Parodies of Mystery and Crime Fiction

Introduction

Conventional genres—those structured around stock character types, plot twists, themes, situations, and locales—lend themselves easily to parody, spoofing, and satirizing of the very elements that define the genre. Because genre conventions are cherished by fans and widely recognized by the general public, it is easy for parodists to select targets for their humor that will be understood and identified by almost any audience. For example, when filmmaker Mel Brooks wrote and directed his parody of the Western genre, Blazing Saddles (1974), he knew the expectations his audience would hold about any film identified as a Western: a setting in the wide spaces of the American Southwest; conflicts among land barons, poor farmers, and ranchers; gunfighters and gunfights; ethnic tensions; sexy saloon singers; and epic, climactic showdowns between good guys and bad guys. Therefore, he chose those elements to tweak as sources of irreverent comedy. For example, in typical Westerns, racial conflict usually pits Native Americans against settlers of European descent. Brooks’s film instead set a Black sheriff against White settlers. At the film’s climax, the conflict between townspeople and the forces of the evil land baron erupts into such a tremendous battle that it breaks down the conventions of the Western genre, as the rustic combatants spill onto the soundstage of a modern musical film and begin fighting with dancers.

Types of Parody

Generic parodies, those spoofing genres defined by sets of conventions and expectations, are separated into three categories. The most common category includes straightforward spoofs, or satires, of the sort represented by the film Blazing Saddles (1974). Their humor is broad, obvious, and often bawdy; the audience’s pleasure comes from having its expectations of the genre tweaked, thwarted, contradicted, or grossly exaggerated. This type is by far the most common sort of generic parody.

A second category of parody might be called “parody-plus.” Works of this nature taunt audiences with the expected conventions of the genre while offering humor that is more intellectual and playful than profane. Moreover, besides serving as parodies, the works function much as standard examples of their genres. A good example of this parody is in the three Scream films released during the 1990s. These films play with the conventions of horror films, and the characters frequently joke about the expectations audiences bring to the theaters. At the same time, however, the films are also genuinely frightening enough to satisfy fans of the genre.

A third and final sort of generic parody can be called the metafictional parody. Humor in this sort of parody is slight and cerebral. Although generic conventions are often used in playful ways, the works play with the broader conventions and uses of narrative and storytelling in general as much as with those of a specific category or type. An example of this sort of self-conscious, parodistic writing is ’s best-selling series of seven novels known collectively as The Dark Tower (1982-2012). Those books toy with the conventions of both the Western and horror genres, not to spoof them, but to analyze them and to reflect on how stories are told, what needs narrative fulfills, and how relationships among authors, characters, and readers are structured. Examples of all three types of parodies can be found in the many parodies of mystery and crime fiction.

Sherlock Holmes Parodies

Although is traditionally credited with inventing the modern mystery story with “The Case of Marie Rogêt” (1842) and “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” (1841), it was ’s later stories about Sherlock Holmes that popularized the new genre and gave the world a paradigmatic figure of the detective. Holmes skillfully solved crimes through thorough attention to the smallest of details, careful ratiocination, and total objectivity. Beginning with his novel A Study in Scarlet (1887), Doyle adhered in almost all his Holmes stories to a successful formula: In a late Victorian setting realistically depicted by the standards of Doyle’s time, Holmes faces with what seems to be an insoluble crime or inexplicable occurrence. Throughout his ensuing investigation, his sidekick, Dr. Watson, and the police remain baffled because they lack Holmes’s eye for detail or because they succumb to emotions and begin fretting or blustering. Holmes has no such shortcomings and soon solves the mystery to the delight and admiration of all. The formulaic nature of the Holmes mysteries allowed them to be imitated widely—and also parodied, almost from the time Holmes first appeared.

The first parody of Holmes was a series of spoofs written by R. C. Lehmann that began appearing in various magazines and journals in 1893 and were collected into book form in 1901. Lehmann’s titles spoofed Doyle’s original titles by imitating them while sounding dull and uninviting. In 1894, published a story titled “The Murders in the Rue Morgue" which has a Holmes-like detective named Sherlaw Kombs stop a Watson-like friend from revealing the details of the Pegram conundrum, explaining that the man should save his breath, as the great detective has just sensed the distant approach of a man who will soon knock on his door and explain the entire matter in a clear and coherent form. During that same year, Allan Ramsey published “The Adventure of the Table Foot,” in which the Holmes figure takes one glance at the Watson figure one morning and instantly deduces that his friend has not had breakfast, that he has taken a cab to visit him, that it is not raining but soon will be, and that a man of the working class brushed up against his friend on the street.

