The best books of laugh-out-loud crime fiction

I had the good fortune to meet Thomas Perry at a writers' conference a few years back. Perry is best known for fast-paced thrillers such as The Butcher's Boy, the Jane Whitefield series, and The Old Man.

On the topic of comic crime fiction, he observed that violent crime is serious business that's difficult to treat with levity. Perry tried it in his second novel. Published in 1983, Metzger's Dog follows Chinese Gordon and his gang as they romp through the southern California desert—blowing things up. Their target is a medical facility with a million dollars worth of cocaine. The heist goes perfectly, except Chinese Gordon also snatches a folder of documents that detail the CIA's meddling with foreign governments. Naturally the feds want those docs back—with extreme prejudice.

My wife grew up in South Florida, and I can tell you from personal experience that if Florida Man didn't exist, Elmore Leonard would have invented him. In Maximum Bob, the criminal screw-ups are all too believable. Murderers, brawlers, alligator poachers, dognappers, and drug dealers—their brilliant schemes invariably go awry, and they think it's unfair that Judge Bob Gibbs doesn't accept plea bargains. Bob himself is a slimy character with a soft spot for anything in a skirt—except his irritatingly psychic wife, Leanne. One night an alligator shows up on the Gibbs' porch and eats Leanne's dog. The cops think someone must have transported the gator, with Bob as the intended victim. Who would do something so stupid? Any of the thugs who received one of Maximum Bob's ultra-long sentences, that's who.

Every crime writer stands in awe of Donald Westlake, the king of the caper. In Bank Shot, the second novel in the Dortmunder series, the gang's target is a bank that's temporarily housed in a mobile home. As a graduate student in the 1970s, I did business with just such a bank. But it never occurred to me to hitch it to a truck and just drive away with it. That's the score Dortmunder's partner Kemp proposes. He guarantees it'll be a breeze. But Dortmunder, a chronically pessimistic ex-con "with a hangdog expression," worries the armed guards might be a problem. Nevertheless, he assembles a string of eccentric criminal specialists, and the fun begins. Rest assured, in a Westlake caper, the best-laid plans always go astray.

Robert Crais' private detectives, Elvis Cole and Joe Pike, inhabit the same traffic-choked freeways as Harry Bosch, but in a much brighter key. I'm drawn to Elvis' non-stop banter, which is often laugh-out-loud funny. Tough-guy Joe has a gift for understatement that makes him a perfect foil for Elvis. In Voodoo River, Elvis falls in love with Lucy Chenier. (His wiseguy courtship style is something you shouldn't try at home.) The novel's set in Louisiana, where Crais grew up. Elvis is investigating a blackmail scheme run by Milt Rossier, a wily ex-con backed up by a gun thug named Leroy; Rene, a 400-pound brain-dead monster; and a vicious snapping turtle named Luther. Elvis is not intimidated, but he wisely calls in Joe to improve the odds for the inevitable confrontation.

I couldn't get enough of the character, Rocco Schiavone, from the TV series Ice Cold Murders, so I decided to check out the original novels by Antonio Manzini. They are equally good—or better.  Rocco is a police inspector from Rome who gets transferred to Aosta, an alpine ski resort town. In Black Run, Rocco instructs his provincial team in big-city police techniques, including cutting corners and avoiding superiors. He contrives useless errands to get his two dumbest cops out of the office. And he introduces his classification of Things That Are a Pain in the Ass, with "sand in your clams" at Level Seven and "unsolved homicide" at Level 10. Black Run begins on the slopes, at Level 10, with the discovery of an unidentified corpse mangled by a snowcat.