Carl Hiaasen’s Bad Monkey and six more of my favourite comic crime novels

Forget Mark Twain, Kinky Friedman, Nora Ephron and David Sedaris: the funniest writer to come out of America is Carl Hiaasen. The former columnist for the Miami Herald published his first novel, Tourist Season, in 1986. “Sparky Harper and the Greater Miami Chamber of Commerce adored travel writers because travel writers never wrote stories about street crime, water pollution, fish kills, beach erosion, refugees, Aids epidemics, nuclear accidents, cocaine smugglers, gun-runners, or race riots.” His crime thrillers combine slapstick violence with real anger at the way humans continue to pollute the natural environment, especially the Florida Everglades.
Until now, only one of Hiaasen’s eco-black comedies, Strip Tease (1993), has been adapted for the screen. The 1996 cringe-fest of a film Striptease starred Demi Moore and Burt Reynolds. Bad Monkey, based on Hiaasen’s 2013 novel, promises to be much better (if — and it’s a big if — the trailer is anything to go by). It starts next week on Apple TV+, so I suggest you read the book first anyway.
Bad Monkey follows the misadventures of Detective Andrew Yancy, who loses his badge after attacking his lover’s husband with a vacuum cleaner. His new job as a restaurant inspector sorely — and stomach-turningly — tries his love of wildlife. However, when a fishing honeymooner hooks a man’s severed arm in the Florida Keys — “The victim’s hand was contracted into a fist except for the middle digit, which was rigidly extended” — Yancy smells an opportunity to get his job back. Convinced that a gold-digging wife has committed murder, he and his sidekick — a glamorous half-Cuban coroner — fly to the Bahamas, where all manner of “blithe atrocities” are committed.
Subsidiary characters include a crooked property developer troubled by bees, wasps, racoons and wild dogs — “‘Let me assure you,’ Evan Shook said, ‘I’ve never seen so much as a stray chihuahua on this island’” — a crinkle-eared goon called Egg and a practically toothless voodoo priestess known as the Dragon Queen: “Dot piece a shoyt you brought tuh me. Any minute now, his skin be fallin’ off his body. Maybe his balls, too.” Like Evelyn Waugh Hiaasen has a cynical view of human nature but the energetic way he skewers venality and venery is laugh-out-loud funny.
If the series is a hit then Hiaasen’s Razor Girl (2016), which also features Yancy, is likely to provide the sequel. However, you’d be better off putting his Double Whammy (1987) and Skin Tight (1989) in your Louis Vuitton. The former features PI RJ Decker, who is hired to prove a celebrity bass fisherman is a cheat, and introduces Skink, a reclusive renegade: “The man’s voice was deep and wet, like mud slipping down a drain.”
Skin Tight features Dr Rudy Graveline, an untrained cosmetic surgeon, who has killed a woman during disastrous rhinoplasty (a no-good nosejob), and introduces Blondell Wayne Tatum, a disfigured felon known as Chemo, who is willing to do anything for cut-price dermabrasion sessions. “One of the wondrous things about Florida, Rudy Graveline thought as he chewed on a jumbo shrimp, was the climate of unabashed corruption: There was absolutely no trouble from which money could not extricate you.” Happily, both Skink and Chemo pop up in subsequent works by Hiaasen.
The Crime Writers’ Association used to present The Last Laugh award for the best comic crime novel of the year. Not any more. While humour — wry, donnish, schoolboy or of the gallows — plays a part in much crime fiction, it is exceedingly difficult to write a full-length crime comedy. The following six titles are guaranteed to make you laugh out loud from beginning to end.
Deputy United States Marshal Carl Webster tells the bad guys: “If I have to pull my weapon, I’ll shoot to kill.” They include Pretty Boy Floyd, Baby Face Nelson and Jack Belmont, the evil son of an oil billionaire determined to be the first man to injure the Oklahoman sharpshooter. The dialogue, of course, flies off the page as a gallery of rogues chases sex and money. A tale of the Great Depression that will leave you on cloud nine.Weidenfeld & Nicolson £9.99
No one had better police sources than the former LAPD cop Joseph Wambaugh. His Hollywood quintet begins with Hollywood Station (2006). This is the sequel, which reintroduces us to the men and women of Hollywood Central — including bodacious surfer dudes Flotsam and Jetsam — as they try to uphold the law while hampered by paperwork and political correctness. Wambaugh clearly relished the unrelenting grotesquerie of LA but he never lets you forget that “far more cops murder themselves than are murdered by criminals”.Quercus £9.99
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By day blood-spatter expert Dexter Morgan works for the Miami police department; by night he executes serial killers. His fourth outing finds him on honeymoon in Paris where he and his wife, Rita, attend a gruesome exhibition that brings a whole new meaning to cut-up art. This clever, sardonic novel has an incredibly gory climax that manages to be both hilarious and horrifying.Orion £8.99
Welcome to Hurmevaara in deepest Finland, where, in the words of a Russian gangster, “nothing works the way it’s supposed to.” Leonid is only one of a motley crew determined to get their hands on a 4kg meteorite that just might be worth a million euros. The local pastor, Joel Huhta, faces a “series of unfathomable events” with admirable stoicism: “What should I think of this man? In the space of one night he has both saved my life and tried to kill me. Twice.”Orenda £8.99
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Ayoola has “the body of a music video vixen” whereas Korede does not: “She is made wholly of curves and I am composed only of hard edges.” The boys love Ayoola but she has an unfortunate habit of stabbing them. Korede, a nurse, is tired of clearing up after her younger sister and so confides in a comatose patient — who then wakes up. Nigerian-born Oyinkan Braithwaite’s astonishing debut is the blackest of black comedies as well as being a sensitive exploration of sibling rivalry.Atlantic £9.99
On Friday, August 23, 1957, a killer smashes a milk bottle on the pates of three people in Brighton. That’s a lot of spilt milk — and blood — to cry over. Constable Peregrine Twitten — he of the big brain but small heart — is determined to solve the case. Meanwhile Mrs Groynes, the criminal genius masquerading as a charlady, is busy organising a gangsters’ get-together at the Metropole Hotel. Further bloodletting ensues — and talk of jam omelettes, knickerbocker glories and Cossack aftershave. The third outing for Lynne Truss’s loveable seaside ninnies proves even funnier than its playful precursors.Raven £9.99