Fri 8 Mar 2013
by Marv Lachman.
Rereading portions of the Sir Henry Merrivale series recently made me realize again how humor in the mystery has deteriorated since the days of Carr-Dickson, Craig Rice, and Alan Green. Nowadays the closest we come to humor is the first-person narrator emulating a stand-up comedian with wisecracks. Spenser, Claire Malloy, and Kinky Friedman are examples.
In the Merrivale series almost every book had a slapstick sequence that was the mystery equivalent of the Marx Brothers. Take the riot Sir Henry causes on the New York subways in A Graveyard to Let (1949).
The humor in the series is not entirely visual — e.g., the delicious confusion between the words “kleptomania” and “nymphomania” in Fatal Descent. Sure, John Rhode is listed as co-author of that 1939 book, but does anyone really think Rhode could have written those lines, even if his life depended on it?
In the same book, the unimaginative Inspector Hornbeam says regarding a corpse discovered in a double-locked “room” (a sealed elevator car within a sealed elevator shaft): “There’s a flaw somewhere. There’s got to be. Otherwise the thing’s impossible. And it’s impossible for a thing to be impossible.”
Pure Carr.
March 9th, 2013 at 2:45 am
Well, as for deterioration in humor, look at what is thrown before us in that department, proper .
Sitcoms, pre-laughed quack,all the work of evidently handicappad ‘clowns’, just to fill the time between commercials .
And nothing better in nowadays movies .
Ha…ha…ha . Cough .
The Doc
March 9th, 2013 at 1:02 pm
I guess Marvin hasn’t read Christopher Fowler, L.C. Tyler, Mike Ripley, Carl Hiassen, or Dave Zeltersman’s short stories. I have no trouble finding some witty and sometimes hysterically funny writers who dabble in the mystery field.
March 9th, 2013 at 3:19 pm
There’s a lovely bit in, I think, NIGHT AT THE MOCKING WIDOW, where HM sees some children smoking cigarettes. Worried, he goes up to them and tells them that they shouldn’t be smoking ciggies. “You should really be smoking these” says the great man, handing out some cigars to them. Try THAT nowadays!
March 9th, 2013 at 3:38 pm
Most of those authors I mentioned were all published well after 1991 as Steve has point d out to me. And I knew that. I intended to add a sentence mentioning that, but I erased it prior to my submitting the previous comment. A more accurate comment should reflect the time that has passed since 1991. I should’ve written: “I wonder if Marvin has read…” And maybe he has by now.