Detective comedy 5: Reflecting on the job

That’s it for the course!

We've looked at the tropes of detective stories and how The Falcon's Malteser exaggerates them to create a comedy.

It's a great way to write a funny piece, too. A lot of comedy is taking a style, a situation, or a story that most people recognise and tweak and twist the tropes by:

• exaggerating what would normally happen
• changing what's expected ('What if the assistant was cleverer than the character in charge?')
• wordplay ('...and the curtains' / 'it was curtains for us')

The next time you attempt to write for laughs (whether it's a dective story or not), use this group of lessons to help.

Tell me more about The Falcon’s Malteser (without giving away too many spoilers)

The Falcon’s Malteser by Anthony Horowitz is the first of 8 novels in The Diamond Brothers series, which tells the adventures of the world’s worst private detective. 

Set in London, it features Nick Simple and his older brother Herbert (who works under the name ‘Tim Diamond’ because he thought it sounded better). As this group of lessons covers, they’re approached by Johnny Naples who employs them to look after a box of chocolates. It contains all the staples of a good detective story - mystery, intrigue, arrests, nightclub singers, shady figures, kidnappings and diamonds.  

The story has also been adapted into a stage play and a film called Diamond’s Edge or Just Ask for Diamond, depending on where you live.

This is a promo that was created for New Old Friends for their stage production of the story.

And this is a section of the film that matches the passages we're looking at in these lessons!

Pictures of this guy are all throughout this course. Who is he?

The actor's name is Humphrey Bogart.

He starred in many classic detective films in the 1930s and 1940s, the most memorable being, Casablanca, The Big Sleep and The Maltese Falcon.

Also, as The Falcon's Malteser is an obvious play on The Maltese Falcon, Humphrey Bogart was an obvious choice to illustrate these lessons!

That's it!

We hope these lessons give you ideas on how to write your own classic detective story (or your own detective comedy story, or your own comedy detective story, or your own... oh forget it).