A series I was reading kept talking about how it was a cozy mystery, but it really didn’t match my perception of what the genre was about.
Before I tell you what I thought a cozy mystery was, I want to hear your opinions.
- not a police procedural;
- not a lot of violence depicted.
- The investigator is often not a police officer; frequently, said person has another career, and solving mysteries is a side profession/avocation
- As @Northern_Piper noted, while there are crimes (often murders), the stories usually aren’t particularly gory, though there may be a bit of macabre humor involved
- The investigator typically has a quirky personality, which often comes into play during the course of the investigation
- The investigator has a supporting cast, typically including an actual police officer/investigator (who is often a foil for the investigator’s unorthodox approach), and one or more assistants or sidekicks, who are quirky in their own way
- They are frequently (though not always) set in small towns, rather than big cities
Also: cozy mystery bonus points if the title of the story is a pun, based on the investigator’s primary career.
Georgette Heyer’s mysteries are an exception to that, with a police officer (Hannasyde in the early ones, Hemingway in the later ones), although they do collaborate with non-police characters.
There’s a cat in there somewhere. Often it’s the detective.
We just had a thread about this.
I stand by my post in that thread. For it to be a cozy mystery, the crime solver absolutely can not be in law enforcement of any kind. There can be a secondary character who is in law enforcement, like a bumbling police chief etc. If a LEO solves the mystery, it’s not a cozy.
To me, Murder She Wrote set the stage for the popularity of cozy mysteries. Lifetime took it and ran a bunch of cozies based on book series.
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It’s set in an established familiar or more likely idealised community, often rural, and full of stock characters - gruff and demanding ex- military man, stiff-necked matriarch, dithery clergyman, flighty young things, gossipy cleaning ladies, rogueish ne’er-do-wells, scandalous radical bohemians, and so on
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Whatever dark secrets its members hold (and gradually reveal as a succession of red herrings), few if any characters are professional criminals or involved in the grimy underworld, and there are no dramatic punch-ups or shoot-outs. The murder itself becomes entirely secondary to uncovering and explaining the succeeding red herrings, until there’s a “Why didn’t I see it before?” moment recalling something seemingly trivial that happened or was glancingly referred to in the first chapter or two.
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The murderer may well be the person who, right at the first discovery of the victim, casually asks "What did the police want?’ or “What do the police think?”
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There will often be a grand reveal scene where everyone is gathered together for the explanation.
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There will usually be a sunny aftermath scene (flighty young things get together, rigid old people soften, etc). There may even be a joke.
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In either 4 or 5, one of the innocent will say “There’s one thing I don’t understand…” about another incident (about halfway through) that seemed significant at the time, but turned out not to be.
(Perhaps I’ve read too many and watched too many on TV)
What do you call mysteries that meet all of @PatrickLondon ‘s criteria except for having police solve it? All of Heyer and Marsh, for example, and even some Christie mysteries eg Towards Zero).
One of my main criteria is that the murder victim has to be enough of a louse that his/her death is not too upsetting. It’s a much cozier mystery if everyone is glad the victim’s dead…as well as providing all those juicy red herrings.
Or someone somehow peripheral to the community and never much solidified as a memorable character.
In addition to some of the things other people have said, I don’t expect a lot of physical action (fights, chases, etc.) in a cozy mystery. It’s not a thriller.
Miss Marple would like a word…
Just “detective fiction” (if it’s not a police procedural.) But I do see “cozy procedural” sometimes.
That’s what I would have thought, too. Although lately I’ve been getting into reading what are called “paranormal cozies” (at least partly because I’m toying with writing them myself, and I want to see what the competition is like). Paranormal cozies are like normal cozies, only the sleuth characters are witches, werewolves, fairies, or some other kind of magical being. Usually the quaint little village they live in seems to be populated entirely by supernatural creatures.
And I’ve run across a fair number of such books where the climax features slam-bang fights with magic spells flying back and forth, vampires engaging in sword fights, ghost pirate ships firing phantom cannonballs, despite the word “cozy” being very prominently displayed on the cover and in the description. It seems like a lose description at best, in some cases.
Yeah, I agree with this. If you plant a policeman in the middle of your delightfully quaint village and its genteel plot and offstage murder, it might feel cozy, but it’s still a procedural (I do like the phrase “cozy procedural” upthread, though, and intend to use it). Yes, I’m looking at you, Inspector Gamache.
One reason I like that definition is that it does create a bright line - a lot of the other bits of coziness are matters of degree.
I’d add that 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.
Therefore the Miss Marple books are cozies while the Hercule Poirot books are not. You can plop Poirot down anywhere, even in the Orient Express among total strangers. That makes him a detective rather than an ordinary person who stumbles across crimes in their small world.
I deliberately held off from reading Maserschmidt’s link until after I posted, but I see that makes the same point.
That page also says, rightly, that most cozies star women. The only major cozy series starring a man I can think of offhand are the Charles Paris mysteries by Simon Brett, whose “village” is the world of British entertainment.
Just mysteries, or light mysteries. On tv, Brokenwood and Death In Paradise fall in this category.
She may have been first. I haven’t read any, are they lighthearted/non-serious stories? I think the real popularity and name cozy came after the Jessica Fletcher books/shows.
I assume this is why so many are set in small towns/villages. Even if it’s set in a larger city, all the mysteries take place in the crime solvers community, whether it’s a pie shop or a bookshop or a corner store.
I was going to say this earlier, but I don’t really read enough cozies to say for sure. All the ones I’ve read have been written by women.
Jonathan Creek TV series, maybe? They have a cosy-ish feel at first (got a lot darker after the hiatus).
I might also put Midsomer Murders in that camp. (I like the term “cozy procedural,” too.)
That probably depends on what you mean by “lighthearted/non-serious.” They’re certainly not noir, but they do have a certain level of moral seriousness.
The term “cozy mystery” hadn’t been coined when the Miss Marple stories were being written, but I can’t help thinking of them in connection with cozy mysteries because they tick so many of the boxes. Perhaps they’re proto-cozies?