A Little Less Grit, Please: The Cozy Mystery

By Michelle Barker

Cozy mysteries are one of the most popular mystery subgenres and they’re definitely worth considering for authors who are interested in writing a mystery series. But to get at the essence of the cozy mystery, it’s important to understand how the subgenre emerged and why it has risen in popularity.

First, some history

The mystery genre really took off during what’s called the Golden Age, with authors like Agatha Christie, Ellery Queen, and Dorothy L. Sayers. It wouldn’t be a stretch to include Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in this group, though technically he was more like the forefather of this era than a member of it.

Key to Golden Age mysteries was the idea that the novel should function chiefly as a puzzle to be solved. A detective would be the one doing the solving, but readers could also be armchair detectives, trying to piece together the puzzle alongside (or even before) the detective figured it out.

In Golden Age mysteries, blood and guts tended to be left behind closed doors. Yes, there was murder, but it was tidy. The blood was not the point; the point was the puzzle, the cleverness of the crime, and the brilliance of the detective who solved it.

In short, the emphasis was on the restoration of order.

Then along came noir

…and authors like Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler felt it was time to pull back the curtain and show readers what this world of crime and murder was actually like. Fewer cups of tea; more bourbon. Same puzzle at the heart of the story—but fewer straight lines to get there, and a hell of a lot more blood.

In noir mystery, the detective is hardboiled. The world is gritty, and the blood and violence are determinedly onstage. Some crimes go unsolved. The detective will likely have to compromise their moral code in some way to get the job done. They end up on a variety of unplanned adventures that might lead to dead ends where someone is invariably standing in an alcove smoking a cigarette and pointing a gun at them.

In other words, forget order. The reality is that crime is chaotic. Solving it is never straightforward. And even if you do solve it, it’ll cost you something you care about.

But, like most things, genre is a pendulum

By the eighties and nineties, a new kid was moving into the mystery neighborhood: science—specifically, forensics and DNA testing. Solving a crime with scientific analysis is something we now take for granted, but when it was just getting off the ground it caused a huge evolution in mystery writing and spawned several new subgenres. On the page, crime was still gritty, but science brought a new form of order to the process, as well as an interesting tension between street smarts and lab smarts.

But by then, some readers had had their fill of blood and guts and started looking back to Golden Age mysteries and wondering what had happened to a good old-fashioned puzzle.

That’s where cozies come in

They’re a lot like Golden Age mysteries but with one key shift: there is rarely if ever a professional detective at the centre of the story. The person who solves the crime is ordinary—in other words, they’re a lot more like the reader. That unbridgeable distance between the reader and a brilliant detective like Sherlock Holmes or Hercule Poirot has now been closed.

This reflects what had been a trend for decades: the reader’s increasing desire to identify closely with the protagonist. That’s where the amateur sleuth comes in, and it’s a key feature of cozies. The reader not only wants to solve the crime alongside the detective; they want to be able to imagine themselves as the detective, and that’s a lot easier to do if the detective isn’t a detective at all but instead is a bookstore owner, an old-age pensioner, or a librarian.

Besides featuring an amateur sleuth, here are some of the key components of the cozy mystery:

• The tone is softer and gentler.
• Any sex or violence happens offstage.
• The novel tends to be set in a small community rather than the gritty big city of noir.
• Gossip over coffee or tea is typical and is often how the amateur sleuth discovers a critical piece of information.
• There is usually a sub-thread involving a hobby such as knitting, baking, or reading.
• A cat may or may not be involved.

While there might be personal loose ends if the amateur sleuth will feature in a series, there should be no professional loose ends. The crime gets solved.

Of course, the amateur sleuth has to be plausible as a crime-solver. They should have an unusual take on the world, and their particular skill should play into solving the crime. The reader needs to believe they’re capable of besting not only the law enforcers who don’t take them seriously but also the criminal.

One advantage to using an amateur sleuth and creating a stronger connection between the protagonist and the reader is how well cozy mystery lends itself to a series. That connection means the reader comes to care about the protagonist on a personal level and will want to know what happens to them. If you can plant some good seeds in their backstory, you can grow a strong series that readers will want to follow from book to book.

In conclusion

Where noir sought to make crime and mystery as real as possible, cozy takes one giant step away from that level of realism and looks back at the Golden Age of mystery. Of course, crime still exists. The key movement in all mystery is from chaos to order, so even a cozy will feature a little chaos, but it’s done with a far lighter touch. There is a certain amount of escapism contained in the cozy mystery and the desire for a little less grit, please.

We get enough of that from the six o’clock news.

Michelle Barker is an award-winning author and poet. She is the co-author of three craft books: Immersion and Emotion: The Two Pillars of Storytelling, Story Skeleton: The Classics, and Fake Query Letters by Dead Authors. Her fiction, non-fiction, and poetry have appeared in literary reviews worldwide. She has published three YA novels (one fantasy and two historical fiction), a historical picture book, and a chapbook of poetry. Michelle holds a BA in English literature (UBC) and an MFA in creative writing (UBC). Many of the writers she’s worked with have gone on to win publishing contracts and honours for their work. Michelle lives and writes in Vancouver, Canada.