Your favorite British "cozy" mystery writer(s), and why

Cafe Society
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Dorothy Sayers is certainly one of my favorites in this genre. Another one, I think very much in the “cozy” tradition, is Sarah Caudwell. She wrote a series about a group of young, attractive lawyers who routinely get caught up in murder mysteries and get out with the help of the Oxford don Hilary Tamar. The joy of the books is the delightfully snarky attitude that basically all the characters have.

Another excellent example of the “fair puzzle” type of mystery are the Judge Dee stories by Robert van Gulik. Based on traditional Chinese murder mysteries from the 17th and 18th century, the Judge Dee stories depict a traditional neo-Confucian scholar and magistrate solving crimes in ancient China. I suppose they are ruled out the by “No Chinamen” clause, though.

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Absolutely. There’s one book where the murder doesn’t happen until 2/3 of the way through the book, and it’s still very suspenseful because the characters are so compelling.

Does anyone know if Josephine Tey deliberately borrowed elements of the Tamam Shud case for The Singing Sands?

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(Bolding added). Well, no, I don’t think you can say that. Amateur detectives, no graphic violence (and no sex at all), go back to the 20’s, if not earlier. Murder She Wrote (from your link) stood on several layers of other peoples’ shoulders, mostly much better writers and plotters.

DaphneBlack, re: Gaudy Night - I’m reading that now and I don’t remember any anti-Semitism, casual or otherwise. Maybe I just missed it. And while the Harriet Vane/Lord Peter romance is enormously frustrating, I do find her a more engaging and human main character than Lord Peter, who is just too too perfect. His only flaw seems to be that his face is not handsome, something over which he has no control. Otherwise he is perfectly unbelievable.

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Father Brown.

Would Asey Mayo count as a “cozy”. There is some action, however.

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Ooh, I can’t say that! Should I be frightened?

In the beginning there were Traditional Mysteries. Looking back, many of the “Murder Most British” mysteries could be defined as “cozy”–but the term wasn’t used in the days of Agatha Christie, et al. From Katherine Hansen Clark’s thesis, “What is a Cozy?”:

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What I gathered from the Wikipedia article is that the term “cozy” wasn’t used at the time to describe the works of writers like the OP mentioned; but that doesn’t mean the term couldn’t apply to them retroactively (especially Christie’s Miss Marple stories).

“Classic” or “Traditional” detective fiction may have been closer to what the OP was looking for, but those terms are kind of generic and vague. At any rate, I assume the OP meant “cozy” in contrast to hard-boiled, or police procedural, or action or suspense thrillers, or things like that.

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Yes, “cozy” has become a marketing term rather than a good descriptor, and the modern cozy resembles the classic mystery the way a PT Cruiser resembles a car of the 30s.

Many writers dislike the term cozy because it is almost invariably applied to women authors. This is good in a way, because women have always bought the bulk of mysteries, but it also serves to lock out male readers. Cozies are defined by their worst examples, as Theodore Sturgeon once said about science fiction. They are feminine and fluffy and silly and bloodless and don’t have big masculine toys like guns and bombs.

Though the word is new, the separation isn’t. Dashiell Hammett and the rest of the writers at Black Mask magazine deliberately wrote for a male audience who wanted mysteries to reflect the deadly world of the mob and corrupt police that grew up under Prohibition rather than upper class killers who used undetectable exotic poisons. As Chandler said, “Hammett gave murder back to the kind of people that commit it for reasons, not just to provide a corpse; and with the means at hand, not hand-wrought dueling pistols, curare and tropical fish.”

Even the members of the Detection Club, who set the rules in the OP, were trying to get away from some of the worst excesses. Unfortunately, their “decalogue” was superseded by S. S. van Dine’s 20 rules, which were partly sensible and partly looney - good writers of the 30s and 40s broke his “rules” deliberately and created some of their best books by doing so.

The backlash to the classic mystery resulted from a change in society. After WWII nobody believed in amateur detectives. Mysteries were supposed to be solved by professionals, who were experts - police of all varieties and private eyes. Spies, who were the most professional of all, became huge in this period. Even in the Golden Age, it was hard to make amateur detectives believable, and few of the Detection Club members wrote about true amateurs. Chesterton did with Father Brown and Sayers with Wimsey, true, but these men did have professions - one was a priest and the other a peer of the realm. Look at the others’ famous detectives: Poirot was an ex-policeman; Croft’s Inspector French a current policeman; Bailey’s Reggie Fortune was a doctor who worked with the police; so was Freeman’s Dr. Thorndyke; so was Rhode’s Dr. Priestly. You have to go to Christie’s second character, Miss Marple, to find a true woman unemployed amateur. Women had to be amateurs because they couldn’t be professionals; men had to be professionals because it was unmanly not to be one.

