Laugh? I Almost Emigrated

I’ve gone into print in the past saying that I believe Raymond Chandler is Ernest Hemingway with a sense of humor.

It’s not that I think every book should be a giggle-fest, but there’s no dichotomy between writing a serious novel and making people laugh. Kurt Vonnegut is probably the classic example, but I like Carl Hiassen and Barry Gifford for the same reason. Elmore Leonard always makes me smile, not so much on a line-by-line basis, but for the overweening aspirations of his characters juxtaposed with their inevitably sordid milieu. John McFetridge mines a similar seam. Charles Bukowski’s crime novel parody, Pulp, is hilarious.

For some reason, a goodly chunk of Irish crime fiction is shot through with humor. It’s not a staple of Irish writing, because lots of Irish crime writers aren’t funny at all, and don’t try to be. And that’s fine by me. By the same token, though, I knew I was going to love Colin Bateman’s Divorcing Jack from reading the very first lines:

I was upstairs with a girl I shouldn’t have been upstairs with when my wife whispered in my ear. ‘You have twenty-four hours to move out.’

The same applies to playwright-novelist Declan Hughes’ debut, the first line of which runs like this:

The night of my mother’s funeral, Linda Dawson cried on my shoulder, put her tongue in my mouth and asked me to find her husband.

Actually, that’s not the very first line of The Wrong Kind of Blood (2006), because there’s a prologue. But I never read prologues, so it qualifies for me.

I’ve already mentioned this week that I’m partial to Flann O’Brien, and particularly The Third Policeman, on the basis that O’Brien was a comic genius and that novel was probably the finest and funniest deconstruction of the crime novel ever. I won’t labor the point, except to point out that Eoin Colfer’s brilliant Artemis Fowl, the evil teenage genius who may or may not take over the world one of these days, has twin baby brothers called Beckett and Myles, Myles na Gopaleen being one of Flann O’Brien’s pseudonyms.

Colfer has also strayed into the realms of the private-eye novel, although, Colfer being Colfer, the private eye is a 12-year-old boy called Fletcher Moon. Half Moon Investigations opens thusly:

My name is Moon. Fletcher Moon. And I’m a private detective. In my twelve years on this spinning ball we call Earth, I’ve seen a lot of things normal people never see. I’ve seen lunch boxes stripped of everything except fruit. I’ve seen counterfeit homework networks that operated in five counties, and I’ve seen truckloads of candy taken from babies.

Derek Landy also writes for young adults, creating for the Skulduggery Pleasant series a wisecracking Bogey-a-like undead skeleton. A sample line from the first novel:

The moon was out and the stars were twinkling and it really was a beautiful night for pain.

Some writers’ sense of humor is darker than others. From Adrian McKinty’s As Dead I Well May Be:

It was 1982 and the year after the hunger strikes and tension was as high as I ever remembered it. In Belfast, riots were as general as Joyce’s snow.

Darker still is the work of Ken Bruen, in particular his private eye Jack Taylor series. While the bleak and blasted tone may appear harrowing to an international audience, Taylor can be darkly funny for an Irish reader, celebrating as he does the Irish penchant for only being truly happy when utterly miserable.

Ruth Dudley Edwards, meanwhile, revels in puncturing the myths of the politically correct in her crime/comedy romps.

For me, though, the funniest writer working crime narratives today is Roger Gregg, who writes, directs, and produces radio plays with his production company, Crazy Dog Audio. My favorite is Tread Softly Bill Lizard, in which the eponymous private eye, named for Bill the Lizard from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, is “thrown off his own train of thought only to land in the strangest of all possible realities. Trapped there, he becomes an unwilling Yankee tourist fumbling his way across the fertile landscape of the Celtic imagination.”

Bill Lizard investigates time, space, and all points in between, and the results have to be heard to be believed. If you can imagine Stephen Hawking, Lewis Carroll, Ray Chandler, and W.B Yeats collaborating on a radio play, this is what it would sound like.

Why so much humor in Irish crime writing? I honestly don’t know, and it’s very likely that every writer has his or her own reasons. For myself, I always find it difficult to write without that crutch of humor to lean on. In one sense it’s self-deprecating, so that if no one takes me seriously, I can always say I wasn’t taking myself seriously either. In another sense it’s a consequence of having grown up in the Ireland of the 1970s and ’80s, when the country was so economically crippled that emigration was at levels last seen during the Great Famine, the 40 shades of green were 40 shades of gray, black, and gloom, and if you didn’t laugh, you’d cry.

And then there’s the great Irish tradition of the pub raconteur, a venerable breed of invariably hilarious tellers of hilarious stories, of which I’m not one and never have been. I can’t tell a joke to save my life. So I try to be funny on the page instead.

It doesn’t always work, but that’s OK too.

Even one joke is better than none.