In the world of mystery and crime series fiction, there are plenty of all-starsโyour Spades and Marlowes, Spensers and Reachers, Milhones and Scudders and Boschs. Theyโre the characters who get put on the big (and small) screens, make the bestseller lists, and lodge themselves in the popular consciousness.
Every mystery fan, though, surely has a personal list of characters they love and treasure who may or may not reach those heights. I wanted to highlight five of the characters Iโve treasured, characters who all, to one degree or another, influenced my own writing as I worked on the stories now available in my collection CRIME SCENES. Some of these characters are well known, their adventures still readily available; others may require some hunting in your local used book emporium. What they have in common, in my opinion, is being enormously entertaining.
ONE: Digger/Trace
Created by Warren Murphy (probably best remembered for his creation of Remo Williams, the Destoryer), Julian โDiggerโ Burroughs was a drunken, sloppy, and lazy insurance investigator whose cases were invariably solved by his Japanese/Italian girlfriend Koko. He appeared in four paperback originals, all published in 1982. A couple of years later, Murphy started a new series, with a different publisher, about Devlin โTraceโ Tracy, a drunken, sloppy, and lazy insurance investigator whose cases were invariably solved by his Japanese/Italian girlfriend Chico. That series ran for seven books, again all paperbacks.
Whatever legal considerations led to the shift, the characters are exactly the same and, despite the name changes, the eleven books constitute a coherent series. It was once popular enough to spark a short-lived TV series (in which the character acquired yet another name), but these days you have seek out the paperbacks wherever you can, which is certainly worth doing. The books are light, humorous and inventively plotted, with a lot of snappy dialogue and lively character interactions. Theyโre similar, I think, to the best of the Fletch books by Gregory McDonald, so particularly if you like those, itโs worth following the traces to dig these books up.
TWO: Stweart โHoagyโ Hoag
Created by David Handler, Hoagy is probably the best-known character on this list, the star of, so far, sixteen books, with another coming later this year. There was a long hiatus in the series, though; 1997โs THE MAN WHO LOVED WOMEN TO DEATH wasnโt followed with THE GIRL WITH KALEIDOSCOPE EYES until 2017, so itโs possible some readers of the earlier books arenโt award that Hoagy, and his adorable basset hound Lulu, have returned for several recent outings.
Hoagy was once a literary superstar, his first novel a blockbuster hit lauded by the critical establishment, but heโs never been able to properly follow up that success. Now he makes his living as a ghostwriter of celebrity memoirs, and invariably the secrets those celebrities want to reveal or hold back result in murder. Along the way, Hoagy pursues, and ultimately wins back, his movie-star ex-wife. The books are, again, on the lighter side, and, particularly given Luluโs frequent scene stealing, can be read as homages to The Thin Man. Some of the observations about celebrity culture, though, can carry a bit of satirical bite.
THREE: Kinky Friedman
Kinkyโs books came out in hardback from a major publisher, so, again, a lot of people are probably aware of them. The last one came out more than twenty years ago, though, and with Kinkyโs death in 2024, there wonโt be any more, so if you havenโt read them, grab your chance before they really get hard to find.
The books are something of a mind-bender. Kinky Friedman, of course, was a real person, a musician who was something of a cross between Willie Nelson (one of his closest friends) and Groucho Marx. His band was called the Texas Jewboys, and his most famous songs include โThey Ainโt Making Jews Like Jesus Anymoreโ and โGet Your Biscuits in the Oven and Your Buns in Bed,โ which should give you some indication of his sense of humor. The star of his mystery novels, starting with 1986โs GREENWICH KILLING TIME, is a lightly fictionalized version of himself, with many of his real-life friends and associates (including Nelson) making appearances. The books have a decidedly absurdist edge that, especially in the later entries, can edge into surprisingly bleak nihilism, but theyโre invariably hilariousโand, you should be warned, often deeply profane.
FOUR: Toby Peters
The late, great Stuart Kaminsky had several series characters, all worth your time, but Peters is far and away my favorite. Heโs a rumpled PI working in Hollywood in the 1930s and 40s, and every entry in the series finds him working for a film star or other celebrity of the timeโJudy Garland in MURDER ON THE YELLOW BRICK ROAD, Joe Louis in DOWN FOR THE COUNT, and so on. Kaminsky was a film scholar, and the books are rich in period detail and grounded in deep knowledge of the biographies of the stars. Theyโre often very funny, with an edge of melancholy that gives them a welcome bit of gravitas, and they have one of the most entertaining casts of secondary characters and sidekicks youโll ever meet. Itโs been more than twenty years now since the last book in the series was released, and I truly hope they wonโt be forgotten.
FIVE: Burke
And now for something completely different. The four characters Iโve listed so far appear in books which are, to one degree or another, humorous, with a light touch, breezy tone and witty dialogue. Burke (no first name), created by the late Andrew Vachss, is something very different. The books he stars in are probably the darkest noir Iโve read, and the world he occupies is violent, unforgiving, and cruel, especially to the innocent. Vachss himself was a lawyer specializing in child protection cases, so the villains in his books are almost all child abusers, sexual predators, and/or child pornographersโand they tend to get exactly what many people would say they have coming to them. Burke himself is the ultimate outsider, living on the fringes of society and viewing everything around him through a veil of cynical fatalism. What redeems him, and makes the books worth returning to, is the family heโs built around himself, a collection of misfits and outcasts who are unfailingly loyal to each other and to him, providing a note of warmth and hope in a very cold world.
Joseph S. Walker has been publishing short fiction since 2011, mostly in the field of mystery and crime. His stories have appeared inย Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, Mystery Weekly, Tough, and a number of other magazines and anthologies. He has been a finalist for for the Edgar Award, the Shamus Award, the Thriller Award, and the Derringer Award, and has won the Bill Crider Prize for Short Fiction. He also won the Al Blanchard Award in 2019 and 2021. His first collection,ย Crime Scenes,ย was published by Level Best Books in 2026.
