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Is it coincidental that every American cozy I am sent is set in a small town?

Date: 2008-11-30 06:28 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] commodorified.livejournal.com
Charlotte McLeod writes - or wrote, must just check (ETA: she died in '05) - cozies sent in Boston. But I admit, they stand out for their rarity as much as anything.
Edited Date: 2008-11-30 06:29 pm (UTC)

Date: 2008-11-30 06:29 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] whumpdotcom.livejournal.com
"American cozy"? I had to look that one up.

Date: 2008-11-30 06:46 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] jamesenge.livejournal.com
A "cozy" in an old-fashioned type of murder mystery where Sir Gerald gets killed in the library while playing a bassoon and, after a leisurely plot through quaint surroundings, it turns out that someone rather decent with a quite good reason did it and they leave the murderer gently alone in the library with a spot of brandy and a revolver with one shot in it.

In American cozies Gerald is a businessman or a politican or something, and everyone listens to NPR.

Date: 2008-11-30 09:49 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] whumpdotcom.livejournal.com
A revolver with a single round? How delightfuly Soviet.

Date: 2008-11-30 11:44 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] jamesenge.livejournal.com
They may have picked it up from Lord Peter Wimsey when he was dining at the Soviet Club.

Date: 2008-11-30 10:44 pm (UTC)
ext_3718: (Default)
From: [identity profile] agent-mimi.livejournal.com
I would read this, mostly because of the bassoon.

Date: 2008-11-30 11:47 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] jamesenge.livejournal.com
There's an alternate version where the amateur detective realizes that there's no murder at all. The final blast on the bassoon was deeply sad, and not in the sheet-music of the piece that Sir Gerald was playing, so that the detective deduces it must have been a suicide note.

Date: 2008-12-01 12:35 am (UTC)
ext_104661: (Default)
From: [identity profile] alexx-kay.livejournal.com
That description reminds me a lot of Fredric Brown's _The Fabulous Clipjoint_. As regards James' question, that book was set in Chicago.

Date: 2008-12-01 01:00 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] almeda.livejournal.com
And in American cozies usually either the sleuth or the victim (or both) have some interestingly quaint, detail-oriented hobby that the author can spend half the book explaining to you, like quilting, or amateur archaeology, or lace-fancy, or raising budgies.

Date: 2008-11-30 06:53 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] james-nicoll.livejournal.com
As far as I can tell, cozies are set in worlds that are basically right the way they are. The murder (or other crime but mysteries seem to be mostly about killing people these days) is either in itself a disruption of the way things should be or caused by such a disruption and the resolution returns the world to its proper state. A cozy universe wants a decent sensible resolution so badly that any half-interested bystander will be able to solve the mystery, possibly too late to save some of the minor characters [1].

Miss Marple would never visit Poisonville because a Poisonville is not possible in her universe.

1: I will admit there are some cozies where the protagonist seems to be waiting for more murders to narrow down the suspects, rather like the conversation in Demolition Man where one cop suggests the best way to find the criminal they are looking for is to wait until he commits another murder/death/kill.

Date: 2008-12-01 01:04 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] jamesenge.livejournal.com
Good points here. I think the callousness that you see sometimes in cozies (as in the romance subplot of The ABC Murders) is a function of the murder-mystery-as-game: it's all just "poison in jest" etc.

And now I want to read "Miss Marple in Poisonville."

When she said she knew the best tea-joint in town, she was talking about the stuff you drink. But I saw a Luger there among her knitting needles and I knew better than to crack wise: she had smoked Shorty McRogers for no better reason than that he had offered to butter her biscuits in the transatlantic sense.


Date: 2008-12-01 06:06 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] burger-eater.livejournal.com
Another definitive trait cozies have is that the crime is solved by rational deduction. No stirring up the bad guys to see who does what. No hunches. All the evidence is laid out and the amateur detective sifts through it all, finds the contradictions and names the killer.

But I think Poisonville could exist in Miss Marple's universe. It would be a place a character is from, not a place to visit, but it would be there.

Date: 2008-11-30 08:50 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] cantkeepsilent.livejournal.com
I presume it's some sort of quilted insulator you put on top of your America to keep it warm. I wish he'd use it already.

Date: 2008-11-30 06:47 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] antikythera.livejournal.com
I had to look it up too, and was surprised to find that the definition of a cozy does not include a small town setting. It sounded like it might.

I think the closest thing to a big city cozy that I can think of would be the Dog Lover's Mysteries by Susan Conant, whose heroine lives with her dogs in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Date: 2008-11-30 07:07 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] xiphias.livejournal.com
I'd have to say, being a Bostonian myself, the examples of American cozies set in Cambridge and Boston don't entirely work as counterexamples.

Boston and Cambridge both CAN work as small towns, albeit, small towns with millions of people in them. But socially, we're more of a small-town mold -- or, perhaps, many, many overlapping small towns. Still, we have that sort of social structure.

Which means that, depending on which subcultures you work in, Boston can work for both cozies AND for hard-boiled stories. . . . I wonder if it would be possible to write an intersection story based around that . . . I can't even begin to conceive of what that would look like, but I'd love to see it.

