A farce, for heaven’s sake! Everyone knows farce is dead.” When a character says these lines on page eight of Janice Hallett’s latest whodunnit, The Christmas Appeal, we can practically see the author tipping us an outsized wink. Hallett, after all, is one of today’s foremost exponents of cerebral, knowing crime. A swift 180 pages later, Hallett has slain another victim and shown that farce was never really dead in the first place. Literary murder – especially the cosy sort – has always been comic. The real mystery is: why is it so popular now?
Richard Osman’s Thursday Murder Club series, in which laughs, foibles and irony figure far more prominently than bloody murder, has topped the charts for four years running. The Crime Writers’ Association has just launched a new Whodunnit Dagger to honour the year’s best cosy, classic or quirky mystery. This Christmas, production company Mammoth Screen will bring us its latest Agatha Christie for BBC One, a reworking of Murder Is Easy that, like its predecessor Why Didn’t They Ask Evans?, plays up the love and laughs – moving away from the grittier cynicism of its earlier adaptations.
But then, this is the production company that made Blandings – based on the PG Wodehouse Blandings Castle stories – and Agatha Raisin. The latter, an affectionate rendering of MC Beaton’s none-more-cosy crime capers, is a reminder that the genre has always been popular. Trace it back from SJ Bennett, whose sleuth of choice is Queen Elizabeth II, and Hallett, through Beaton and Simon Brett, with his wisecracking Charles Paris mysteries, and you find an unbroken link to the golden age of comic crime.
Christie herself wrote laughs aplenty, especially when it came to Poirot; her contemporary and fellow queen of crime, Ngaio Marsh, excelled at badinage. GK Chesterton’s Father Brown stories, written in the early 20th century, have a profound and gentle humour – or not so gentle in the barbed parody The Absence of Mr Glass, which pokes fun at Sherlock Holmes. Arthur Conan Doyle also made space for jokes amid the pea-soupers and arch villainy, not just in surreal escapades such as The Red-Headed League, but in the everyday interactions of Holmes and Watson. And there are links between the generations: as a producer on Radio 4’s classic adaptation of Dorothy L Sayers’s Lord Peter Wimsey series, Brett revisited the pinnacle of comic crime from the 1920s and 30s.
In Evelyn Waugh’s 1945 novel Brideshead Revisited, the aristocratic Catholic family at its centre turns in times of crisis, not to sermons, but to Father Brown stories. Read aloud by the matriarch, the scene is at once absurd, touching and completely understandable. Part of the solace stems from the benign humour of the tales, and that explains why comic crime is resurgent today – amid planetary and economic crises, that promise of escapism is more beguiling than ever. Especially at this time of year. From Hercule Poirot’s Christmas to PD James’s Mistletoe Murders, authors as well as readers have been drawn to fatal festivities.
We’re all familiar with gallows humour, the need to find laughter in the grimmest places. Yet the appeal of truly comic crime is less about professional detectives doing a grisly job than dilettantes playing a game. Literature has few laughing policemen, but an awful lot of quipping amateurs. Even Marsh gave her best one-liners not to handsome Inspector Alleyn but to her Watson figure, the journalist Nigel Bathgate.
Games, puzzles and mysteries are by definition playful. And it’s not just the sleuths who are playing. Reader is always pitted against author in a test of wits – can we solve the crime before the detective? Like every game, there are clear rules: detective author Ronald Knox set out his not entirely serious 10 commandments of fair play in 1929. This is what makes these stories such perfect escapism today: readers can lose themselves in the contest. Every true whodunnit is a work of metafiction, as the reader flits in and out of the story, constantly trying to estimate the author’s intelligence or honesty in setting trails and leaving clues.
For my money, today’s greatest exponent of playful detective fiction is Alex Pavesi, whose Eight Detectives is a gloriously original, intricate and often very funny series of practical jokes played on the reader. Dann McDorman’s new novel, West Heart Kill, as tricksy as they come, uses a jigsaw puzzle as cover art, while the cover of my own Helle & Death tips its hat to Cluedo. This playfulness puts us in the right mood, but the classic whodunnit has other weapons, many of which it shares with farce: plots like clockwork, exquisite choreography and perfect timing. Sayers’s Peter Wimsey has been called “Bertie Wooster with Jeeves’s brain”.
The most important comic quality of both murder mystery and farce, however, is the meticulous arranging of cause, effect and misunderstanding. The detection of a murderer involves paying minute attention to what people say and do. The reader is given privileged access into the lives of others, replete with dramatic irony and a degree of omniscience. And what could possibly be funnier than the everyday idiosyncrasies of human beings?
The Christmas Appeal is packed with hypocrites and exhibitionists. Mrs Ruddle, in Sayers’s Busman’s Honeymoon, is a world-class gossip. As for the sleuths themselves, from Holmes, to Poirot, to my own Torben Helle, the more seriously they take themselves, the sillier they become. Snoop on anyone for long enough, and their habits, sayings, priorities start to become hilarious.
• Helle & Death by Oskar Jensen will be published by Viper on 18 January. To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