Some of these parodies spoofed various details of Holmes’s lifestyle and pastimes. For example, G. F. Forrest has his Holmes figure playing an accordion rather than a violin, and R. K. Munkittrick has his master detective enjoy morphine as his drug of choice, rather than cocaine. John Kendrick Bangs, an admired writer of crime and supernatural stories in his own right, wrote several Holmes parodies, including a book of purported comic memoirs.

Several writers celebrated outside the mystery genre also contributed to the growing amount of Holmesian parodies published during Doyle’s day. In America, both Bret Harte and O. Henry produced spoofs of Holmes. In Harte’s “The Stolen Cigar-Case,” the Holmes figure amazes the Watson figure by revealing he has deduced that it is raining. He then impresses him even more by explaining how he arrived at this deduction: He heard the rain on the roof and window. In O. Henry’s “The Adventures of Shamrock Jolnes,” the great detective merely glances at his sidekick to perceive that the man has just installed electricity in his house. O. Henry’s name, “Shamrock Jolnes,” is typical of the names of most of these spoofs of Doyle’s creation and indicative of their level of humor. Other examples include Picklock Holes (Lehman), Thinlock Bones (Ramsay), Sherlaw Kombs (Barr), Hemlock Jones (Hart), Shylock Jones (Bangs), and Warlock Bones (Forrest). These Holmesian spoofs were straightforward parodies and nothing more.

As intellectually undemanding and lowbrow as these burlesques may have been, parody quickly became so much a part of the growing cult of Sherlock Holmes that even one of Doyle’s closest friends, James M. Barrie, the famed playwright and creator of Peter Pan, used such a device to communicate his affection and admiration. After the writers collaborated unsuccessfully on a libretto called “Jane Annie” for Richard D’Oyly Carte, the producer of W. S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan’s operettas, Barrie expressed his feelings about his friend and their failed effort when he signed the flyleaf of a copy of his book A Window in Thrums to Doyle, adding afterward “The Adventure of the Two Collaborators,” a brief recasting of their mutual misadventure in theater as a loving take-off on a Holmes-and-Watson story.

The 2018 film starring Will Ferrell and John C. Reilly, Holmes & Watson, attempted to parody the Sherlock Holmes mysteries, but most audience members felt it fell short and some critics called it the worst film of the year.

Twentieth Century Parodies

Arthur Conan Doyle never wrote again about his famous creation after World War I began. He turned to other genres and, most especially, to a study of spiritualism and parapsychology. Meanwhile, mysteries and crime stories continued to fascinate readers, and other authors began to write mysteries that drew especially on one of the best of the Holmes stories, The Hound of the Baskervilles. Their books tended to deal, especially with the dark secrets of old families in stately manor houses and of the villagers and servants surrounding them. Agatha Christie soon emerged as the best—and the best-selling—of this new generation of mystery writers. As the twentieth century progressed, other writers, especially in the United States, began crafting a new type of mystery story that was more urban and distinctly American. The works of writers such as Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler came to be called the “hard-boiled” subgenre of mystery and detective fiction. They were so named because of the toughness of their protagonists, the leanness of their prose style, and the bleakness of their worldview. Perhaps predictably, the works of Christie and other English writers similar to her in style and subject and those of the new, very different American writers soon became fodder for parodies. Through the remainder of the century and into the twenty-first century, literary parodies of mystery and crime fiction of all three sorts—simple spoofs, “parody-plus,” and metafictional parodies—appeared frequently in a variety of formats: short stories, novels, plays, and even musicals.

One of the earliest and best straightforward spoofs of Agatha Christie’s pastoral detective fiction is the engaging novel Trent’s Last Case (1913) by the English novelist E. C. Bentley. The book is funny and gentle in both language and tone, but it is also one of the most damning satires of detective fiction ever written. Its protagonist, Philip Trent, is not a moronic bungler botching a case out of ineptitude. He is intelligent and competent and employs all the techniques of observation and ratiocination that Holmes and Christie’s detectives routinely use. Still, he misinterprets every clue, overlooks important evidence, and misidentifies the culprit. At the novel's end, Trent recants—to the actual murderer, no less—all future interest in solving crimes and mysteries. Bentley thus subverts the basic paradigm of crime-solving as spelled out in the stories of Doyle and Christie, namely, that cleverness, eagle-eyed skills of observation, and cool application of logic do not always lead an investigator to a proper conclusion, with everything solved and tied up neatly with no loose strands of thought or plot. Bentley seems to be spoofing not only the genre's outward conventions but also the core values central to it.

