Lacing Crime (Fiction) with Humour

Writing crime fiction may not seem like an obvious way to exercise your funny bones, however You will find that a comedic phrase or allusion can intrigue your reader and emphasise the predicament into which you have put your character.

Often humour will help you describe your characters' thoughts and reactions by way of 'showing not telling'. Although, of course, comedy is tricky ground for crime writers.

Slapstick comedy is universal but verbal humour does not. The perfect verbal insult, for example, is one where the person spoken to walks away thinking you’ve been complimented, but your reader knows they have been insulted. The British love to laugh at human weakness, sex, death, embarrassment, sarcasm, class, money and selfishness. That is why humour can be used to such good effect in crime novels.

The idea that your characters might exist in a satanic war with their own natures can prove weirdly life-affirming for the readers. Many characters in novels by Muriel Spark and Evelyn Waugh pursue their own aims with a thrilling disregard for conventional morality, sentiment and legality. 

I use this device in Hunter's Chase where my ne'er do well villain Jamie Thomson steals from a large house, but grumbles about the small charge made by shops for one time use carrier bags refering to this as 'daylight robbery' as opposed to what he was doing which was 'night time robbery'.

Creating a funny character is one thing, but consciously setting out to write a witty crime novel is another matter altogether. Humour must emerge organically; you can’t simply parachute characters into a funny situation. It also requires a moral viewpoint, if only so that morality can then be flung aside. Chris Brookmyre accomplishes this in his novel The Cracked Mirror where the pairing of the sharp minded character Penny Coyne who appears in a twinset and tweed with the hard-bitten Johnny Hawke provide a rich opportunity for the witty exchanges and humorous situations that Brookmyre writes so well.

It helps to have the right mindset. I recommend a sense of amused resignation. Exaggerated versions of my own experiences usually find their way into stories. I genuinely had no clue as to whether my first book, Hunter's Chase, - it was never intended to be a series—would find an audience. But I am glad it did and many readers enjoy the humour which lifts some appalling crimes from being too bleak to being bearable.

I highly recommend using humour when writing your crime fiction. It gives it a totally different accent from straight crime thrillers.

Val Penny