A Cozy by Any Other Name . . .

I used to write cozies. No longer. It’s not that I’ve changed what I write. No, what I write has changed names.

That makes me feel better. Knowing this, that is. I thought for a while I had dementia. After all, I’ve been a member of Sisters in Crime and Mystery Writers of America on and off for almost 10 years now, have been reading mysteries since about second grade, and started trying to write them in fourth grade. I should know what the different types of mysteries are.

What I’ve always loved about mysteries is the way average people somehow get caught up in a murder in their hometown or workplace and use their specialized knowledge and ingenuity to solve the crime that the local cops are royally botching. I love the interplay between the characters. I love the puzzle. I love the bad guys being caught in the end and the world being once again set right. These books that I love to read and to write were always defined as cozies to me.

Recently, however, I began hearing that the only cozies that have been selling revolve around talking pets or knitting. I knit, but not well enough to write about it. And no matter how much I try to suspend belief, I just can’t seem to suspend it enough to take a talking cat seriously.

Then a week or two ago, I learned that the definition of cozies has become much narrower. Today, they’re almost always humorous. They generally have a female sleuth. They tend to have pets, and if they don’t, you don’t have a problem imagining shy pets hiding behind all the furniture. And they all have hooks, or gimmicks, whether it’s the sleuth’s profession, hobby, or something else that lends itself to great cover art and promotional items.

Originally, a cozy was a mystery of the type written by Agatha Christie. These are now called traditional mysteries. St. Martin’s Press, in its description of the manuscripts eligible for its Malice Domestic Competition, offers the best description:

1. Murder or another serious crime is at the heart of the story, and emphasis is on the solution rather than the details of the crime.
2. Whatever violence is necessarily involved should be neither excessive nor gratuitously detailed, nor is there to be explicit sex.
3. The crime is an extraordinary event in the lives of the characters.
4. The principal characters are people whom the reader might not like, but would be interested in knowing.
5. The suspects and the victims should know each other.
6. There are a limited number of suspects, each of whom has a credible motive and reasonable opportunity to have committed the crime.
7. The person who solves the crime is the central character.
8. The “detective” is an amateur, or, if a professional (private investigator, police officer) is not hardboiled and is as fully developed as the other characters.
9. The detective may find him or herself in serious peril, but he or she does not get beaten up to any serious extent.
10. All of the cast represent themselves as individuals, rather than large impersonal institutions like a national government, the Mafia, the CIA, etc.

Cozies, therefore, would seem to be a type of traditional mystery. Not all traditional mysteries are cozies, however.

In the end, though, I’m not going to stress over what subgenre my book falls into. Just like so many other things in our world, the list of mystery subgenres will continue to evolve and the definitions of many of the subgenres will continue to change. I’ll just write my book the way it needs to be written and pick the subgenre that best fits it when I’m ready to begin sending it out. And when it’s published, it’ll say “Mystery” on the spine and the back cover, the sales and publicity people will call it a mystery, the bookstores will shelve it in the mystery section, and the reviewers will deem it a “brilliant introduction to a new mystery series.” Only my talking cats and I will know it’s a traditional mystery. Or maybe a cozy again.