That’s what drew women into the mystery field in recent decades - the chance to go against the male professional with amateur females. Not surprisingly, people saw the deliberate differences and put the subgenres at odds with one another, emphasizing the ends of the spectrum. There are plenty of books in the middle - Donald Westlake wrote the most masculine of hardboiled crime novels in his Parker series and also wrote as many light & funny comic crime books about amateurs who get swept up in a plot - but people like putting labels on things. There’s an equal division between science fiction “male” and fantasy “female” and it’s equally removed from reality.

Sorry. I go off too long on this stuff, but I find the history fascinating in what it says about things you wouldn’t think mere mystery categories would tell you.

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However, it is to be noted that during the period we had the rise of the Professional Police force. Who in general would either look upon your “help” with jaundiced eyes, arrest you for interfering or consider you a suspect.

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The corrupt police had already done so in America for a generation. Read any hardboiled novel.

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I don’t, either, recall anti-Semitic material in the Wimsey novels (some very racist-sounding stuff re black people, but I’m ready to accept, just “standard operational procedure” 80 / 90 years ago, not indicating actual hatred). It’s some decades since I read the novels – memory perhaps failing – but I seem to remember the odd sympathetically-portrayed Jewish character? I’ve seen it alleged that in reality, as distinct from the world of her writings, Sayers harboured anti-Semitic attitudes on religious grounds.

I’m one who strongly dislikes blasted misery-guts drama-queen Harriet, and feel that the Wimsey series went progressively down the pan after she showed up. Maybe to do with my being male, and tending to impatience with “soppy lurve stuff”, particularly in what are supposed to be detective stories… I have generally mixed feelings about Sayers. She’s a talented writer; but what I find to be her intellectual snobbery and pretentiousness, grates on me – including all the passages in foreign (living and dead) languages. I “get” what is often observed, that most of a hundred years ago, anyone halfway well-educated would have some competence in French and Latin; I still find Sayers’s “foreign tongues” stuff, an annoying affectation.

An author and series – published in relatively recent years – that I truly like: Carola Dunn (British-born, though resident in the USA)'s Daisy Dalrymple mysteries. These class, I feel, as “cozy” in any sense of the word occurring in this thread – with IMO very engaging main characters – but not in a, for me, “sickly” way. Their blurbs say stuff to the effect of “will appeal to fans of Dorothy L. Sayers”: one sees why – the Dalrymple novels lack Sayers’s intellectual gravitas (and IMO, intellectual pomposity) – but they are set in England, in similar era and to a large extent in similar milieu, to “Wimsey”. Period, the early and mid-1920s – from all that I see, the author has researched the period with a high degree of accuracy. These mysteries are basically light-hearted in tone, but with a sombre background re the then-recent World War I, memories and effects of which are, in the novels, seldom absent for long.

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I don’t have a text of Gaudy Night handy, and it was a long book, but I remember one or two offhand cringe remarks. Not enough to make me notice, probably, if I was not already aware of Sayers’ religious anti-Semitism. Also “Whose Body?” Is pretty dubious on these grounds, stereotype-wise, at least.
The king of shocking British prewar mystery casual anti-Semitism was Anthony Berkeley – in his case so much as to really get in the way of my enjoyment of his otherwise classic tales.

Anyway, I kind of like Lord Peter even if he was clearly a love-object for his creator, but Harriet is completely infuriating. Gaudy Night is absolutely worth reading tho, if only for its very interesting insider portrayal of women at Oxford.

I forgot to mention the totally delightful Gervase Fen novels of Edmund Crispin. Great fun!

ETA: I second Carola Dunn for contemporary writers in this vein. Very uneven but enjoyable series.

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I’ve read The Moving Toyshop several times and I still cannot figure out any rational explanation for how it could have worked. You can argue that of all his books, a rational explanation is not the point for this one, but something other than magic would have been nice.

Crispin is a prime example of a male English cozy writer, with Oxford don Gervase Fen as the amateur detective on leave from his day job.

