Comfort is hard to come by in the modern world. Whether you turn on the television, open a newspaper or log on to the internet, almost inevitably you’ll find something to appal, disturb or discomfit. Monitoring life beyond your front door can be a nerve-shredding experience – and that’s just watching the six o’clock news.
Crime fiction might not seem an obvious panacea for the ills of modern living, but a new generation of authors is reconfiguring the genre with those real-life stressors in mind. Richard Osman, Anthony Horowitz and Richard Coles are among the names spearheading the “cosy crime” movement: a subgenre of crime fiction that delivers mysteries with old-fashioned characters and a welcome dose of humour.
“They’re like a hug in a book, but one that keeps you turning the pages to find out what happens next,” says Kitty Graham, a Dublin writer and fan of the genre. “It’s murder-lite. No gore, no horrific autopsies – just a mystery and a resolution, all surrounded by a strong sense of community.”
Osman’s 2020 debut The Thursday Murder Club shot to number one in bestseller charts in countries around the world, selling more than 10 million copies, and has been turned into a film starring Pierce Brosnan and Helen Mirren, with Steven Spielberg snapping up the rights.
READ MORE
Horowitz’s Magpie Murders series – a layered country murder story – has brought him globe-trotting success, while Coles’ popular Canon Clement series has legions of readers; his books feature a vicar, Canon Daniel Clement, who solves crimes in a sleepy English village, often with the help of his mother.
While to the casual reader the plot lines might not seem schematised, they often share characteristics from novel to novel. Namely: a suburban setting, a naive but intrepid detective, and a sense that – if the right clues are followed – a heart-warming, satisfying solution will be found. Yes, there will be a dead body or three, usually killed in inventive fashion. But there will be nothing too grisly or gruesome. There will be some amusing set pieces. At the end, blissfully, you will feel better about life.
“In a world of horrible uncertainty, these stories are set in a safeish world, with witty characters, the good guy always wins and justice will prevail,” says Karina Clifford, a manager with Dubray Books.
“Generally the murder has taken place off the page, there is no graphic violence or horror. Each mystery is an interesting puzzle that will get resolved by the end of the book. It is structured so that everything comes to a nice tidy resolution.”
The genre has deep roots. Queen of cosy crime is undoubtedly Agatha Christie, who published more than 60 detective novels, and continues to provide inspiration to authors working in the area today.
In Japan, Seishi Yokomizo, author of The Honjin Murders, published in the 1940s, is another influence, while in the 1920s Irish author Freeman Wills Crofts’ tightly constructed fictions earned him high praise from peers, with celebrated names such as Raymond Chandler still flagging his work 20 years later. (In The Art of Murder Chandler said he was “the soundest builder of them all when he doesn’t get too fancy”.)
Television is another important inspiration for cosy crime: from classic series like Midsomer Murders through to modern fare, including Poker Face starring Natasha Lyonne as a casino employee on the run and BBC dramedy Ludwig with David Mitchell and Anna Maxwell Martin.
British author Ross Montgomery is set to publish his debut book for adults – a highly enjoyable cosy crime novel called The Murder at World’s End – later this month. “The seed for it was during lockdown,” he says.
“I ended up rewatching TV shows like Midsomer Murders and Jonathan Creek. That was the beginning of my way back into it. I was like, ‘These are just so much fun’. So I revisited Agatha Christie and started reading Anthony Horowitz’s books. They spoke to me. The perfect blend for me is when it’s funny and safe, and has these flashes of gothic threat, but not too much.”
Why does he think readers are moving towards cosy crime?
“I think we’re in a period of time that feels particularly unsettled and hectic, and nothing makes any sense, and everybody is arguing with each other. It’s a relief to enter into a book in which this terrible thing has happened, and there’s only one explanation for it, and it’s just systematically explained.”
In The Murder at World’s End, amateur sleuth Stephen Pike, an under-butler at Tithe Hall in Cornwall in 1910, must figure out who murdered the viscount of Tithe Hall – and save his own skin in the process. Pike is matched with cranky elderly relative Miss Decima to try to establish who shot a crossbow taken from a coat of armour at the viscount. Their buddy-buddy dynamic, as much as the crime solving itself, offers many of the pleasures of the novel.
“With cosy crime, there are often detectives sparring off each other, and what you really care about is spending time with that one person and that viewpoint. You’re not necessarily watching somebody who’s going about things in a dangerous way. You’re watching somebody who seems like they have the answers, or at least the ability to work out the answers, and spending time in their company is key.”
There can be a whiff of snobbery around the cosy crime genre, which Irish author and festival programmer Henrietta McKervey believes is unfair. “So much crime could actually be cosy in some ways. The term is reductive but also accurate in that these novels have warmth, they have humour, they focus on order and resolution. It’s a term that maybe is overused to the extent that it can become a lazy shorthand – books can be shoehorned into a categorisation because it suits publishers more than readers.”
McKervey programmed a cosy crime event for the International Festival of Literature of Dublin over the summer, featuring the authors Jess Kidd and Andrea Carter: Carter is known for her popular Inishowen Mysteries series, while Kidd’s latest is Murder at Gulls Nest, the first in a new 1950s-set seaside mystery series. “The [books] are hard to write, which is one thing that came up in the event,” McKervey says.
“The plots need to be slick. When chaos comes to a small community, it needs to be something massive and big, but also believable. Also that there can be this resolution.”
Montgomery agrees.
“I didn’t realise how difficult they are to write. I thought, maybe quite arrogantly, ‘This will be difficult but I know what I’m doing.’ I’ve been learning on the job and hopefully improving as I go.
“The difficulty is that you’re writing two books: the book you want the reader to read and then also the book that they’re going to realise is happening at the very end. By changing one thing, you often change both of them completely. It can melt your brain.”
The Irish market for cosy crime remains small. “It works in the UK, but doesn’t sell well here,” says one publishing insider. But perhaps that is set to change. For Kitty Graham, who has just self-published her cosy crime novel Purls and Peril, the first in a series, the landscape in Ireland is shifting.
“Richard Osman is huge – the Thursday Murder Club books are brilliant, and with the film just out, I think it will really help break cosy mysteries in Ireland,” she says. “There’s Alexander McCall Smith with The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency, M C Beaton with Agatha Raisin, and Joanne Fluke’s baking mysteries. Closer to home, I think C E Murphy’s Dublin Taxi Driver series is a great example of a Dublin-based cosy mystery.”
[ Richard Osman: ‘Having a hit in Ireland is one of my great joys’Opens in new window ]
Purls and Peril opens with Maeve Lynch, a part-time knitting teacher, stumbling across the body of a journalist on Dublin’s Three Rock Mountain. With her terrier Nidge and best friend Michelle, Maeve and her knitting group are drawn into the mystery.
“I wanted to create a cosy crime novel that was decidedly Irish. And the knitting community is incredibly warm and comforting – I wanted to make that a big part of the story.”
Cosy crime might still be a genre foreign to many readers, but as the news media becomes ever more turbulent, finding solace in puzzling through the mysteries behind the polite bludgeoning of a few characters in a novel may become far more popular. As Montgomery says: “It’s all about creating order from chaos.”
The Murder at World’s End by Ross Montgomery is published by Viking and available from October 30th. Purls and Peril by Kitty Graham is available via Amazon