Date: 2008-11-30 07:19 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] james-nicoll.livejournal.com
There was a soft-boiled detective story set in Indianapolis, I think, where the detective discovers he has the perfect excuse to have a drawing room scene, something that he has never, ever had an excuse for in his entire poorly paid and rather seedy career. This pleases him immeasurably.

The killer is a little old lady who cannot possibly be a physical threat to him so there is no risk in exposing her in this way or so he thinks. As it actually works out, she grabs a razor-sharp letter opener and disembowels him in mid-explanation before attempting to flee the scene. He's still getting PT for the injury books later.

Date: 2008-12-01 11:17 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] tavella.livejournal.com
I wish to know the name of this series/book, dammit.

Date: 2008-12-01 11:21 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] james-nicoll.livejournal.com
That's the problem. I am not sure. It *might* be an Albert Samson novel by Michael Z. Lewin.

Date: 2008-11-30 09:17 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] blpurdom.livejournal.com
That's true; the Jane Langton "Homer Kelly" mysteries that are set in Boston still move in a rather limited milieu within Boston--usually Harvard University, or a particular church or neighborhood. She's written a couple that take place in Italy--one in Florence and one in Venice--but they're still cozies.

I think that even if a cozy takes place in which is, technically, a big city, the city needs to be brought down to scale for the sake of the story. So, to all intents and purposes, the story might as well be taking place in a small town even though it's a good-sized city.

Date: 2008-11-30 08:21 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] ffutures.livejournal.com
The essence of a cozy is a small and relatively closed community disrupted by murder - it doesn't necessarily have to be a town, Christie used residential hotels, schools, etc., as did Michael Gilbert.

Date: 2008-11-30 08:49 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] tx-cronopio.livejournal.com
Hee. I first thought you meant coozies, which probably reveals more about my lifestyle than it should. But I'll send you a coozie if you want one :)

Date: 2008-11-30 08:59 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] blackwingbear.livejournal.com
I had no idea what you meant by cozy... I had to look it up just to find it was an overused sub-sub-sub-sub-genre of murder-mystery set in a dull, uninteresting culturally overwrought backwoods small-town.

Date: 2008-11-30 11:37 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] nihilistic-kid.livejournal.com
Hey man, cities have cops in 'em.

Date: 2008-12-01 03:27 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] james-nicoll.livejournal.com
So do small towns but it doesn't seem to matter.

Come to think of it, in the series set in small town Minnesota, the one where the lead is dating two men, one of them is the town sheriff. This has less effect on her snooping than you'd think.

Date: 2008-12-01 03:29 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] james-nicoll.livejournal.com
In big towns, the cops may be too busy to look into minor cases or too stupid to solve them. The latter was Holmes' key to steady employment.

Date: 2008-12-01 12:40 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] j-larson.livejournal.com
"We kill good people in our small towns." Or something like that...

Date: 2008-12-01 02:40 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] maruad.livejournal.com
I think of Rex Stout's Nero Wolfe books as being American cozys or at least an older version of the American cozy. I never noticed if he choose major cities vs small towns.

Date: 2008-12-01 10:53 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] martin-wisse.livejournal.com
Nero Wolfe almost never leaves New York, or indeed his house.

Date: 2008-12-01 12:19 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] maruad.livejournal.com
I suspected that but in one of the short stories I have read, he does actually conduct a case at a very exclusive and remote fishing lodge. The fact that he is in his home makes me think of the cozy. The fact that he has his servant (Archie?) do all the running around and investigating makes it unusual.

Date: 2008-12-01 12:06 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] puritybrown.livejournal.com
Okay, question from a very occasional reader of mysteries who is not exactly up on the state of the genre: do the Wimsey books count as cozies? Five Red Herrings would seem to fit the bill (small enclosed community where everything is basically fine, murder happens and is concealed by crazily elaborate and puzzle-like means, Lord Peter solves the puzzle by using Logic, the author deliberately, barefacedly and explicitly withholds information from the reader in order to keep the mystery going), but there's such a sense of unease about the world in The Nine Tailors and Busman's Honeymoon, and no feeling of resolution at the end; the mystery gets solved, but that doesn't make it all better. It just makes the wretchedness easier to discern.

Would it be fair to say that she started out writing cozies and then evolved into something more complex?

Date: 2008-12-01 12:34 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] papersky.livejournal.com
Small towns are the Real America!

Date: 2008-12-01 02:42 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] don-fitch.livejournal.com
I don't much like the word "cozy" in this context, but seem to need to use it in order to be understood. As others have pointed out, a small and closed environment is generally deemed necessary, and small towns provide that conveniently. But I'm puzzled by your restriction to "American" -- probably because I'm especially fond of the Class: Mystery, Ethnic, UK Village (of which there seem to be hundreds of examples).

Date: 2008-12-01 02:51 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] james-nicoll.livejournal.com
The British cozies I've read are sometimes set in large cities and by large cities I mean London.

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