Thanks all for the many suggestions to check out! - I’ve started Westlake’s “The Hot Rock” today and am really enjoying it.
I’ve heard of those, but never read any of them.
Another Westlake book worth looking up is High Adventure, involving pre-Columbian artifact smuggling in Belize, with some hilarious characters.
Damon Runyon still can’t be beat.
For his humorous mysteries? Could you name them?
Sharyn McCrumb’s Bimbos of the Death Sun is a humorous SF novel set in a science fiction convention. It won the 1988 Edgar Award for Best Paperback Original and I found it an amusing read. She wrote a followup called “Zombies of the Genie Pool” that just wasn’t as good as the original, IMHO.
The plots cannot be called humorous, but Robert B. Parker’s Spenser novels have some of the cleverest dialogue I have ever read in any genre. Maybe it’s just me, but Spenser and Hawk make me laugh out loud.
Whoops. “Bimbos of the Death Sun” is a humorous **MYSTERY **novel. Oops.
And I’ll second the nomination of the Spenser novels for wit. Some of those lines are hilarious. “He’s so low he’d fuck a snake if he could get someone to hold it down for him.”
I found them extremely predictable and repetitive. Good buds making jokes about racism only goes so far, IMHO.
Second anything by Carl Hiaasen.
Probably because I’m a dog lover and sometimes need a light, fast mystery, the Chet and Bernie series by Spencer Quinn. Bernie is a PI and Chet is his mixed-breed dog who narrates the books. Always fun and the dog reminds me sometimes of Enzo from Art of Racing in the Rain.
I read a whole slew of lighthearted humorous mysteries (of the chick lit/Stephanie Plum genre), my favorite off the top of my head is theJaine Austen series by Laura Levine. They are all laugh out loud funny.
I’ve been enjoying Steve Hockensmith’s Holmes on the Range series.
Reginald Hillwrote two dozen books in the Dalziel and Pascoe series, British police procedurals set in Yorkshire.
His writing is absolutely full of sly, gentle humour at the expense of characters and their interactions, and also, as British novels should, poking fun at the class system and society generally. A smaller series he wrote, about Joe Sixsmith, a beginning private detective is a bit broader in its humour.
Both series work because he was one of those crime writers who wrote beautifully, and he created deeply affecting novels about humans who happened to be cops or criminals, and used humour to make it even richer.
There’s much to enjoy in Carl Hiassen, and I’ll check out previous posters’ suggestions, but Hill shows you how subtle humour can add just as much punch as prat-falls.
Nobody has mentioned Kinky Friedman yet? For shame.
And Andrew Vachss has a delightful sense of humor, though his mysteries are very very dark.