As epitomized by the Detection Club, founded in 1930 by several then-popular mystery authors. They established a “fair code” of mystery writing, reproduced here from Wikipedia:
[QUOTE=Detection Club Decalogue]
The criminal must be mentioned in the early part of the story, but must not be anyone whose thoughts the reader has been allowed to know.
All supernatural or preternatural agencies are ruled out as a matter of course.
Not more than one secret room or passage is allowable.
No hitherto undiscovered poisons may be used, nor any appliance which will need a long scientific explanation at the end.
No Chinaman must figure in the story.
No accident must ever help the detective, nor must he ever have an unaccountable intuition which proves to be right.
The detective himself must not commit the crime.
The detective is bound to declare any clues which he may discover.
The “sidekick” of the detective, the Watson, must not conceal from the reader any thoughts which pass through his mind: his intelligence must be slightly, but very slightly, below that of the average reader.
Twin brothers, and doubles generally, must not appear unless we have been duly prepared for them.
[/QUOTE]
So, I assume if you’re still reading that you are familiar with this genre, and that you have one or more favorite authors. Who, and why?
My current favorite, because I’m reading what might be her best one, Gaudy Night, is Dorothy Sayers. She was certainly very literate and had a scholarly background (which I like but many might not), although there are places in her books that bog down. Seriously, in Have His Carcase, there must be 20 pages devoted to solving every letter of a certain important cryptogram. I skipped over that without any loss of information.
I also like R Austin Freeman, who isn’t read these days but I found loads of his books free for my Kindle; Josephine Tey (she didn’t write enough of these); and Margery Allingham, although I haven’t read any of hers in a bunch of years, so I’m going to go through them again. Agatha Christie I feel that I have outgrown; with a few exceptions, her writing feels like a back of cheap tricks. Not that I could have thought them up myself, so she earned every penny, but I prefer a little more savory meat on my plot bones.
Sorry if I’m being dense; but, “cozy” as opposed to what? (And I don’t see the relevance of the appended – tongue-in-cheek? – “fair code”, to that definition.) I wouldn’t have thought of calling Sayers or Allingham, particularly “cozy”.
Are you thinking of “cozy” as, in contrast to the author wallowing with relish in hideously ugly, sick stuff / far-out reaches of sadism / kinky sex, consensual or otherwise? And who draws the lines, where? Would be grateful for some enlightenment.
Sorry, I thought “cozy” was a recognized genre of mystery, where the emphasis is on the puzzle, the murder is usually off-stage, violence is not in the forefront, that sort of thing. As distinct, for example, from Dashiell Hammett’s Continental Op, who seems to careen from one shootout to another with little time (or need) to figure out who done what.
The fair code of detection story writing was in reaction to a lot of cheap tricks by hack writers who were giving the genre a bad name. It is as much about the Golden Age of detection fiction as it is about the “cozy” sort of mystery, but most of the original members of the club were writers of the cozy school. And yes, I would include both Sayers and Allingham in that group.
I’m part of the John T. Sladek cult, and adore “Invisible Green” and “Black Aura.” He mostly plays fair with the mystery, but it is the characterization and the occasional material that is the true reward.
Sci Fi writer Jack Vance wrote a few mysteries, as “John Holbrook Vance.” If you like his space opera, you’ll probably like his mysteries too. He definitely plays fair, but it is his mastery of language and nuance that is the most fun.
ETA: Oops, neither is truly British, although Sladek was an American ex-pat living in London, so he almost counts.
Roderick Femm has it right. It’s also usually cozy as in it was done by someone that the victim knew and for personal reasons. There is an identified social, work, or neighborhood group and there is at least the probability, if not the certainty, that it was another group member who did it. Everyone knows everyone else and there is a group history. The history between group members is pertinent to the investigation.
They did not die because they walked in on a drug deal or burglary done by a stranger. It was not a serial killing done by an unknown person targeting blondes at bus stops. One of us has died and it was done by one of us. Knowing that, what do we do?
Was this to deliberately blackball Sax Rohmer? why?
Hmm: just looked up Sax Rohmer, and it seems that he had other series, and they involved the occult; it seems that quite a lot of the rules were aimed directly at excluding the work of Sax Rohmer. Now, I’m not a particular fan of his, but what’s up with the hate?
Thanks for clarification. Ignorance on my part, it seems: I’d imagined “cozy” as being extremely “murder-mystery-lite” – rather whimsical tales basically about ever-so-nice people, and very definitely and invariably with – as RF mentions – the murder off-stage and violence not in the forefront. I was, wrongly, thinking only about “uber-cozy” fare such as that provided by authors like M.C. Beaton and Alexander McCall Smith; which to my personal taste, is so twee and cloying as to be unreadable.
Josephine Tey is excellent, I reread her books regularly. I certainly didn’t outgrow Agatha Christie, she’s still the best.
If you like cozy police procedurals à la Midsomer Mysteries then Deborah Crombie is great. She’s American but married a Scot and lived for a while in the UK. The series is set in and around London. Some friend or relative of the two main detectives is usually involved in each murder.
