Humorous Mystery Books and Series

What is a humorous mystery?

Humorous mystery does something technically difficult: it makes you laugh and then makes you care. The comedy is not relief valve — it is not there to defuse tension before the serious business resumes. It is the mode the story operates in. Character reveals itself through wit. Relationships are built in banter. Even the detective work gets filtered through a sensibility that finds the absurdity in human behaviour. Done badly, the jokes undercut any genuine stakes. Done well, the comedy and the crime reinforce each other — the humour is why you trust these characters enough to follow them into dark places. There is also something structurally interesting about humorous mystery: a story that makes you laugh has already got you off guard, which makes the genuine shocks land harder.

What makes a great humorous mystery?

The wit needs to be in the characters, not just the narration. It is easy to write an ironic narrator who comments amusingly on events. It is much harder to write people who are genuinely funny in the way real funny people are funny — inconsistently, sometimes at the wrong moment, in ways that reveal something true about them. Great humorous mysteries also do not shy away from real emotion. The best comedy makes space for grief, fear, and genuine moral weight. The jokes land harder because the reader knows the story is not pretending those things do not exist. Robert Thorogood’s Judith Potts in the Marlow Murder Club is funny because of her certainty and her obliviousness to other people’s social discomfort — and that same quality is what makes her good at her job.

Best humorous mystery series to start with

The Thursday Murder Club by Richard Osman works as comedy because the jokes come from character — Elizabeth’s imperious certainty, Joyce’s cheerful indiscretion, Ibrahim’s literal-mindedness, Ron’s class-inflected truculence. The plots hold up and the comedy lands, but that is not really why people keep buying these books. Osman gets what it is like to be seventy-five with bad knees and a memory that skips. He does not make it sad or sweet. He just makes it true. Start with The Thursday Murder Club (2020).

The Marlow Murder Club by Robert Thorogood is the right choice if you want something funnier in a drier, more English register. Judith Potts is a genuinely comic creation — the kind of person who is exhausting in life and brilliant in fiction — and Thorogood never lets the comedy undercut the puzzle.

We Solve Murders by Richard Osman pivots to a different kind of comedy — the absurdity of international crime in an age of social media and celebrity, filtered through characters who bring very different temperaments to the same situation.

History of the humorous mystery

Comic crime is almost as old as crime fiction itself. The language around Sherlock Holmes in A Study in Scarlet is drier and funnier than many people remember. PG Wodehouse wrote comic crime that holds up today. The Golden Age had its share of witty practitioners. But the humorous mystery as a recognised sub-genre is largely a product of the 1980s and 90s, when MC Beaton’s Hamish Macbeth and Agatha Raisin established that cosy crime could be laugh-out-loud funny and still be taken seriously. Richard Osman’s sales figures have settled the question of whether there is an audience for it. The question now is whether the next generation of writers can find a comic voice as distinctive as Osman’s without simply imitating his tone.