Comedy is a tricky thing for crime writers. Slapstick travels, but wit does not. For most of the 20th century American humor was a great gusting belly-laugh. On my side of the Atlantic, humor was always complicated and hard to pin down; semiotically dense, it’s traditionally more allied to European sensibilities and is best when being black, bleak, or at least rather cruel. They say the perfect English insult is one where you walk away thinking you’ve been complimented.
The British find humor in human weakness, sex, death and embarrassment. The idea that people might exist in a satanic war with their own natures, selfishly pursuing their own aims with a disrespect for conventional morality and sentiment, can prove weirdly life-affirming. When you read the collected short stories of HH ‘Saki’ Monro you can see where this cynical worldview originated. His miniature masterpieces are full of little crimes that usually benefit the perpetrators.
In the mid-to-late 20th century healthy cynicism blossomed into outright mistrust. Richard Condon was a Hollywood agent who delineated the new amorality in The Manchurian Candidate and the four-volume gangland saga Prizzi’s Honor. He was a satirist who turned what could have been an unbearably bleak outlook into something rich and often hilarious. After this there were no more entirely happy endings.
Then came a time when I almost stopped reading British crime novels because of their unrelenting grimness; the detective was traumatized or physically damaged, the victims were mutilated beyond belief and the villains were grotesquely evil. If that’s all there was, nobody would choose a career in law enforcement.
Publishers are keen to convince us that their latest murder mysteries are grittily realistic and true-to-life. They’re not, but more to the point they never were and never will be. How many killers are captured while they’re still in the middle of slaughter sprees? How many have ever planned a series of murders according to biblical arcana and get caught just as they’re about to strike the detective’s partner?
Crime fiction is a construct, a device for torquing tension, withholding information and springing surprises. Yet every month crime novels appear that promise us new levels of realism when they patently supply the reverse. We’ll happily believe that the murder rate in Inspector Morse’s Oxford equals that of Mexico City if the story is told with conviction.
When I lived in America I turned to Ed McBain, Janet Evanovich, Donald E Westlake for a lighter touch. Marcia Clark’s courtroom fiction showed me something I’d never before considered, that prosecutors actually love their jobs. In Guilt By Association her Deputy DA Rachel Knight lets her hair down by going out with the girls after a tough day in court. Similarly, her defense attorney Samantha Brinkman is aware of her flaws but doesn’t spend half a book agonizing over them.
In my experience law enforcers come in two types; cheerful and suspicious. The former love practical jokes. One officer told me that the height requirement for City of London constables (a grander, separate force) was over six feet, so someone put up a rack of coat pegs at a height of five foot six, adding a sign, “For use of Metropolitan officers and traffic wardens only.”
Finding the comedic vein in police life is one thing, but consciously setting out to amuse in a crime novel is another matter altogether. The easiest approach is to make the criminals incompetent, but it takes someone like Carl Hiaasen to make the set-ups zing. His top-voted book Skinny Dip is gloriously funny and surprisingly warm.
Caryl Brahms and Simon Skidelsky were writers who shared the same ridiculous sense of humor. In A Bullet in the Ballet (1937) Brahms did the ballet bits and Skid wrote the parts that involved detection. The novel’s first line is “Since it is probable that any book flying a bullet in its title is going to produce a corpse sooner or later—here it is.” My edition suggests that I might also enjoy reading A Survey Of Russian Music, an indication of the thoroughness of Brahms’ research.
Clearly, there are rules about adding comedy to crime that must be followed. Bizarre situations need to arise for believable reasons. The tragedy of sudden death and its investigation must be taken seriously, and the humor confined to characters who ideally have no idea that they are amusing. People are funniest when they’re being absolutely serious.
Another rule; you can get away with anything if you say it with a straight face. This partly explains the power of Sherlock Holmes; everything he says can be taken at face value. Not so his greatest contemporary rival, Dr. Thorndyke, created by R. Austin Freeman. In The Eye Of Osiris, an Egyptologist vanishes from a watched room and must be presumed dead in order for his will to reach probate—but the will in question has a bizarre clause which makes it impossible to honor. Like WS Gilbert before him, Freeman takes delight in outlining the peculiar properties of paradox. “A man cannot deposit his own remains,” cries Thorndyke in exasperation, as he deals with recalcitrant jurors, bovine policemen and the intricacies of the embalming process.
Comic crime must be produced organically. You can’t simply drop characters into a humorous situation. Josh Bazell understood this perfectly for the writing of Beat The Reaper. His young Manhattan medic has a secret mob past, and his gruesome, darkly hilarious race against time merely ramps up a doctor’s daily life, so it feels right even at the bloody climax.
Comedy requires a moral viewpoint, so humor and tragedy go together very well in crime novels—although I’m aware that comedy will get you delisted from awards ceremonies.Comedy requires a moral viewpoint, so humor and tragedy go together very well in crime novels—although I’m aware that comedy will get you delisted from awards ceremonies. Critics take you more seriously when you don’t get laughs. Chris Brookmyre became recognized for his startling use of black humor in crime procedurals, but when he realized its limitations he switched to a more hard-edged style, with the result that he won national awards for Black Widow.
Charles Higson started out as a TV comic but his desolate, bleakly funny crime novels revealed his real talent. In Getting Rid of Mr Kitchen, his accidental killer manages to annoy everyone who could help him dispose of a body. The Moral? You can get away with murder if you’re a little nicer to people.
This was certainly Pamela Branch’s theory. Her four crime novels (there was a fifth, but she left it somewhere) include The Wooden Overcoat, which is unlike anything you’ve read, although at a push you could describe it as PG Wodehouse meets The Ladykillers. What happens when someone is murdered in a houseful of professional murderers? The Asterisk Club in Chelsea provides a home for wrongly acquitted felons, so when a corpse turns up they at least know how to deal with it. America rediscovered Branch first, bringing back her delightful books in new editions.
For me, the clown prince of English crime remains Edmund Crispin, with his detective-don Gervase Fen, Professor of English Language and Literature, “cherubic, naive, volatile, and entirely delightful.” The books are funny and erudite, their hero charming, frivolous, brilliant and badly behaved. While investigating, Fen tends to dive into pubs, play word games or break the fourth wall by coming up with the book’s title or making rude jokes about his publisher. The Vanishing Toyshop pleased me so much that I wrote an homage to it in The Victoria Vanishes.
When I placed a pair of Golden Age detectives in modern-day London I wanted to set up a cultural clash. Arthur Bryant & John May were based on real people who were naturally irreverent. Humor in crime gets a bad rap from critics who mistakenly assume that it trivializes the unfolding drama. Handled correctly the reverse is true, for it can highlight everything that’s surreal and sad about criminals and their investigators. With one corollary, however; it can eventually prevent the author from ever being taken seriously.
Because my senior detectives are facing mortality I’m licensed to use graveyard humor, but I’m careful to respect victims and honor them over villains. There needs to be serious intent underpinning droll events. Neither procedurals nor cozies, humorous crime novels expose flaws rather than confirming beliefs, and can leave readers with plenty of food for thought.
