oblivious and sunny moods? If she doesn’t feel guilty, why would there be a problem? . . . . Ah, family.
Conviction by Denise Mina
Mina’s novels, including the Garnethill series, have all been excellent: closely observed and realistic, with a lot of crisps-eating and amused exhaustion in the midst of brutal death. I still remember my gradual surprise at the change of tenor of Conviction, which opens up with a housewife named Anna McLean listening to a true crime podcast over coffee about an exploding boat and quickly starts spinning like a whirligig: Anna is not Anna, Anna knows the owner of the boat, and Anna is avoiding the persistent knock on her front door for a reason. And off we go into a giddy, beautifully executed balancing act. There’s a wild sense of freedom to this book, and it leaves you happy as it snaps into a perfect ending.
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