Dean Koontz on the Humorous Suspense Writer You Need to Read

I thought if we laughed with the characters now and then, they would be more appealing and seem more real, because humor is how we all—if we’re sane—cope with adversity and peril. I tried to be humorless for the next book, Midnight. At the keyboard, I was a grim, doom-mongering, tornado of paranoia. Then came The Bad Place, which was dark and scary but, at the same time, funny enough that my agent and publisher were not amused.

In those days, before email, I was receiving as many as 10,000 snail-mail letters each year from readers, and one day it occurred to me that not one of them complained about my often mixing a little humor into the books. In fact, many of them liked it. Thereafter, when I felt the need to wear two hats—the black hood of a grim reaper and a bell-festooned jester’s cap—I didn’t worry about it. So there followed the Odd Thomas series and From the Corner of His Eye and Life Expectancy, among others, and I never had to gut a single fish.

Although I’ve been influenced by scores of writers, I can identify one who most profoundly impressed me when it came to the delightful blend of suspense and comedy: Donald E. Westlake. Under the name Richard Stark, he wrote some of the finest hardboiled caper novels ever published, but under his real name, he was the most consistently funny American writer from 1965 until well into the first decade of the new millennium. In a just world, his best work would be preserved in prestige paperbacks forever, but you’ll probably most easily find them now as ebooks.