The next best spoof of the Holmes/Christie school of mystery story was American humorist ’s 1938 short story “The Macbeth Murder Mystery.” Thurber’s story satirized not only the conventions but also the fans of the genre. The story has an American mystery-story fan go to England, find a copy of ’s play Macbeth (1606), foolishly mistake it for a mystery story, and set out to prove that Macbeth did not murder Duncan.

The hard-boiled detective subgenre arose during the 1920s but had to wait until the 1950s for its first excellent satire. When it finally arrived, it came in an unusual form—a comic recording by humorist Stan Freeburg titled Sam Splayed: Detective. Freeburg’s recording poked good-natured fun at Dashiell Hammett’s detective Sam Spade, who was made famous by the 1941 film The Maltese Falcon. (Perhaps coincidentally, many comedy and mystery fans consider another recorded comedy routine of the 1960s, “The Giant Rat of Sumatra,” by the Firesign Theater, to be the best twentieth-century spoof of Sherlock Holmes.)

During the 1970s, another American humorist, Woody Allen, took on the hard-boiled school of mystery fiction in a hilarious series of short stories he wrote for The New Yorker. Featuring a Sam Spade semiclone called Kaiser Lupowitz, Allen’s spoofs juxtaposed the tough, stoic language and character types of Hammett and Chandler with the trendy, neurotic milieu of the late twentieth-century United States, in which characters have anxiety attacks and whine about abstract philosophical issues. An English theatrical troupe assembled Allen’s stories called I Am Camera in 2006 and presented as a play with jazz accompaniment to enthusiastic reviews in London and New York. This was not, however, the first such combination of mystery spoof and music. In 1987, John Bishop’s The Musical Comedy Murders of 1940, a combination of comic song and satire of Agatha Christie and hard-boiled mystery fiction, had a successful run on Broadway.

Some straightforward mystery spoofs are very narrow in their scope, satirizing an author, series, or individual book. For example, Robert Kaplow’s The Cat Who Killed Lilian Jackson Braun is a take-off on Braun’s seemingly endless series of mystery novels in which cats figure prominently both in the plots and the titles. Likewise, Confessions by a Teenage Sleuth, by Chelsea Cain and Lia Miternique, pokes fun at the Nancy Drew series of juvenile mystery stories. Some spoofs take on a single book. For example, Toby Clements’s The Asti Spumante Code (2005) burlesques Dan Brown’s wildly popular thriller Da Vinci Code (2003).

Parody and More

Other parodies written since World War I have striven to do more than simply poke fun at the mystery/crime genre and its loyal fans. Other writers have experimented with the tropes and figures of typical crime fiction while providing audiences with solid and involving narratives. One of the best in the parody-plus category is Lawrence Block’s The Burglar in the Library. This novel features a typical Agatha Christie-type plot: Guests staying in an English country manor house try to solve the mystery of who has murdered their aristocratic host. The twist on convention—and the playful reference to the mystery genre itself—lies in who the protagonist and amateur sleuth are and why he is present: Bernie Rhodenbarr is a thief who has insinuated himself into the household to steal a first edition of a classic of the hard-boiled detective genre, Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep (1939). Rhodenbarr must solve the murder of his host to steal the valuable mystery novel.

One of the longest-running Off-Broadway plays is also an excellent example of parody-plus. Shear Madness, an English adaptation of a Swiss play by Paul Portner, began its record-breaking run at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., in 1987. Set in a unisex hair salon, it is a comic mystery play that pokes fun at all plot, motive, and character twists and turns that genre fans expect. At the same time, it invites reflection on the nature of the genre and its appeal by involving audiences in solving its mystery. A similar exercise in audience exploration and involvement in generic conventions was tried, with less success, in the 1985 production of Charles Dickens’s The Mystery of Edwin Drood.

The popular trend of mystery-themed parties began during the 1980s. Evenings and even entire weekends were devoted to elaborate games in which guests acted out and tried to solve mysteries, usually in the form of Agatha Christie novels or hard-boiled crime tales. These “events” might easily be labeled “parodies-plus”; while the competitions to solve the crimes were real, the guests were, in a context of light-hearted entertainment, made to review and test the conventions of mystery stories they had read or viewed.

Several plays, novels, and stories appearing from the latter half of the twentieth century onward take the notion of parody to an even higher level: they knowingly employ conventions of and references to classic mystery and crime literature to explore the very nature of truth, storytelling, and intellectual endeavor. These works might be called metafictional parodies.

