I turn out to own the book - small world - so I read it to see what makes it cozy.
A mystery writer spends a few days in a gossipy small town. He stays in a big old house in which two people in the past five years have died of perfectly natural causes. Or have they?
The coziness has to come from the narrowness. Almost the entire book takes place in the big old house. There is a doctor and a pharmacy mentioned for obvious plot reasons - everybody thinks poison is involved - but the house is one of the major characters.
The setting sounds a bit like some modern maybe cozies mentioned above, with the detective an amateur who doesn’t know the characters but talks and talks with all of them to learn their secrets. No real violence takes place in the book; it’s of the school where 100 pages of plot is crammed into 240 pages of text. The rest of the chapters are there for atmosphere to create the “uneasy feeling.”
Contemporary reviewers gave it great reviews and called the best of Offord’s books to date. While usually a good indicator - newspaper reviewers read three to five books a week and culled out the best - I can’t see it. I admit I’m cold to phony atmosphere, so the glacial pace just annoyed. More seriously, in a book totally about character, Offord’s first glimpse of the suspects digs as deep as she gets; the rest is padding. And the atmosphere is developed by making over a perfectly sensible female character into a neurotic mess.
Is it a proto-cozy? The setting is similar to Taylor’s Asey Mayo books, but even more similar to Ellery Queen’s blockbuster Calamity Town of 1942, in which amateur detective Queen goes to a gossipy small town, stays in a house where there was a natural but suspicious death, and solves an old mystery. Queen was trying to humanize the character to make him more relatable in a world where the pure intellectual puzzle mystery was fading and also trying to get serialized in the ladies’ magazines, where the big bucks were and where coziness was desired by editors.
I guess I’m saying yes to cozy, but the form would change greatly over the years, especially the portrayal of major women.
As others have mentioned and explained quite well a cozy mystery is typically a story in which the characters attempting to solve the mystery are not law enforcement in any way but instead ordinary citizens who either decide to snoop in themselves to run their own unofficial investigation or are caught up in the mystery themselves which makes them feel compelled to get to the bottom of it. They have an earnestness that shines through but in being amateur sleuths that can get them into some trouble along the way by going down leads which the actual detectives and police would not go down unless actual evidence points to it. And the characters who are implicated generally are to the public model citizens with wealth and/or status in society. The community is not a place where crimes take place let alone a murder. They are places where everyone knows the family next door on a personal level so for a murderer to be among them rocks the community to a core.
I do enjoy reading cozy mysteries now and again. As stand-alone books they are quite easy to get through in one sitting since they do not have the details of a police procedural, the gruesome imagery of the crimes, they are not psychological thrillers that rely on the fast paced cat and mouse chase between the criminal and the pursuer. And as I said above the people solving it are not cynical introverted antiheroes trying to solve the crime while battling some inner personal demons but rather eager beaver extroverted type of people whose best asset to solving the crime is that they know the community inside out and once the mystery is solved they return to their normal everyday lives with a story to tell and gossip to share.
Anyone familiar with the work of Kinky Friedman? His eponymous lead character lives in Greenwich Village, spends most of his time drinking espresso and/or whiskey, snorting coke, and talking to his cat, and his friends are all “characters”. The cops are always bumbling fools and there’s little explicit violence. I’d never heard the term before this thread, but I guess he’s “cozy”, if that’s possible for a man who keeps the cat litter box in his shower. I guess he does technically represent himself as a “detective”, but he rarely if ever actually gets any paying clients.
I haven’t thought about him in years. Looking at his wiki, it appears he wrote more books than I thought. From what I remember of the ones I read, he may well fit in the cozy category. I think I would edge him out because, IIRC, he thinks of himself as a detective.
Based on mentions in this thread, I’ve read both The Glass Mask and The Cape Cod Mystery.
First, both books included the word “dast,” that I don’t think I’ve heard spoken IRL ever. It was used once in the first book, and a few times in the second book. Just an interesting aside I noticed.
I semi-enjoyed both. The first was nice in that the setting wasn’t typical, and the characters were mostly well drawn. The mystery was very convoluted, and I found I didn’t really care which one of the circle was the actual murderer. Any of them could have been, and I wasn’t really rooting for one or the other to be either guilty or innocent so the conclusion fell a little flat for me.
In the second book, I guessed the murderer before I think the murder was even committed. I noticed something, and I paid attention, and my suspect never was eliminated – by me. I think it was meant to be somewhat shocking and a big surprise, but even though I didn’t know the details of the motive, I knew the shape of the motive and why the killing was done. Thumbs up on atmosphere and period details though!
To me a cozy mystery is one that takes place on a small town. and the detective usually knows the victims in some way. They will also use tricks like the invisible waitress trick in the cookie jar murder series. The family of the detect8ve helps them and the police officer doesnt want them involved