Gervase Fen sounds suspiciously like a play on Gideon Fell, the Oxford don who was the sleuth in half of John Dickson Carr’s mysteries, and Crispin (a pseudonym for Bruce Montgomery) was a known fan. Whether Carr should count as a British cozy writer is a good place to start a long argument. Carr was an American who lived in Britain throughout the Golden Age, set most of his mysteries there in that period, and tried to be more British than the British (spoiler: you can usually count on the person with the darkest skin being the murderer) even though he always sounded like an American. His other major sleuth, Sir Henry Merrivale, has as long a lineage as Wimsey, but is also head of their spy agency, as well as being a barrister and a doctor. The two were based on Chesterton and Churchill, respectively, and so were caricatures of caricatures. Carr just doesn’t fit well in any category.

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Yeah,I think Fen is def. a friendly parody of Fell.

I think Carr should count, though I find his output very mixed. I generally prefer the Merrivales. More humo(u)r.

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They’re interesting as deliberate attemps to reproduce a completely different series of mystery novel (and, given Gulik’s diplomatic background, he probably had a fairly good grasp on the originals), but I found them rather dissatisfying as ordinary novels. It’s not just the insistence on genre conventions like some mild supernatural elements or the necessity for the murderers to confess; the mysteries themselves don’t hold up. For example, in one (which, unfortunately, I can’t remember the name of):

Judge Dee wanders across a tower with some sort of mystic spirit inside who gives him a clue to the mystery. That’s fine; as Gulik notes in the introduction, that sort of plot device is common in the original Chinese stories he’s recreating. What’s unbelievable is that a key point in the solution is that when the spirit was asking the detective ‘Who?’ repeatedly, it was actually trying hint that the villain was named ‘Hu’. The novel is set in 7th century China, and everyone in the novel is speaking Chinese.

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Incidentally, if you are interested in the “Decalogue”, it is worth seeking out “Sins for Father Knox”, a collection of ten short stories by Josef Skvorecky, in which each one violates one of the commandments. A neat experiment, part of Skvorecky’s Lt. Boruvka series, which is definitely not “British cozy” but instead “post-war Czech noirish” but is quite good (at least this volume, the second, and the first in the series, The Mournful Demeanor of Lt. Boruvka).

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I’ve read Gaudy Night, but not with great pleasure. As told of earlier, I find Harriet a complete PITA; and nearly fifty years ago, I attended Oxford University – was miserable there, and did not fit in at all – the book’s non-stop glorifying / revelling re the place, was not too comfortable for me. The material on how things were for the relatively few female participants in that scene, struck some chords with me; re slight acquaintance with same, via a fellow-student girlfriend I had at the time (then, late 1960s, “woman’s lot” at Oxford was much the same as thirty-odd years earlier; though I gather that it has greatly changed since). In the main, though – other stuff aside – I found GN altogether annoyingly “overblown, overdone and over-the-top”; and Busman’s Honeymoon, equally lauded by many, even more so.

Crispin’s Gervase Fen mysteries are something of an odd one for me – a personal matter, mentioned in a thread which I started 04-20-2014 in “Cafe Society”, “Anyone met a fictional character’s real-life original?” I understand – and have not seen anything to contradict this – that Gervase Fen, as well as being modelled on (in fiction) John Dickson Carr’s Gideon Fell; was also based on a person who truly lived: Dr. W.G. Moore (1905 – 1978), modern languages professor at St. John’s College, Oxford. (A bit of name-wordplay seen: “moor” and “fen” both being kinds of wilderness area.)

In my timne at Oxford, Dr. Moore was my supervisor / “tutor”. My university career was an unmitigated disaster, and I disappointed him very badly – misunderstandings and failures, and in the end bad feelings, on both sides. I cringe now at a lot of my behaviour vis-a-vis the old guy; and, sense-makingly or not – ugly feelings and memories re all this, mean that there is no way I see ever picking up a Gervase Fen novel. (As it happened, I read The Moving Toyshop a couple of years pre-university; wasn’t particularly taken with it, and can now remember nothing whatever about it.)

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First, thanks to OP and responders for giving me a pile of books to read.

Second, the only mentioned writer with whose work I’m familiar is Christie and she doesn’t follow those rules. Once I’d become familiar with other mystery writers who do not pull information out of Poirot’s [del]butt[/del]sleeve in the final explanation, her technique of doing so now looks terribly hamfisted.

I recently enjoyed several Charlie Chan books (I’d have to look up the author, sorry). They do give you the information.

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(And yes, I know Chan’s not British. Nor a Chinaman, although that is one of the aspects the writer plays with)

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Minor nitpick :- Wimsey,at least when Sayers was writing him, wasn’t a peer. His older brother was.

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If we are speaking the Queens English, the word is “cosy”, not cozy.