In honor of 4/20, we’ve brought together a list of the best stoner mysteries, in print and on screen.
The obvious definition of a stoner mystery would be a work in which there are elements of the detective story or mystery, where marijuana plays a role in the narrative. Beyond the obvious, stoner mysteries (in print) all seem to share a hazy, meandering nature, and erratic, syncopated plot, as opposed to their goofier on-screen cousins.
Most of these stories draw their conflict from clashes between the ordinary stoner, or low-level drug dealer, who’s just trying to get by, and forces greater and more organized than themselves, whether cartels, police, capitalists, or adulthood. In a sense, the stoner mystery mimics the genre’s overall fascination with the struggle of the individual against the masses. Mild transgressions are acts of independence and are treated, more often than not, with tenderness, though they sometimes spiral into larger and more chaotic problems. Just as the classic PIs of the early hardboiled days indulged in copious amounts of drinking, these shamuses have their own forms of indulgence, irreverence, and self-medication and -exploration.
Stoner Mysteries: Books
Thomas Pynchon, Inherent Vice
Doc Sportello—proud son of Gordita Beach, champion of the unwashed counterculture, always game and oft-befuddled—is quite possibly the poster child of stoner crime fiction, thanks to his creator’s literary eminence and Joaquín Phoenix’s memorably bemused rendition in the 2014 Paul Thomas Anderson. Doc and his doper’s ESP are living a kind of waking dream, going down a strange path that conjures up very specific plot points from Chandler, Macdonald and other classics, after they’ve been grinded, rolled into a jay, smoked, and washed down with a cold one.
Lisa Lutz, Heads You Lose
When two pot farmers discover a corpse among the *ahem* weeds, they know they can’t call the police. But when the corpse keeps turning up in different parts of their property, the slightly-pot-addled farmers know it’s up to them to investigate the murder. This one’s a favorite among mystery writers—when we asked around about the community’s favorite stoner mysteries, several folks mentioned Heads You Lose.
Roberto Bolaño, The Savage Detectives
You could very well ask, as some of Bolaño’s many narrators do, whether Ulises Lima and Arturo Belano are poets or drug dealers. No doubt they partake, as many of the Visceral Realists do, and fine, their lit mag, Lee Harvey Oswald, is in large part bankrolled by their sales of Acapulco Gold. Then again, you could just accept that poetry and dope have always gone hand-in-hand. Cheap booze, good drugs, and youthful passion are the fuel of this modern classic, a portrait of Mexico City’s poets and a quest / lost person novel of the highest quality. We should all of us be lucky enough to have a sale stash and a quest like the search for Cesárea Tinajero
George Pelecanos, King Suckerman
The first in the Dimitri Karras and Marcus Clay series, King Suckerman moves to the rhythms of 1970s DC funk. Dimitri is a small-time weed dealer and pickup hoops junkie; Marcus is a Vietnam vet back in District. They somehow stumble out of a re-up gone bad with a bag full of cash and the supplier’s girlfriend, and so King Suckerman quickly becomes a road trip novel, because they need to get the hell out of D.C. Dimitri and Marcus certainly aren’t your typical stoner PIs, just as Pelecanos isn’t your typical crime novelist, but their (first) story is of a hazed out time and place, and like many others in this fine tradition, King Suckerman becomes, against the odds, a kind of coming-of-age story. (Be sure to move on to read The Sweet Forever, too: a Pelecanos classic.)
Lisa Brackmann, Go-Between
In Go-Between, Brackmann delivers a zany smuggling caper set in thriving Humbolt County, then complicates the narrative through a critical examination of the prison-industrial system, with villainous lobbyists campaigning against legalized marijuana so they can continue to fill their prisons with non-violent drug offenders. The best description comes from the author herself: “Add pot, the prison industry and a shady non-profit run by a likable but unstable woman. Stir in a community activist with an agenda of his own, and don’t forget to add a few operatives, drug runners, gang bangers, gun smugglers and a possible hit lady wearing a Tinkerbell charm.”
Adrian McKinty, Sean Duffy Series
Sean Duffy, McKinty’s dissolute and cynical protagonist, spends his downtime stealing drugs from the evidence locker as an attempt to counteract the extreme stress of his day-to-day experiences as cop in 1980s Northern Ireland. He does pretty much every drug through the series (happily, reigning in some of his excessive consumption in the later books) but for the purposes of this holiday, Duffy certainly certainly smokes some high-quality hash, and—bonus points to the character—he smokes it while listening to jazz classics.
Patrick Modiano, Out of the Dark
Here’s another title that doesn’t fit the classic mould of stoner fiction, yet captures the air. It’s Paris in the 1960s. A young man, pretending to be a student as he sells books for rent and food money, meets a mysterious, glamorous young couple, Gérard Van Bever and Jacqueline. Van Bever is involved in something mysterious. Jacqueline keeps herself stoned much of the day, in between pinball sessions at their favorite Left Bank cafe. There are vague plans to leave Paris for Mallorca. All this is told with Modiano’s signature searching, retrospective style: an older man trying to make sense of an obscure, possibly criminal, certainly romantic incident from his youth.
