Cozy Relationships

Another familiar type of mystery is referred to as a Cozy,” made famous by Agatha Christie.

In its classical form, a cozy takes place in a small English village, a place where everybody knows everybody else. And all their business. Lately, the definition has broadened to encompass any small closed community that is socially isolated: an office, for example. Murder on the Orient Express could be classified as a cozy because the characters are locked into the situation by the weather. Someone on this rail car is responsible, but who? Christie refined the model to include the locked drawing room model. Again, weather intervenes to reduce the number of potential suspects.

A cozy works because the setting is an inherently peaceful place. Crime is not the norm. The people are not normal criminals. However, people in small villages have secrets and long memories. Usually, something from someone’s dark past is the key that unlocks the puzzle. The protagonist, usually a gifted amateur working at odds with the police, probes into the other people’s lives, until all is revealed.

Cozies have been popular with readers who are put off by the cold, calculating, gratuitous sex and violence that drives hard boiled mysteries and thrillers, not to mention the gruesome bits of decaying flesh that authors like Patricia Cornwell feeds her readers.

Among my favorite modern authors, I think Nevada Barr comes closest to the cozy model. Her stories all take place in National Parks – closed, incestuous communities if ever there were ones. In some of her books, like Firestorm and Winter Study, fewer than a dozen characters fill the pages. There may be more people just off stage, but the principal players are easily identified.

Barr skirts the edges of cozy norms by introducing more violence. The wild can be a harsh, unforgiving place, but the depravity of humanity is what drives her stories.

With all the graphic material splattered across the television screen in HD by CSI and its kin, it is getting harder to write cozies that appeal to readers. Even ten-year-olds have been hardened to violence by Harry Potter and Eclipse. 

The wide-eyed innocence of Nancy Drew has long since faded to black.