What’s a Cozy Mystery?
At first glance, the two words sound like a contradiction. What can be cozy about a mysterious event? Spooky, chill-inducing, scary—those are words I would associate with murder mysteries, until I began reading the kind that often featured women sleuths and cats, dogs, and knitting. Stories that put the cozy in the chilling.
When is a mysterious murder ever easy to read about? Authors inspired by the likes of Agatha Christie have evolved a new art of mystery storytelling, a way of setting the deadly deeds in gentle circumstances, suburbs, bookstores, seashores, pleasant inns, so that you can read the book and still sleep well.
Authors like Ellery Adams and Richard Osman have made main characters compelling, quirky, and relatable. No more Hercule Poirot exoticism, no more genius-level sleuthing via “the little gray cells.” Now we have solving murders and women who knit chasing serial killers. In cozies, something sinister does lurk beneath the quotidian, but great emphasis is on the ordinary surface of life, and the daily comforts that get us through the day. The main character may pursue other interesting activities besides solving murders, such as costuming amateur theatricals or running a bakery.
Christie was the master of hiding evil beneath a genteel surface, and of course her Miss Marple series invented the amateur sleuth. But these days, cozy mysteries take a much more benign approach, less sinister in their view of human nature. The murderer is an anomaly. Settings like a florist shop or a café are the perfect places for the amateur sleuths to figure out murders as a sideline to their real lives. Whether it’s dog walking or gardening, these self-made detectives are fully fleshed-out people because we see more sides of their lives than just the detecting.
In The Deadly Tea, my main character has a psychic calling to comfort and counsel newly deceased souls gives a twist to the investigations. In her case, she looks into the mystery on the victim’s behalf, and often gets the most clues from the person who was killed. She’s sidelining in that gig, though, because her main job in life is mother to two small children. Plus, she bakes a lot of sourdough bread, mostly for calming her nerves and feeding a hungry family, which includes her live-in in-laws.
Whatever the recipe for a cozy mystery, it’s now a booming business in fiction, and as a reader, I’m delighted to explore all the coziness in the genre as well as the puzzles.