Yes, it’s a bit gory at times, but ultimately it follows the genre – middle to upper class suspects and victims, motives involving greed or jealousy, killers who aren’t psychopaths, the detective finding one final clue that solves it all.
Yes, I agree. It quite simply can’t be a cozy if the crime solver is a professional. Cozy has things like baker, dog walker, book store owner as the crime solver. They run across crime in the pursuit of their profession or hobby.
Some really good cozies or light mysteries listed in this thread. I think my wife and I are about done with Brokenwood. The last season that switched to 90 minute episodes and the replacement of the original detective with a guy that can’t act kind of sealed the deal. The whole plotline of Mike getting married was so out of left field it seemed jammed in to pad the episodes.
Are the Poirot stories not cozies? Although I don’t recall them ever dealing much with how he runs his “business,” he is, I believe a professional private detective.
What if they’re a former detective or cop? Are they still cozy mysteries?
I know Hallmark has a few mystery series, but I have some philosophical objections to that channel.
Here’s a whole thread, before we completely derail this one.
In this linked thread, @Exapno_Mapcase asserts that in a cozy…
the detective is someone very much a part of the community, knows the people and deals with them regularly, and so can make assumptions about their behavior.
I guess this is a valid distinction. I my mind I had lumped Poirot in among the cozies because so many of Christie’s other stories are, and he meets most of the other criteria we’ve listed.
Someone will correct me if I’m wrong, but ISTM that with these criteria, the BBC Father Brown with Mark Williams is a cosy, but Chesterton’s originals, for the most part, are not.
I have read a good percentage of the short stories, and none that I can recall featured any of the stock characters of the show, and many of the tales were set in various European cities. Does the series draw anything from the originals other than the basic character of Father Brown?
Monk is lots of fun. Love the show.
This. In addition Peacock has Murder She Wrote and Psych, which both fit the OPs criteria.
Just the Devereaux (sp?) character – the jewel thief. But he’s really different in the TV series than in the stories.
ETA: I just love the Sebastian character on Shakespeare and Hathaway! He’s perfect in the small doses that they use him for, and I’ve gotten a huge kick from all his various undercover activities. Hope they don’t begin to overuse him.