Mysteries With a Sense of Humor and a Proper Puzzle

A poet finds a body in an Oxford toyshop, then discovers the same premises occupied by a grocery store. Crispin lets the indignity of trying to explain that to anyone carry the comedy. Keep the original account of the shop in mind while the chase gets sillier; the joke gives you a concrete impossibility to solve.

The bickering in an art master's program arrives as emails, messages, and student work. The format makes a small change in someone's version of events as worth noticing as a new piece of evidence. Read this for the pleasure of sorting through a group that can be funny about almost anything except its own behavior.

A severed arm turns up in the Florida Keys and a reluctant restaurant inspector takes the discovery seriously enough to ask questions. Hiaasen's real-estate satire gives the people he meets excellent reasons to be slippery. Pick it for a case with a hard edge, where the money and the outlandish behavior are worth paying equal attention to.

A murder turns the people being held in a bank into suspects. Ernest Cunningham is so willing to tell you what kind of mystery he is in that the setup starts to feel like an argument between narrator and reader. Pick it if you like a confined set of suspects and a storyteller who makes a game of pointing out the rules.

The actor playing detective Daniel Hawthorne is stabbed on the set of a film about one of his cases. The real Hawthorne steps in to investigate. Start here if you like a mystery that makes funny work of film-set grievances while leaving room to ask who the intended target was.

A barrister goes to Venice and finds herself suspected of murder after her copy of the Finance Act turns up near a body. A tax statute makes for a wonderfully unromantic clue on a Venetian vacation. Choose this for very dry comedy and a puzzle that lets a small piece of legal reading do a surprising amount of work.

The women in a prenatal class form an investigative group after a murder in their village. They barely know one another, and now they have names to clear. The mix makes this an easy place to start if you want the ordinary irritations of meeting new people to carry some of the comedy.

A cabbie gets a tip on a horse race instead of a tip he can spend, then finds his bookie dead when he goes to collect his winnings. His wish to get paid keeps pulling him toward people with reasons to think he knows too much. The distance between his small ambition and the trouble it buys makes this a good choice for a quick, dry crime novel.

Peggy Smith used to help crime writers plot their murders. When she dies, that line of work gives her carer reason to look more closely at what seems like an ordinary death. Read this if you enjoy the affectionate joke of people who know the rules of mystery novels trying to make use of them outside the covers.

Lord Peter Wimsey goes undercover at an advertising agency after a copywriter dies on the stairs. The jokes about how hard people work to make a phrase seem effortless make the office worth visiting in its own right. Listen to the conversation around the desks; this is a case where the workplace gives you more to go on than the death alone.

A judge on circuit starts getting threats. Hare gives you enough time with the court's rituals and pecking order to recognize which small breaches of etiquette make people uncomfortable. Choose it for dry professional comedy and a puzzle that pays attention to rules the people inside the court take for granted.

Paul Mulchrone finds himself on the run with a crime-novel-loving nurse and a renegade police officer. The three make an awkward team, which is much of the fun. This is the faster, rougher end of the shelf, with enough uncertainty about who wants Paul dead to keep the chase from running on jokes alone.

A suspense writer is mistaken for a hired killer while discussing her latest plot over lunch. The misunderstandings keep getting funnier when she is drawn into an actual murder investigation and her assumptions about how a case should work stop helping. Read this for farce with consequences and a case that keeps changing under the heroine's feet.

An actor once famous for playing a sleuth on television takes a part in an amateur play, and someone is killed onstage. The audience has seen the performance without seeing how the murder happened. There's a neat puzzle in that distinction, and a running joke in watching an actor try to bring the authority of her old TV role into real life.

A fortune teller's prediction that Frances will be murdered becomes a lifelong preoccupation. Decades later, her great-niece has to take the prediction seriously enough to investigate her death. The humor is lighter here. Part of the pleasure is seeing how eccentric behavior starts to look reasonable once the person who expected trouble turns out to have been right.