Perhaps the best-known metafictional mystery parody is Umberto Eco’s Il nome della rosa (1980; The Name of the Rose, 1983). This international best-seller spoofs other writers. For example, its investigator and protagonist, the monk William of Baskerville, recalls Arthur Conan Doyle’s most famous Holmes story. Moreover, the relationship between William and his novice monk sidekick, Adso, is much like that between Holmes and Watson. Eco’s narrative technique is typically Holmesian. Its sidekick, Adso, is its narrator, not the primary investigator. Unlike other parodists, however, Eco aims not to poke fun at the mystery genre or Doyle but to depict the difficulty of identifying truth amid many conflicting possibilities and to demonstrate how the unwavering deductive approach to the mysterious—that taken by Holmes and most prototypical crime-story protagonists—is not always effective.

Another writer who sometimes uses crime-fiction allusions and conventions to point out how reason and logic often prove to be faulty guides through the maze of human existence is the Argentine , a Nobel Prize winner for literature. “The Garden of Forking Paths,” his most widely read short story, plays with conventions of two subgenres of crime literature—the espionage thriller in the style of and the typical manor-house mystery of Christie. Borges’s protagonist is a spy trying to uncover a valuable artifact on a country estate. His skills of stealth and deduction help him but little, as he soon becomes lost literally and metaphorically in a vast maze of hedges in the estate’s garden.

Satire on Screen

Despite the many short stories, plays, and novels that parody mystery, crime, and detective fiction, the most striking examples of such satires since the early twentieth century have been film spoofs. One of the earliest and best was famed silent screen comedian Buster Keaton’s Sherlock, Jr. (1924). In that film, Keaton plays a meek movie-house projectionist who is saddened by the prospect of his girlfriend’s being stolen by a sophisticated rival; he literally projects himself onto the theater screen. There, he finds himself playing the role of Sherlock Holmes, Jr., who must solve his girlfriend’s kidnapping at the hands of an amorous sheik. Woody Allen used a similar gimmick in The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985), in which poverty-stricken small-town Americans during the Great Depression find themselves mixing with characters who come to life from a film similar to an Agatha Christie story set amid the ancient ruins of Egypt.

Allen’s film was one of a spate of mystery/crime story parodies produced during the 1970s and 1980s. They all owe a debt to Buster Keaton, Mel Brooks, or both. Shortly after the dual successes of Brooks’s spoofs of the Western and horror-film genres, Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein (1974), Gene Wilder, Brooks’s protégé and star of those two films, wrote and directed The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes’s Smarter Brother (1975), a Brooksian treatment of the Holmes material. Wilder’s story about Sherlock’s younger, bumbling, jealous brother, Sigerson (not the Mycroft Holmes of Arthur Conan Doyle), Wilder’s film featured not only Brooks’s trademark physical comedy and punning wordplay but also several actors who had appeared in Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein. The following year, Robert Moore directed a similar but more thorough and sophisticated take on mystery and crime fiction, Murder by Death (1976), from a script by the popular Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Neil Simon. Moore and Simon satirize not one but several types of mystery stories, as Dashiell Hammett’s sleuthing socialites Nick and Nora Charles become Dick and Dora Charleston, Christie’s Hercule Poirot and Miss Jane Marple become Milo Perrier and Jessica Marbles, and Hammett’s Sam Spade becomes Sam Diamond.

Although Murder by Death received lukewarm praise from critics at the time of its release, it contains a brilliant satire of one of the genre’s oldest traditions: the denouement in which all suspects and investigators assemble and all possible scenarios explaining the crime are explained out and the culprit is pinpointed. Although this traditional scene is a legitimate form of foreshortening—a technique for advancing a story faster than it would transpire in reality to avoid tedium—mystery writers and film directors have often overused or overextended this technique to tie up all plotlines and provide closure. Simon’s final scene in Murder by Death is a witty take-off on such excesses. It drags on and on, with almost every imaginable secret revealed about all the characters, whether they are suspects or not. In 1977, Mel Brooks took on the crime genre himself with a spoof of director Alfred Hitchcock’s thrillers he titled High Anxiety.

