What are the best ingredients needed to create a cosy mystery? Award winning, author, Michael Reidy gives an insight into the magic that makes this genre so very popular.
Readers
are now familiar with the “cosy mystery” genre, but the origin of the term is
elusive. It seems to have appeared in the 1980s as a branding exercise (creatio
ex nihilo) by publishers to describe novels that imitated or were
reminiscent of “the golden age” of detective fiction. Nonetheless, it is a very
useful term to categorise mysteries – even murder mysteries – with certain
characteristics.
Among
the common features are a village setting (with a town hall, friendly police
force, independent shops and restaurants, a parish church, a river or a canal,
and one or more amateur or professional detectives), a relatively close
community, and host of “the usual suspects” – eccentrics, outsiders, grumpy
pensioners, local ne’er-do-wells, snobs, busybodies, twits, agreeable – or
disagreeable – children, people with strong opinions, suspicious “foreigners”
(who may just be from the next county), playboys, slovenly females, vicars, and
old money or nouveau riche people “up at the big house.”
The
final key element is that – in the true style of classical literature – the
crime is solved and order restored.
It’s
all very easy to parody and ridicule, but the appeal, success and endurance of
cosy mysteries cannot be disputed. All of these identifiers can be traced at
least back to Agatha Christie’s earliest works in the 1920s, and you’d have to
be pretty churlish not to consider many of today’s examples anything but worthy
successors.
Dare - Pauline Barclay’s third story in the
Gardner & Chattaway series - has many of these ingredients and mixes them
well to present the reader with credible plot lines, intrigue, humour, a sense
of an essentially harmonious community (but not excessively so) with examples
of both meanness and kindness, and, of course, enough crime to keep private
investigators Craig Gardner and his young assistant, Roo Chattaway, in tea and
biscuits.
No
spoilers here, but the plot develops when a series of seemingly unrelated
requests for investigation arrive on the desks of the detectives. Are they
related?
Since
the appearance of Serendipity in 2021 and Past Secrets and Lies (2022),
Craig and Roo have settled into a trusted (though not always smooth) working
relationship. Gardner is an ex-policeman who draws on his experiences and
community connections, while Roo has more discipline than many of Gen Z, and is
passionate about her rollerblading – and her boyfriend, Taylor.
Pauline
Barclay’s eye and concerns for young people (recently featured in her short
story, Tormentors) appears in Dare, and it is handled subtly and
with sympathy – as are the observations on age.
Dare is engaging, nicely written,
entertaining and reassuring: all that a cosy mystery should be.
One
caution: if you’re a cat lover (not, I, for certain) you may wish to put your
animal in another room as Barney, the office dog, scampers about quite a bit.
Dare is available in Kindle and paperback
from all Amazon sites
You can find all 20 of Michael Reidy’s books by clicking on the link below
