Wednesday 2 October 2024

The Best Ingredients for a Cosy Mystery

 


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

Amazon co uk


 


You can find all 20 of Michael Reidy’s books by clicking on the link below

Amazon co uk

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