Charles Harris author ~

TOP 10 COMEDY NOVELS

Merriest season’s greetings. Are you only now getting round to buying presents? Or is it just me?

I always leave it late, though this year I have an excuse: just out of hospital and needing to finish the edits on my next novel (more about that in 2026).

I like buying people books I like – and treating myself to an interesting book too. This year I feel we need a bit of cheering up – so here are my top 10 comedy novels. All of them would make great gifts – or just great reading.

Have I missed your favourites? Or even your own? Tell me and I’ll share them too.

My top 10 comedy novels:

1. Get Shorty by Elmore Leonard

Enormous enjoyment when cool but tough loan shark Chili Palmer goes to Hollywood and gets involved in the movies. Leonard has fun sending up the movie industry and its self-obsession in a classic clash of cultures yarn between Tinseltown and Gangsterland. Check out the movie too which is, unusually, as good as the book. One of John Travolta’s career-best roles.

2. Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons

Dive in for a ruthless parody of rural melodrama. Purple prose is even specially marked for our delectation and the characters will stick on your memory, always simmering with barely-concealed emotion (along with that suggestive porridge, always bubbling on the stove). A comedy classic.

3. Sam The Sudden – PG Wodehouse

I could have chosen just about any Wodehouse novel. They all show an underrated mastery of the comic form. Like all good humour, there is a steely precision to his plotting and characterisation that’s easy to overlook. This one just happens to be the first I read – a rollicking romantic comedy. Sent reluctantly to New York as a business failure, Sam sets out to win the heart of a woman whose picture he fell in love with, but lack of money, a difficult boss and a gang of thieves get in the way. A joy.

4. The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy by Douglas Adams

How to describe this phenomenon? If you’ve missed one of the many iterations (TV series, movie, LP, novel series and original radio series) you’ve obviously been living with the Vogons. Arthur Dent is enduring an ordinary day when Earth is destroyed to make way for a hyperspace expressway. This is just the start of a rollercoaster ride with the help of a friend, who turns out to be an alien, a towel and the fabled Guide, an innocuous-looking book inscribed, in large friendly letters, with the words: DON’T PANIC.

5. Slow Horses by Mick Herron

Forget the TV series! It’s famously said that radio is better than TV because it has better pictures. Well, no TV could better the pictures I have in my mind of the outrageous Jackson Lamb and his flock of misfit spies. This was the book that kicked off both series, novels and screen. Well, OK, watch on TV if you want, but read the books first. They’re a delight.

6. Squeeze Me by Carl Hiaasen

If you haven’t come across Carl Hiaasen yet, I envy you – you have a joy in store. Again, I could have chosen almost any novel by this Florida-based journalist with a sharp eye for the idiocies that surround him. This one centres on the POTUSSIES, a group of women dedicated to supporting their President. (No prizes for guessing who). When one of their founders is apparently murdered, we’re in for chaos, led by the President, his roving-eye wife and a horde of hungry pythons. I love it, not least because it inspired the title of my latest comedy crime Play Me!

7. The Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe

Tom Wolfe takes a scalpel to New York life – high and low – in this masterpiece of satire. A WASP, bond trader and self-appointed ‘Master of the Universe’ is involved in a hit-and-run accident in the Bronx. The resultant pile-on by lawyers, newspaper hacks, politicians and clergy threaten to destroy his comfortable Park Lane lifestyle with fashion-obsessed wife and Southern mistress, giving Wolfe free reign to make hay with hypocrisies on all sides.

8. Scoop by Evelyn Waugh

When newspaper tycoon sends inoffensive nature writer William Boot to cover an African war, mistaking him for ace reporter John Courtney Boot, we’re in for a classic fish-out-of-water story which allows Waugh to satirise the news industry with an acid pen. The comedy is irresistible, with great and memorable one-liners, but the characters always believable and we warm immediately to William, rooting for him to succeed against all the odds.

9. The Prison Minyan by Jonathan Stone

Prison life with a Talmudic twist as the Jewish inmates of an up-state New York penitentiary learn to game the system in the only prison with a kosher deli. But all that is under threat when a new governor toughens up the rules. A lovely light-hearted read as the inmates find ways to fight back.

10. Play Me! by Charles Harris

OK, I couldn’t resist including my own favourite comedy crime novel. Developed over three decades after I heard that Western supermarkets were selling food grown in poor countries, where their own citizens were starving, Play Me! tells the story of a hapless British rock-star who gets entangled in a deadly plot in the Caribbean. Going on the run, his only hope of saving his life lies with a violent gangster, the gangster’s pacificist sister and a motley army of pro-democracy rebels.

Nominated for two awards and an Amazon genre bestseller, a perfect present for a friend – or even yourself – buy now.