Kem Nunn, Tapping the Source
Nunn is the godfather of surf noir, so it would be a shame to leave him off the stoner canon, though if you’re unfamiliar with Nunn’s work, don’t get the wrong idea about him. His surfers aren’t loopy lovable potheads, far from it. In Nunn’s seminal work, Tapping the Source, Ike Parker, a young man from the inland deserts, gets word that his sister has gone missing in Huntington Beach, after taking up with a gang of surfing toughs. Ike goes to the famed pier, takes up surfing, works on some motorcycles, infiltrates the gang, gets a girl, does a lot of drugs, starts dealing himself, and along the way looks around for his sister and finds secrets darker than he ever thought. Come to this one for the gritty mood pieces, stay for the mystical descriptions of ocean meeting land.
Karim Miske, Arab Jazz
Ahmed Taroudant just wants to spend his time dreamily smoking pot in his Parisian apartment, but when his upstairs neighbor is found murdered, and the murder is suspected to have religious significance, he comes under scrutiny from the police. Enter a cast of characters from across the world and nearly every religion (and doing nearly every drug) and you get a madcap, jazzy adventure perfect for the Parisian mystery fan.
Lisa Moore, Caught
In this Canadian crime thriller, an ex-con makes plans to smuggle millions of pounds of marijuana from Columbia to Vancouver, a plot doomed from the start, given the ineptitude of the smuggler and the fact that Vancouver has the finest home-grown in Canada (we read somewhere online). Caught was recently adapted for television by the CBC and just finished up its initial run.
Don Winslow, Savages
The protagonists of this get-rich-quick-scheme-gone-wrong grow an exciting new strain of marijuana. They attempt to partner with a cartel (distribution is key) but instead, come into conflict with these powerful new foes. Savages made it to the screen in 2012—alas, without real marijuana plants used in the filming process, despite the director’s California-legal quest for authenticity.
Stoner Mysteries: Film and Television
Bored to Death
Jonathan Ames’ vehicle for literary stoners merged the crime genre and stoner comedy for a perfect gem (high-quality bud?) of a series. In between taking pot-shots at the New York City literary scene, Ames’ characters run around in farcical crime-solving sequences that are equal parts parody and paen to the genre.
Weeds
Weeds would be worth watching just as a vehicle for the ever-more-beautiful Mary Louise Parker, but there’s so much more to the series than it’s star. Housewife-turned-suburban-drug-dealer Parker is always one step away from arrest and discovery, and while every season of this show could be considered a crime story, early seasons have Parker and her family as naive dealers just trying to survive, while later seasons see the family increasingly embroiled with cartels and kingpins, and less and less able to assuage their guilt over their actions.
Smiley Face
Before Anna Faris became a Hollywood goddess, she starred in this, the best of all stoner comedies (and the only stoner film we could think of with a female lead—where are all the pot-smoking ladies of Hollywood, huh? But we digress…) After Anna Faris gets high, eats all of her roommate’s weed cupcakes, and then gets even more high, she goes on a quest to raise a 1000 dollars to pay her drug-dealer. In between having nightmares of her dealer coming to take her comfy bed as back payment, she goes on an incredibly ill-thought-out quest to steal and sell a rare document, culminating in all the hilarity for viewers and misery for characters we could want.
Pineapple Express
When a process server and his dealer accidentally witness a murder (we think? It’s been a while since we watched it, and the details are little hazy here…) they must outwit drug kingpins and cops alike in order to stay alive. Plus, that soundtrack will take ya right back to 2008—”I fly like paper, get high like planes”…yeah. Now it’s stuck in your head too.
The Big Lebowski
Has any stoner PI left a greater mark on the pop culture? The Dude—an unholy distillation of Philip Marlowe, C.W. Sughrue, and every California washout pseudo pacifist who ever said the hell with this protesting nonsense I’m just gonna unwind with a jay—now feels like an indelible part of the crime fiction canon. Try to explain the case he’s solving—a lot of ins, a lot of outs, a lot what-have-yous—and you’ll find yourself talking in circles and probably scratching your head. There’s a kidnapping, a coincidence of names, a bag of money, a bowling alley. It really doesn’t matter any more than the plot of The Long Goodbye. What matters is this world of recognizable and ridiculous types, lovingly rendered and thrown into chaos by cinema masters and a murderers’ row of actors. We could easily spend the rest of the day just reciting favorite lines.
Easy Rider
If Reefer Madness was the first stoner murder mystery (and, unintentionally, the first stoner comedy), then Easy Rider is the film that took the genre into its maturity (or, should we say, perpetual immaturity). Two guys on motorcycles take a cross-country trip, smuggling drug money in their engine tanks, to an iconic film soundtrack. This is the ultimate counter-culture classic.
