Murder is a Laughing Matter
I think we all know that murder is serious business. If it were a loved one of mine, I certainly wouldn't want the detective cracking jokes at the crime scene. But as well as countless depressing novels about bad men and dead women, there are plenty that make you smile, or even howl with laughter. For me, injecting humour into writing felt natural, it felt fun, and it felt real. Because life is funny, even when the bigger picture isn't.
Obviously I’m not alone in finding the lightness in the dark. Plenty of comedians – often to their downfall when they go too far – crack jokes about the most tragic of human experience, and many crime authors before and after me weave humour with the heartache.
Golden Age crime has inspired a slew of modern day ‘cosy’ authors, many of them drawing on similar humour. Agatha Christie’s writing may not be laugh-out-loud funny, but her tongue-in-cheek observations about class consistently raise a smile even today, and Hercule Poirot is an inherently funny creation – vain, fastidious, with an extravagant moustache that would make a grown man snigger. In the 2020s, Richard Osman, Ian Moore, and the Reverend Richard Coles mix murder with mirth in a more explicit fashion (though perhaps the humour is just more obvious to me as a modern reader).
Cosy crime is escapist and solvable, like a puzzle on a winter’s evening, and the genre lends itself to gentle humour. But it’s not just cosy writers who crack jokes. The recent wave of female serial killer books produced many hilarious novels – Bella Mackie’s How to Kill Your Family made me cackle with laughter on multiple occasions. The enduringly successful Misery by Stephen King avoids being relentlessly dark because it constantly surprises you with humour. More than that, it made me feel I understood Paul Sheldon – I might not be able to relate to his rather unusual predicament, but I could relate to his wit. The gallows humour is what makes Misery one of my favourite novels.
So why are we drawn to writing, and reading, crime fiction that makes us laugh?
Crime fiction has a lot in common with a good joke. A set-up, a story, a punchline that ties it all together. There are red herrings, surprises, and clues you could have spotted but usually didn’t. Mostly, it is that they both often rely on contrast – what you think you know and what is coming – and contrasting humour with horror can sometimes double the effect of both.
In recent years, explicitly funny crime has had a resurgence. I don’t believe it is a coincidence that we find ourselves reaching for fiction that makes us laugh when the news feels so relentlessly bleak. Crime fiction in general appeals because it makes sense in a world that sometimes feels senseless, controlled when everything else feels the opposite. Humour also allows us to create distance and explore something dark without it overwhelming us. I said I wouldn’t want a detective cracking jokes while investigating a murder of my loved one – but in reality, I’m sure they would be, much like doctors are purported to do in the hospital wards. Because humour is humanity’s best coping mechanism.
All of this appeals to me in both my writing and what I reach for to read. My amateur sleuth, Jane Hepburn, has a comically British self-deprecation and love of tea and cake. She often finds herself in bookish settings that mirror this gentleness, with a dead body that feels … out of place. Like the old biddie Miss Marple consistently outsmarting the police force before returning to her knitting, that contrast is funny. It also allows characters to shine – when you’re focused on how they react to a broken printer or a cold cup of coffee you connect to them and bring that connection forward into the darker sides of the story.
Murder is, self-evidently, no laughing matter. But fiction has always let us do the things we cannot do in life, and one of those things is finding the absurdity in the darkest corners. From the gallows humour of Misery, to the razor-sharp wit of How to Kill Your Family, to my own novels with their relatable comedy subtly woven through a murder mystery, I say it’s okay to laugh when the stakes are high.
Crime Novels That Might Make You Laugh
Misery by Stephen King
How to Kill Your Family by Bella Mackie
The Thursday Murder Club series by Richard Osman
The Word is Murder by Anthony Horowitz
Death and Croissants by Ian Moore
(and mine!)
Q&A with E.C. Nevin
What inspired you to set a cosy crime series in the world of publishing?
Before becoming an author, I was a crime editor, so publishing is a world I know intimately. As a reader, I adore books set in a world I don’t know much about, but that the author clearly does. Well, this is the world I know.
There is also the fact that you have an immediate connection with the reader. The very fact that they are setting foot in a bookshop to buy it means that we have something in common – we both love to read. The winks, easter eggs, and allusions to genre tropes and classic plot lines I can weave in are fun to write and, hopefully, fun to read. It’s like having a conversation with them about your shared hobby.
Publishing can be a total joy, but it can be cut throat too. There is a lot of emotion coming from all sides, from jealous or disappointed authors to stressed out editors. Sure, I have never actually witnessed a murder because of this … but there have been times it didn’t feel too far away!
Can you introduce us to Jane Hepburn? What makes her the perfect amateur sleuth?
Jane is smart, but doesn’t realise it. Ambitious, but often afraid to grasp chances. Good with people, but second guesses that trait. In the world of books, but a constant outsider. Knowledgeable about crime fiction, but not about actual crime. And finally, she cares – about her friends and about people who have been wronged.
This all means she can worm her way into situations and connect with people in a way that not everyone can, as well as approach investigations on a more human level than the detectives on the case. There is also the fact that she knows books, and as the crimes she encounters are all book-related, she spots things that the professionals don’t always see as important.
A Novel Murder is set at a literary festival and A Killer Plot starts in a bookshop. How do you choose your settings?
I thought it would be fun to set these novels in places where many people in the book industry are brought together. The first is based on a well-known crime fiction festival I’ve been attending for years. Book festivals are notorious for too much alcohol and high emotion, so it felt perfect. When it came to A Killer Plot, I wanted an equally important bookish location that also drew people together, and a book launch in Cecil Court felt perfect.
Over the years I have attended numerous parties thrown by Goldsboro, and the setting is so atmospheric and joyful. The street is even known as Booksellers Row. The bookshop in A Killer Plot started off as actually being Goldsboro, but I didn’t want to get in trouble for setting fictional murders in a real shop, and writing real people into fiction felt dangerous, so it became the fictional Willow Tree Books instead.
Are any of the characters in the series based on real people from your publishing career?
No one is taken directly from that world and placed into a book. However, a lot of the characters started off that way, or as an amalgamation of a few people I have worked with. Perhaps sadly, more people I have worked with have been lovely, so there were no obvious villains to choose from!
What does a typical writing day look like for you?
I treat this like any other job so I try to work 9-5, be that research, planning, editing, or actually getting words on the page. But that is difficult and I have to constantly trick myself to keep focus. I will work in a coffee shop for a few hours, move around the house to different rooms, outside, inside, outside again. Sometimes I’ll write while walking on a treadmill because it’s almost impossible to procrastinate while walking.
If Jane Hepburn walked into a bookshop, what would she pick up?
I’ve been reading Anthony Horowitz’s Hawthrone series, which I know Jane would also love. They are very meta – Anthony Horowitz is a character in them – and are twisty, knowing and fun. Jane would be reaching for the latest in the series – A Deadly Episode.
Do you have a favourite minor character?
In A Novel Murder I loved writing Abi, the angry, selfish, and overlooked literary agency assistant. In A Killer Plot, it was Lambert Graves, the respected author with a gaudy obsession with gold. You never know who you will fall in love with writing, but it often happens that a certain character appears that you really enjoy spending time with on the page, even if I wouldn’t enjoy their company in the real world.
What can readers expect next from Jane?
Jane’s third adventure – A Death Sentence – will publish next year. She is off on her first ever writing retreat in the south of France. Hopefully nothing goes wrong while she’s there …
