About American cozies

[james_davis_nicoll]

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

Comments

[whumpdotcom.livejournal.com]

"American cozy"? I had to look that one up.

[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.

[whumpdotcom.livejournal.com]

A revolver with a single round? How delightfuly Soviet.

[jamesenge.livejournal.com]

They may have picked it up from Lord Peter Wimsey when he was dining at the Soviet Club.

[agent-mimi.livejournal.com]

I would read this, mostly because of the bassoon.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.