Funny Tough Guys

Novels about crime can be gripping, but there's nothing saying that they can't be funny, too. Throw in the unique stylistic touches of the varied authors below, and you're sure of a good time.

Pete, known as Pillow to most, is a punch-drunk former boxer who now works as muscle for the local crime syndicate run by Surrealists in Andrew Battershill's debut novel. When a stolen-coin turnover goes wrong on his watch, Pillow figures he can take the coins for himself and get out of town with his pregnant sort-of girlfriend. All he has to do is remember which lies he's telling to whom, which when you've taken as many blows to the head as Pillow has is near nigh impossible. What sounds like a standard crime novel is a showcase for lyrical, poetic writing. Pillow's whole world is surreal, partly because of his mental state, and people are constantly saying impossibly bizarre yet pithy things. What makes this novel stand apart is not only its creative imagery and stylistic complexity, but its dark humor.

Another quirky caper novel is Thomas Pynchon's Inherent Vice. Laidback Doc Sportello, part-time P.I. in 1960s California, gets a visit from an old flame who is dating a guy whose wife and her lover want to disappear and are willing to cut the girlfriend in on it. Then the old flame and her boyfriend vanish unexpectedly, and then it gets complicated. Pynchon uses sharp dialog and hallucinatory imagery to create a California that never quite existed, but you definitely want to visit.

Of course, if you want gallows humor mixed with crime in your fiction, you can hardly go wrong with Chuck Palahniuk's Fight Club. Our nameless narrator is living a humdrum life in an office job when he meets iconoclast Tyler Durden. The anarchistic fun Tyler gets up to certainly beats the support-group tourism our narrator has been engaging in and where he has met and become enamored of Marla, a fellow visitor. Small scale rebellion soon turns to wholesale terrorism, as participants in fight clubs harness their alienation and despair. One of the first books to come out of Generation X, Fight Club gleefully skewers pretty much everything the Baby Boom was about. Not for the faint of heart, this is a gritty, complicated book.

If you want to see crime from the other side of the badge, there's Michael Chabon's The Yiddish Policemen's Union. Part alternate history, part Chandlerian mystery, this book explores what might have happened if a Jewish homeland was set up in Alaska instead of Israel. Put-upon police detective Meyer Landsman lands a case that no one wants solved: the murder of a heroin-addicted chess prodigy. The victim is also the son of the most powerful rabbi in Sitka, which is in turmoil over the federal government's proposed deportation of all those without the proper papers. What to do? Landsman grabs his half-Tlingit partner and ex-wife boss and tries to find out whodunit. Filled with wry humor and wordplay, this book proves the multitalented Chabon can write noir with the best of them.

Got more good crime novels by great authors?  Let us know in the comments.