Cozy???
The cozy mystery is of course the province of Agatha Christie and her countless imitators. A party of upper-class people is united for some revelry somewhere, when the host unexpectedly appears in a locked room with a large salad fork in his back. We then get to follow the reasoning of the detective until he manages to show us how the only possible way the murder could have ocurred was the way we least expected it (this was also parodied to brilliant effect in a throw-away one-liner in Douglas Adams' The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul).
I've never done much reading of cozy mysteries, having read my very first Agatha Christie book a little over a year ago (a collection of Poirot shorts). It seemed, like Sweet Valley High or vampire romances, to be aimed at an uncritical female audience: fluff for girls (I have no problem with reading things aimed at an uncritical and brain-dead male audience, fluff for boys, of course, but the combination seemed to indicate that I wouldn't enjoy this particular strand of fiction). But I found the book of shorts (a birthday present) entertaining and not intelligent, so I took the plunge and purchased a book entitled Poirot: The Perfect Murders, which is an omnibus holding three novels and a novella (The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, Murder on the Orient Express, Murder in the Mews and Hércule Poirot's Christmas).
Of the four, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd is the masterpiece (the other three are entertaining in their way, but pale in comparison). This one will stay with me for a long time, both as a reader and a writer. The coziness, of course, is present (at least it is from the discovery of the body onwards - there is little that is cozy about the title character literally getting it in the neck), but it dissappears in the last two pages. The reader is shocked to the core by the revelation of the murderer, and leaves the book emotionally damaged, but in awe of the writer's skill.
Writers will be even more moved. The brilliant abuse of the reader's trust, and the sheer audacity of the conclusion will leave writers with the sense that there are some very, very big fish out there in the authorial waters, and that, to make a mark, one's writing needs to be very, very good indeed. Cozy? I think not.
Writing: 800 words into a new short and about 200 into a requested rewrite.
I've never done much reading of cozy mysteries, having read my very first Agatha Christie book a little over a year ago (a collection of Poirot shorts). It seemed, like Sweet Valley High or vampire romances, to be aimed at an uncritical female audience: fluff for girls (I have no problem with reading things aimed at an uncritical and brain-dead male audience, fluff for boys, of course, but the combination seemed to indicate that I wouldn't enjoy this particular strand of fiction). But I found the book of shorts (a birthday present) entertaining and not intelligent, so I took the plunge and purchased a book entitled Poirot: The Perfect Murders, which is an omnibus holding three novels and a novella (The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, Murder on the Orient Express, Murder in the Mews and Hércule Poirot's Christmas).
Of the four, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd is the masterpiece (the other three are entertaining in their way, but pale in comparison). This one will stay with me for a long time, both as a reader and a writer. The coziness, of course, is present (at least it is from the discovery of the body onwards - there is little that is cozy about the title character literally getting it in the neck), but it dissappears in the last two pages. The reader is shocked to the core by the revelation of the murderer, and leaves the book emotionally damaged, but in awe of the writer's skill.
Writers will be even more moved. The brilliant abuse of the reader's trust, and the sheer audacity of the conclusion will leave writers with the sense that there are some very, very big fish out there in the authorial waters, and that, to make a mark, one's writing needs to be very, very good indeed. Cozy? I think not.
Writing: 800 words into a new short and about 200 into a requested rewrite.