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[littlered2]

I was in Waterstones last week, and discovered that they had a bookcase devoted solely to what they called "Cosy Crime". It included Dorothy L Sayers and Agatha Christie, to my great bemusement.

Here is the ending of Unnatural Death:

'An evil woman, if ever there was one,' said Parker, softly, as they looked at the rigid body, with its swollen face

Comments

[hedge_backwards]

If I were going to draw any distinctions between 'types' of crime novels; which would probably be a fool's errand in the first place, I would group them as crime fiction which treats the crime as an intellectual problem to be solved on the part of the detective and by extension, the reader and those which deal with the crime as a social or psychological symptom. The latter often don't have most complex of plots where the actual crime is concerned. It's really more of an excuse to involve a lot of interesting character types in an extreme situation and to record the ensuing explosions (sometimes literally). I would place Christie firmly in the former camp but I have trouble defining Sayers, true, she deals with fully rounded characters and the cases are rarely concluded in the library with brandy and cigars, after which, everyone but the murderer goes merrily on their way as though they've done nothing more than solve a particularly difficult crossword. However she does seem to set out her stall in Busman's Honeymoon when Peter emphasises the importance of the 'how' rather than the why. However, he might be describing Harriet's fiction rather than Sayers', which would be borne out by the passage in Gaudy Night where he tells Harriet that she is capable of writing more profoundly than the clever puzzles that she is currently producing.

Leaving that aside it is ridiculous to a) map these distinctions along a timeline and b) label them as 'cosy' or not. One of the prime examples of the symptom type is Crime and Punishment where it's pretty damn clear who the murderer is and how he did it by virtue of the fact that the crime and subsequent flailing around St Petersburg is written from his POV. This is the paradigm that most of the supposedly 'non-cosy' Scandanavian crime writers are operating in, certainly people like Jo Nesbo, who seems to use a crime novel as a format to write about addiction, psychology, imperialism, racism etc etc. However, I would not describe problem-focused writers like Christie as 'cosy' in fact, its actually more chilling to view a crime solely as an intellectual game with few profound effects on the people it touches. (I may be doing Christie a disservice here, I have not actually read all of her works, merely the major ones, and those were some time ago.)

Of course what the Waterstones staff might be doing is drawing a line between a certain type of American crime fiction where the authors are involved in an arms race over who can make their books more 'shocking' and the rest. In which case it would probably be more honest to put a sign reading 'Rubbish' over the former.

[littlered2]

Ooh, this is interesting! Looking at which camp Sayers belongs to, she wrote Five Red Herrings specifically to show she could write an intellectual-puzzle style mystery (although I get the impression, from an admittedly small sample size, that it's not hugely popular. Could this be why?), and even as early as Unnatural Death, there's a presumption throughout the book that Mary Whittaker did it - it's just finding out how and why that's the problem. So in some ways the intellectual puzzle aspect is there, but at the same time her characters are very three-dimensional, even the minor ones, and it's not just a Christie-eque "here are the puzzle pieces, let's spend a book putting them together". And the solution to the mystery is often not as interesting as the other things going on around it.

true, she deals with fully rounded characters and the cases are rarely concluded in the library with brandy and cigars, after which, everyone but the murderer goes merrily on their way as though they've done nothing more than solve a particularly difficult crossword.

And, in fact, this is dismissed pretty quickly in the first book, where Parker rightly tells Peter that he can't just treat crime-solving as a game and act under the code of the Eton playing field; justice is the important thing. Your point about intellectual puzzle mysteries being extremely uncosy, as they ignore the human realities of murder, is an excellent one. (I haven't read enough Christie to judge, either - but off the top of my head, I can think of several of her books that involve couples getting together, the murder case merely acting as a catalyst and the characters merrily laughing over their situation afterwards (rather than being all, "OH NO MY FRIENDS ARE DEAD AND ONE IS A MURDERER. LET'S NOT JUST BLITHELY PLAN A WEDDING". And Poirot doesn't seem to have PTSD flashbacks when about to bring a criminal to justice).

I feel your final explanation may well be the correct one. 21st century, inner-city, gritty stuff with guns and drugs is "Crime"; anything not conforming to that pattern is "Cosy Crime". It is enough to make one weep. (Perhaps I should have a rant at the staff about how Sayers is not cosy, after all. "Have you even read Gaudy Night?")