I’ve recently been enjoying Elly Griffiths’s Ruth Galloway series. The main character is an archeologist and there are druid myths and legends woven into the stories.
Martin Walker’s Bruno Chief of Police series is very good, he’s British but the series is set in France, but they aren’t strictly cozies. There are outside forces at work and it’s the setting that’s cozy, not the murder. There are themes of racism, war crimes, terrorism, and politics that crop up in the charming French countryside.
Agatha Christie is the best MYSTERY, but not the best writer and not the best character-developer.
For wonderful writing and really interesting characters, I prefer:
Dorothy Sayers
Ngaio Marsh
Margery Allingham
… of course, their “mystery” is often very see-through, but it doesn’t matter.
By the way, a modern/current writer who doesn’t quite fit the “cozy” mold but often comes close is Robert Barnard.
I have read somewhere that this was not so specific as it sounds - mostly they wanted to rule out exotic and inscrutable gangs that get their way through methods that mere westerners cannot understand. Too close to magic and the occult.
vontsira, I can guess you might be thinking about some of the recent series set around the antics of pets, or the cooking of fancy desserts. Those I certainly think of as mystery-lite. You can have humor in a mystery without pandering to people who just want to read about cats or food.
C. Alan Bradley. Because of his post-war Britain depictions, I could deal with the precocious Flavia.
M.C. Beaton. I like the Hamish Macbeth series a little more than I do the Agatha Raisin books, which are a trifle anti-woman.
Right now, it seems like the cozy British mystery is much rarer than its American counterpart.
Oh, absolutely – mystery-solving pets – “The Cat Who…”, and dreck like that: at the risk of sounding like a miserable, hard-to-please wretch – I’ve been at pains never even to try any of such stuff. Am certain that I would find it even more vomit-inducing, than the product of the couple of authors writing about human characters, who I’ve mentioned as too twee-and-whimsy for my taste.
Dorothy Sayers’ writing was the best, but I cannot abide the Harriet Vane plotline(s). And the casual anti-Semitism in Gaudy Night bugged me. At least Dame Agatha edited her earlier works later on to remove some of that.
I quite like Ngaio Marsh, but I feel like there is not enough plot in them – they drag a bit. She does a great job with “theatre people” though, which is something I enjoy greatly. In this vein, the Charles Paris mysteries of Simon Brett are really fun, and quite “Cozy”. His more recent series (the Fethering mysteries) is very cozy, almost too too cozy for me, but good comfort reading.
An underappreciated, mostly out-of-print, author of British “cozies” is Patricia Moyes. Her series features the likeable Scotland Yard detective Henry Tibbett and his wife Emmy. She’s all post-WWII, but the vibe is very much like the earlier queens of crime. I like them very much.
The list of rules in the OP do not specifically disqualify American authors and/or settings, so I’m nominating Rex Stout. The only caveat is that Archie Goodwin is in no way less intelligent than the typical reader. Not even slightly.
P. S. For actual subjects of the Empire, my go-to is Miss Marsh. I find Dame Christie to be all but unreadable.
Agatha Christie. She’s a middling writer and mediocre at best in character development, but that’s actually a benefit for her work. Her novels and stories are clever and reasonable puzzles, with everything— setting, characterization, etc.— contributing towards those puzzles and their solutions. Except for in the late works, when she went off the rails, every single conversation advances the plot or the solution of the central mystery in some way.
Her real talent was in taking a clever idea for a murder and running with it, while still keeping the central idea reasonable. The mysteries in Death on the Nile, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, Peril at End House and others are brilliant. The characters in those books are flat and shallow, but the books are intended to be an intellectual puzzle more than anything else; only the minimal elements necessary to support the plot and solution are present.
She also gets a point for internal consistency. Her characters may be a little 2-dimensional, but the cases never hinge on someone doing something wildly out of character. Also, her characters like Miss Marple certainly do stumble on a lot of corpses, but I think that’s a conceit of the genre, that doesn’t need an explanation.
That said, Josephine Tey was great with characters.
There’s a children’s author who won one of the few Newberry awards without killing a pet. The book is The Westing Game, and the author is Ellen Raskin. The plot and characters are beautiful, and it’s as good as any novel meant for an adult audience. Raskin has another book called The Tattooed Potato, and it’s just as good. Both books were written in the 70s, and both highly recommended.
This is also what I thought a “cozy” was. While I’d never claim with Wikipedia is definitive about anything, they at least correspond more closely to what I was thinking:
The “cozy” is more about the environment & the detective than simply following those rules–although they are followed.
Dorothy Sayers (and the others mentioned) wrote Classic Detective Fiction; cozies began in the late 20th century. The quaint British small town is the classic setting but there are plenty of quaint fishing/tourist villages, etc., in the USA. Sex & violence are never graphic. No detectives who are hard-bitten inner city Lesbians & no villains who are sexy vampires.