That’s a bit like I remember them. I think they showed the actual body quite a few times. Getting shot with an arrow at a fair or being pushed of the roof of a building are fairly violent. Plus, police, thus not a cozy in my opinion.
Right, because he’s not an amateur part time sleuth who stumbles across mysteries while going about pruning his orchids. His job is to solve mysteries, so not a cozy.
She kind of blurs the line as she is a retired detective who still solves mysteries, but I would rule her out on that alone. To me, the amateur sleuth part is really the main qualification for a cozy book these days. The different locations don’t really disqualify it for me. Even Jessica Fletcher solved crimes away from Cabot Cove. ( for anyone interested, you can get all seven Virginia Holmes books on Amazon Kindle for $6.93 right now)
To me, it’s the tone (including setting) that’s paramount. You can have an amateur detective who gets involved in violence and sex, that wouldn’t be cozy. Or one that’ while not violent or sexy, is set in a big city, that’s also not cozy IMO. Set in a quirky neighbourhood of a big city that has a village-like character is fine, though - Greenwich Village seems popular, I wonder if it’s the name 
. Also set in some subculture of a big city could work. The key is that the setting be intimate, that most people know each other and that some people are “characters”
The protagonist being a professional detective in some way doesn’t wholly preclude coziness, for me, as long as they behave just like the amateur sleuths of other series. This is why the Hamish Macbeth series is a cozy, for example. He doesn’t behave like a cop.
That would be the “Bernie Rhodenbarr” series by Lawrence Block, in which the main character is a burglar. A deliberate contrast to the “Matthew Scudder” series by the same author.
Are those cozy? I see mention of sex, which is decidedly un-cozy if included in the book, as opposed to merely alluded to.
I’m just going by a couple series listed on Wiki, not stuff I’ve read: Cleo Coyle’s Coffeehouse Mysteries and , a bit more dated, Frances and Richard Lockridge’s Mr & Mrs North series.
I do not remember any explicit sex scenes or torrid romance, but, admittedly, it has been a very long time since I read the book. Other than that, he is not a detective, he lives in a “Village”, he has his friends who are “characters”, he has the cat, etc.
Doubtful. First Miss Marple story, “The Tuesday Night Club”, was published in 1927, and she is described as a sweet old lady even then.
Ah. One of those that never ages.
Doesn’t every English village have a capital “S” Spinster?
Today we would assume that they never married because they were gay, but at the time they usually had some terrible secret that prevented them from every finding love again.
I don’t think Christie ever mentioned one, but readers could do their own math.
I concur. Certainly police procedurals are not cozy, but altho having the protagonist be a professional detective or cop does lose points, the critical things are setting, almost no violence or sex (romance is okay as long as it doesn’t get into being a Romance novel) and most importantly- the general lighthearted feel. Gunfights are right out.
Midsomer come close, but loses points for police and some violence.
Asey Mayo is a yes.
As to Spinsters- GB lost a lot of young fit men during WW1, and even WW2. That left an excess of women, so if they were not well off or very charming or lovely, it could be hard to find a husband. Not to mention, many lost a loved one during the war.
As Northern_Piper mentioned, spinsters of Marple’s age would have been marriage prospects long before the war, as far back as the 19th century. The British Golden Age produced hundreds of writers and thousands of novels, most of them set in villages. That era ended long before the WWI-bereaved would have reached little old lady status.
Marple would have been around the same age as Baroness Orczy. The Tuesday Night Club stories are ripped off of based on her Old Man in the Corner stories. I don’t think that’s a complete coincidence. She was born in 1865, and Christie’s grandmother - who she says she modeled Marple on - was born in 1867.
Wait, NO Hercule Poirots are cozies, because he’s an outsider? What about the ones set in little villages where everyone else knows everyone else?
He doesn’t know everybody.
And of course, he’s also a detective. And not just any detective - the greatest detective in the world!
As for that, here is a guide that might be helpful, which I found in the library.
I took that off the front page of Google and it’s just wrong. Mary Ann West was born in 1835 (or 1834 or 1836) and died at 84ish in 1919. Christie’s mother, Clara, was born in 1854 and died at 72 in 1926. Christie was born in 1890 so she had plenty of time as an adult to observe older women in her family.
She still ripped off Baroness Orczy, though.
Are there any mystery writers, at least after Poe, who didn’t rip off their predecessors?
Good point.
I feel there’s a spectrum from “blatantly copy” to “homage” to “reference” to “be as different as possible”.
And there has to be more than one beginning point. Winn’s five categories were reductionistic even at the time. (She couldn’t fit Nero Wolfe in any.) And her list of cozy writers are so varied that we can’t recognize them in the same category today.
Good writers can twist the basics and introduce new variants and reflect their eras’ changes. Christie actually could be a good writer when she wanted; she just learned that readers bought way more copies of old stuff cleverly redone.
I see the Nero Wolfe stories as a mash-up of two distinct styles of detective story: the cerebral, sedentary, puzzle-solving oracle (Nero himself), and the wisecracking, hard-boiled (or at least soft-boiled), man-of-action private eye (Archie).
Wolfe is an Old Man in the Corner too, no question.