Based on the popular Milton Bradley board game, Clue (1985) was similar in plot and characterization to Moore and Simon’s Murder by Death. However, most mystery satires during the 1980s were inspired more by Buster Keaton than Mel Brooks. Director Carl Reiner’s 1982 film Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid (1982) took Keaton’s notion of projection into a mystery film and applied it to his lead actor rather than the character. In this satire of the hard-boiled detective genre, Steve Martin plays a private eye who, during his investigation, interacts with characters from classic Hollywood crime films through artful split-screen techniques. In 1988's Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Bob Hoskins plays a hard-boiled detective in an alternative-world Hollywood in which classic cartoon characters are real and must be interrogated during murder investigations. Like the characters in Keaton’s Sherlock Holmes parody and Allen’s The Purple Rose of Cairo, Hoskins moves back and forth between a realistically seedy 1930s-era Hollywood and the brightly colored, literally cartoonish Toonville.

During the 1990s and early 2000s, the most popular film spoofs were parodies of the spy-film subgenre, particularly the iconic James Bond films, beginning with Mike Myers’s Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery (1997). Poking fun at the conventions and characters of films based on Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels, Myers’s film also parodied the fashions and slang of the 1960s. Its success spawned sequels in 1999 and 2002. Three decades earlier, Get Smart (1965-1970) had been popular as a long-running spoof of mystery and crime fiction on television. Like the Austin Powers films, Get Smart parodied James Bond, having particular fun with Agent Maxwell Smart’s outrageous gadgets, such as shoe phones.

As might be expected, metafictional parody is uncommon in films. However, three examples from three decades embody this self-aware mystery film about mysteries. The most daring of the three films is Jean-Luc Godard’s (1965), combining conventions of James Bond-style espionage thrillers and hard-boiled detective stories to comment on the Cold War, totalitarianism, and the dehumanizing effect of mechanization.

The year 1982 saw Sidney Lumet’s film adaptation of ’s Deathtrap, the longest-running thriller on Broadway. Jay Presson Allen’s screenplay, adapted closely from Levin’s original play, repeatedly toys with viewers’ expectations as it morphs from one type of story to another. At first, it seems to be a thriller about a frail wife trying to talk her strong-willed playwright husband out of killing a younger playwright to appropriate a play he has written. Then, the audience realizes that the two men are lovers who are plotting—successfully—to frighten the wife to death so they can be together. Later, the plot becomes a war of nerves between the two men over who will write which play. Along the way, Allen and Levin trot out almost every clichéd gimmick from more than a century of mystery tales—conflicting motives, shifting alliances, a half-dozen types of weapons, duplicitous lovers, unfaithful spouses, even a dark and stormy night. The authors and director seem to exult in their ability to review these conventions and baffle viewers about what will happen next. Moreover, like the original play, the film explores in a satiric vein the nature of writing mysteries, as much of its action and motivation center on who can write a clever mystery and who will succeed as an author of mysteries.

Perhaps the best of the three metafictional film parodies is Robert Altman’s Gosford Park (2001), which turns the conventions of classic whodunits and British cozy mysteries on end: During the 1930s, a tyrannical English aristocrat is murdered during a lavish house party—a storyline straight from thousands of mysteries published since the time of Doyle. However, Altman deliberately foregrounds themes and plot elements that are secondary in traditional mysteries, such as romance, class conflict, and gender warfare. The murder occurs late in the film, and its solution is desultorily offered—and not by the police inspector and his assistant, who are buffoonish bunglers. The murder of the aristocrat is assigned less value than the harm he has done by the power his class and sex have allowed him. The film's resolution involves not a review of suspects and clues but a reconciliation between two older servants, sisters who had long ago been seduced and abandoned by the aristocrat, thereby ruining both their lives and creating a rift between them. Altman plays with the expectations audiences bring to mysteries and questions the values and attitudes common to many whodunits and cozies.

Twenty-first Century

In the twenty-first century, traditional parody films became less important in the comedy genre and were produced less frequently. Most productions had small budgets and small audiences, and parody-like films and mockumentaries that addressed entire genres or multiple works became more common. One such film featuring friends and police partners Nicholas and Danny, Hot Fuzz (2007), compiles decades of parody-worthy crime and mystery works, performers, and cliches. In one scene, the pair bursts into a bar while each firing two guns at once, completely missing their targets but looking and feeling cool. The scene is a nod to films like Desperado (1995) and the four-film Bad Boys (1995-2024) series which feature characters who successfully shoot the story's villain by impractically using a gun in each hand. Just before the final shootout between the heroes and the villains, the film includes the commonly used suit-up montage as the two heroes prepare for action. Hot Fuzz also addresses Nicholas and Danny's stereotypical police partner dynamic and their expert driving, including avoiding a collision with a mother with a stroller. Other similar works include Shaun Of The Dead (2004), Tropic Thunder (2008), Deadpool (2016), Deadpool 2 (2018), and The Cabin In The Woods (2012).

Bibliography

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