Michael Kardos ’92 Recommends Comedic Crime Novels
Comic crime has a baked-in challenge. Crimes —the big ones, anyway — tend to take place on the worst day of someone’s life. So how does one write about it comically?
Michael Kardos ’92 has it figured out. A native of the Jersey Shore, he studied music at Princeton and spent years as a professional drummer before switching gears to write fiction. He holds an MFA from Ohio State and a doctorate from the University of Missouri, and he’s written several novels. His latest, Fun City Heist, follows a former drummer who agrees to perform a reunion show with his old bandmates at a beachside theme park — and, following a plan with “more holes than a golf course,” rob it.
PAW asked Kardos to recommend three more comedic crime novels that have cracked the genre’s code. He suggested these:
By Donald Westlake, 1970
Donald Westlake was the unrivaled king of the comic caper. He was an astonishingly prolific writer, publishing something like 100 novels under his own name as well as under a half-dozen pseudonyms. During the COVID lockdown, I found myself drawn to — or maybe “escaping to” is more apt — his series about a crew run by career criminal John Dortmunder. My favorite is the fourth installment, Nobody’s Perfect. But I recommend beginning at the beginning with The Hot Rock. Here, Dortmunder and his crew steal the famous Balaboma Emerald — and succeed! — but then, almost immediately, they lose the emerald, requiring them to have to re-steal it, only to lose it again, causing them to have to re-steal it … you get the idea. It’s a clever, funny novel with great timing and lively prose. Its humor comes from a place of cosmic absurdity and an ethos of “what can go wrong will go wrong” (often spectacularly). If needed, Westlake’s novel will ease you through a lockdown or other dystopian moment. And when you’re done, you can watch the film, deftly adapted by William Goldman and starring Robert Redford.
By Fredrik Backman, 2019
A failed bank robber bursts into a realtor’s open house and takes everyone present hostage. As far as premises go, it’s a grabber, and the structure allows for a disparate set of characters, trapped together, to gradually reveal themselves in greater depth to one another and to the reader. Over the last few years, Swedish writer Fredrik Backman has become a Very Popular Author, but if this is one you’ve missed, I recommend it: It’s a generous book with surprises that keep coming and a well-calibrated humor-to-pathos ratio.
Everyone in My Family Has Killed Someone
By Benjamin Stevenson, 2020
Despite its contemporary setting and voice, Stevenson’s novel is a classic whodunnit with clues and red herrings and a large cast of characters with dark secrets and hidden motives. The novel is set at an Australian ski resort during a blizzard, making the location inaccessible to anybody but the family who has gathered there for a reunion. It’s narrated by the engaging, self-aware Ernest Cunningham, whose past, as the title suggests, is as shady as everyone’s in his family. Stevenson’s novel has a strong comic impulse, but the book is equally interested in the comic armor we wear to hide deeper pain. Like The Hot Rock, Everyone in My Family Has Killed Someone happens also to be the first in a series — so if you enjoy it, there are plenty more.
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