Murder tales best served with food

Faced with an inordinate amount of leisure time, I rejected the idea of doing something useful such as volunteering at a retirement home or animal shelter. Instead, I read every crime novel I could get my hands on.

When I had an actual job, reading a crime novel, usually one of the Robert B. Parker books based on wiseguy Boston detective Spenser, was one of life’s truly guilty pleasures. No redeeming value, no great mental stretch. It was sort of a Big Mac for the mind.

Once I discovered the joys of Amazon.com and an endless vacation, I plowed right in. I must have read 20 or 30 books, none of them exactly “War and Peace.”

Murders, like life, must come with a twisted sense of humor and great meals. Just finished a Michael Connolly book, “Black Ice,” based on L.A. police Detective Harry Bosch. Good enough, but deadly, deadly serious. Where are the yuks? When does he eat?

After countless hours and charges to my Amazon.com account, I am here to recommend Janet Evanovich and Robert Crais.

Ladies first.

Evanovich writes wildly popular and tasty books based on bounty hunter Stephanie Plum who fell into the job after being laid off from an underwear store, or some place. The books are set in Trenton, N.J., of all places and appear in numerical order, as in “One for the Money,” “Two for the Dough” and “Three to get Deadly.” Like that.

Plum is cheerfully inept and harangued by her mother about her job, her clothes, her love life, even her car. She isn’t a tough guy but knows several. Whenever she is in trouble she calls up Ranger, her fellow bounty hunter, or Morelli, an oversexed police detective who seduced her behind the jelly doughnut counter in a neighborhood bakery a few decades earlier and has been paying for it ever since.

With the help of the tough guys and impeccable neighborhood contacts from grade school, Plum barely manages to solve the crime, arrest the bounty hunter and make a few bucks. And she never misses a meal. In the middle of the adventure, broke, bleeding and stumped, she will call her mother to check on the evening’s menu. She also visits the neighborhood pizza parlors and sub shops to meet her contacts. A crime novel is nothing if it doesn’t make you hungry.

The Spenser books, which got me hooked on the genre, always had Spenser with his tough guy Hawk and his tender significant other, Susan, sitting down for a late-night meal whipped up in the Spenser kitchen. It was a key to the appeal of the books.

Likewise, the genre must have compelling sex scenes. The Plum sex episodes, written naturally from a woman’s angle, are devastatingly understated. A woman’s angle on anything in a detective book, let alone sex, is rare to say the least.

Crais has sort of adopted the Spenser formula and taken it to the West Coast. His character, Elvis Cole, is a defrocked L.A. police officer who has turned private detective with an office that features a Mickey Mouse phone and Jiminy Cricket clock.

Some of the Crais titles are “Voodoo River, “Free Fall,” “Lullaby Town,” “Stalking the Angel” and “The Monkey’s Raincoat.”

The books are as funny as the Parker series and feature wisecracking martial arts expert Cole, backed up by an impossibly tough partner in Joe Pike and loved by a hotty girlfriend in attorney Lucy Chenier, a transplant from Louisiana. And like the Spenser books, there is never any doubt that good, and our detective, will prevail. Like, Spenser, Cole makes most of his meals in his house and each one is good enough to send a late-night reader waddling to the refrigerator. Like the Evanovich series, the sex in the Crais books is deftly handled by understatement.

I can save you the trouble and advise you to skip detective novels by Steven Womak, whose detective Harry James is boring, even if he is an ex-newspaper reporter. He never eats anything but Chinese food and appears to be a wimp.

An excellent alternative is Rick Riordan and his English professor-detective Tres Navarre, and anything penned by Daniel Woodrell, my new favorite. Woodrell is not exactly in the detective genre, but it doesn’t matter.

Now, wasn’t all that time better spent than in some retirement home or walking some injured beagle?

Send complaints and compliments to Emmet Meara at emmetmears@msn.com