Or, perhaps, the ur-cozy.
The UK has tons of these types of shows that my wife and me watch on BritBox or Acorn. They have the formula down pat.
Yes, that’s a great name.
Both good answers. How to choose… Maybe someone can start a poll and we will be credited with naming a genre of books.
I thought finding the origin of the term “cozy mystery” would be a breeze, since I have shelves of nonfiction about mysteries. Total fail.
Newspaper databases are better, though even the earliest hit uses the term as if everyone would know it.
The reviewer “R.G.” from the Montgomery Advertiser, used the phrase a lot starting on Sept. 3, 1944 with a review of The House That Hate Built by Sara Elizabeh Mason and again on June 3, 1945, calling Born to Be Murdered by Dennis Allan “a good cozy mystery” and continued it for several years.
The best context is from an Oct. 29, 1944, review of Lenore Glen Offord’s The Glass Mask.
Here is a good cozy mystery that transfers a pleasantly uneasy feeling to the readers as the suspenseful pages slip by to an extremely clever solution.
That could be an idiosyncrasy of his, but in 1946 the Inner Sanctum radio show was advertising the “Make Ready My Grave” episode as “a cozy mystery thriller.”
I’m only finding a couple of uses from the 1950s, but in 1966 they suddenly get a feature mention in a syndicated article, “The Case of the Cold That Catches,” not about mysteries at all.
In those cozy English mysteries that are so “in” right now, someone is always settling happily into bed with a cold, simmering gently between two hot water bottles and downing quantities of hot tea with lemon.
In 1977, Dilyn Winn “perpetrated” (her term) Murder Ink: The Mystery Reader’s Companion and on the very first page she writes that “I recognize five basic mystery categories: the Cozy, the Paranoid, the Romantic, the Vicious, the Analytical.”
The cozy (sometimes spelled cosy just to make searching a nightmare) apparently had already long been recognizable before it became a category and after around 2000 a marketing subgenre.
Almost everybody goes back to Miss Marple as the ur-cozy today, with Winn calling the first Marple book cozy at “full kitsch.”
What makes a cozy mystery “cozy” for me is the tacit assurance that, if I’m stressed out and need “literary therapy”, this is a book where everything will turn out for the better.
And part of the stress relief is that I know I won’t have to deal with complex philosophical or moral issues. And that the “bad guys” will get their comeuppance, usually due to their own lack of ethics… and stupid mistakes.
And that the woman who saved her grandparents’ book store from the greedy corporation will escape from the kidnappers, and the whole town will unite against outside Big-Box capitalists. (And she just may notice how handsome the amateur sleuth is, and accept that he has huge dogs and she has tiny cats…)
There’s that series that features a Siamese cat and the universe’s most naive and sweet reporter. The author is something like Braun, and the detective’s name starts with a Q I think. Anyway, they are definitely cozies.
They are often very formulaic, which is not an intrinsically bad thing, but the balance between repeating elements that are familiar versus innovation and tweaking the formula errs very strongly to the former.
They are commonly series - so there is no sense of suspense that the hero[ine] is at risk of actual death or failure and won’t come back next time. Jeopardy of any sort is low.
The real world usually only intrudes as a stock suspect who may be an immigrant, refugee, transgender person etc. They did not do it - ever - and are only there to further the story by showing how some other people are prejudiced arseholes, including the real killer.
The Cat Who series?
Yes, i think Miss Marple is the ur-cozy model on which all other cosy mysteries have been based.
That’s about ten years before Murder She Wrote. Does she list any stories that she identifies as cozies?
Not a Christie fan, and never read any Miss Marple. My sole experience with her is in the movie Murder By Death, which skewered the detective genre in general.
It seems she never even held a job/had a career. She was just a nosy old lady in a small town who solved murders. That’s a little different than modern cozies, which usually have the crime revolve around the hero’s line of work. Wiki describes her as a female “gentleman” detective, a popular theme in UK mysteries. I couldn’t even count how many UK books where the detective, or a good hearted thief, spends all their time playing polo and sitting in their gentleman’s club sipping whisky.
This is true of all series books, cozy or not. There are many series that run to dozens of books in which the hero is in danger all the time, but there is no real suspense. We know they’ll be back in the next book. And that cuts across all genres.
According to Jane Cleland, who writes a cozy series and has free monthly webinars, besides what is mentioned above the murder never happens on stage and there is a relationship between the victim and the murderer. No random killings.
I don’t read many but my kids do, and according to them another sign of the cozy is that the detective makes a good living from some sort of store/job that couldn’t possibly produce enough income for her cozy house. Like muffins shops that seem to sell dozens a day or the Crossword Lady who seems to sell one crossword a week. There are exceptions like Jane Cleland’s detective, but they seem rare.
That’s not Miss Marple. She’s a a “gentlewoman” by virtue of social class and independent means, but she doesn’t live the life of an urban gentleman detective with the clubs etc. She’s very much part of the village setting.
“Nosy old woman in a village” is pretty much a cozy mystery job description. Wiki recognizes this:
Dismissed by the authorities in general as nosy busybodies, particularly if they are middle-aged or elderly women
Note that their source for that statement includes “homemaker” as a typical cozy occupation.
I think you’re fighting this too hard, just accept that the Miss Marple series is cozy. You admit never reading them.
The branding and strict definition of the genre may be quite recent, but you might be interested in the British Library’s reprints of various older mysteries
One of their reprints is of Revelations of a Lady Detective, from 1864!
(Every time I see the brand name of a major maker of ceramic fitments, I think “Armitage Shanks” would be a good name for a detective, in such adventures as Death At Your Convenience, Fatal Flush, and Please Adjust Your Shroud Before Leaving)
NB in that series the reporter (supposedly a once-famous crime reporter) lives in a small town with one of the highest per capita murder rates, judging by how many people drop dead (he should have just stayed in Chicago or wherever he is supposed to be from); there are several attempts on his own life, also including 2 or 3 cases of arson where his apartment or house is burned down.
hallmark has had a whole network based on a lot of these …
YES. that’s the one. I haven’t read one in several decades, maybe the author has dies. She was pretty old even back then.
You missed a part of that series formula. Except for the first book, which happens in the city, every single book starts with him moving somewhere else in the rural area. I suppose this is to avoid the “Murder she wrote” issues, but once I noticed it, I could not stand the series anymore…There are a couple more repetitive plot points, that that was the most annoying.
But those are really dreadful.
First, my brain got ahead of my fingers when writing her name. It’s Dilys Winn, not Dilyn. Her definition is not exactly what we expect today.
Alternatively titled the Antimacassar-and-old-Port School, the Cozies surfaced in England in the mad Twenties and Thirties, and their work featured a small village setting, a hero with faintly aristocratic family connections, a plethora of red herrings and a tendency to commit homicide with sterling silver letter openers imported from Paraguay. Typical Cozy writers include: Elizabeth Lemarchand, Margaret Yorke, V. C. Cinton-Baddeley, Anne Morice, Michael Gilbert, Michael Innes, Edmund Crispin.
Not a familiar list of names; you’d have to be British - or a mystery bookstore owner - to have heard of some.
I’ve read at least a couple Edmund Crispins, and I thought of his Gervase Fen earlier as a possible example of a cozy series starring a male detective, but I decided they weren’t quite cozy enough.
The only other name on that list that even rings a bell is Michael Innes, and I’ve never read him and couldn’t tell you anything about him without looking him up.
Michael Gilbert? I am not familiar with his entire opus but there are plenty of police detectives, serial killers, grim secret agents that kill and torture… I always thought of him as firmly the opposite of cozy.