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Written by Gordon Hopkins Wednesday, 21 September 2011 19:27

It is Daphne’s take on people and events, rather than the events or people themselves, which is funny.

• One: Populate your mystery with wacky, zany or just plain weird characters. The best known, or at least most successful, example in recent years would be Janet Evanovich’s Stephanie Plum novels. I don’t know anyone who loves those books who hasn’t said to me, at one time or another, “Oh, that grandma just cracks me up.”

• Two: Make the plot, itself, funny. Many of Donald Westlake’s humorous novels fit into this category. That isn’t to say the books don’t have their fair share of strange or funny characters, but rather that the humor derives primarily from the circumstance said characters find themselves in. In the first Dortmunder novel, The Hot Rock, much of the comedy results from the various failed attempts to swipe an emerald, the “hot rock” of the title. The danger in this is that wildly improbable plot elements can be viewed as unrealistic or, even worse, lazy writing.

• Three: The humor is derived from the way the story is told. The majority of Gregory Mcdonald’s Fletch novels could easily be rewritten as “straight” mysteries with little or no changes to plot or characters. It is the way the main character views events around him and, of course, the famous dialogue that makes these books hilarious.

That brings us to Wendy Dager’s I Murdered the PTA. This book is actually a bit of an odd duck. At first blush, it appears to be a type one but it is actually a type three. I Murdered the PTA tells the story of Daphne Lee-Lee, a widowed mother, singer, pottery maker and vintage bowling shirt fanatic. Despite the affectations, she never comes across as anything more than a bit quirky. Even the hyphenated last name (she and her late husband had the same last name) is the kind of spur-of-the-moment thing an otherwise perfectly normal person about to get married might do. It is Daphne’s take on people and events, rather than the events or people themselves, which is funny.