EVERY NIGHT for the past few weeks has found me donning pyjamas, snuggling under the duvet and embarking on my research for this article. T is is the best way to appreciate cosy crime novels: in bed on a winter night, preferably with rain lashing down outside. Full of ingeniously contrived
murders, they have a remarkable ability to ease the reader into nightmare-free sleep. If James Ellroy is the bourbon of crime fi ction, Ruth Rendell the blood-red wine and Jo Nesbo a lethal cocktail of whatever’s leſt in the drinks cabinet, then cosy crime is the equivalent of cocoa – although with the best practitioners you oſt en feel as if a nip of something stronger has been added to the mix. Cosy crime was
fi rst recognised as a sub-genre in the US in the 1980s. ‘Cozies’ are afforded a critical respect in the US they rarely receive here. One can only imagine the ridicule that would greet a British equivalent of Rita Mae Brown, the acclaimed literary novelist who moonlights as a writer of mysteries supposedly co-authored with her cat Sneaky Pie, with titles such as Murder, She Meowed. T ere’s even an annual convention
genre: “Mysteries which contain no explicit sex or excessive gore or violence” of the sort “typifi ed by the works of Agatha Christie”. But how did stories of murder,
a heinous crime, become pre-lights- out escapism for millions? “Cosy crime” is an oxymoron: the phrase is no less ridiculous than “cuddly assault” or “comforting arson”.
said that in his stories he had devised 83 diff erent
be found alone in a locked room”
in Washington DC celebrating the cosy, called Malice Domestic. Its website off ers a defi nition of the
the problem of how a murder victim could
solutions to “Carr once
THE GOLDEN AGE T e seed was sown by the earliest classics of British crime fi ction: Wilkie Collins’ novel T e Moonstone (1868), Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes tales (1887-1927) and G.K. Chesterton’s Father Brown short stories (1911-36). Not to be looked to for gritty realism, these works took their cue from Edgar Allan Poe’s Auguste Dupin tales and provided their readers with cunning whodunit puzzles. T ese are books to reach for when under the weather, the literary equivalent of a hot- water bottle. After the First
World War the so- called Golden Age of detective novels took off . T ere was little
in these books to disturb readers’ equanimity. Gruesome details were kept to a minimum and the emotional devastation caused by violent death was glossed over. It is worth remembering, when
we try to account for why these bloodless books sold in their
millions, that their readers had just seen a generation massacred in the trenches. Extravagant vicarious grief of the sort that the Victorians went in for when Dickens killed off Little Nell was no longer so attractive. In contrast to the indiscriminate slaughter of war there was always a logical reason behind the killings in these books, and the prelapsarian order of things was invariably restored aſt er the villain was caught and sent to the gallows by an omniscient, infallible detective. Agatha Christie – whose fi rst