Written by Alan Gordon for Karen Odden‘s March 5th newsletter and reposted here by permission. As I told Alan I never know what the hell a cosy is myself and I hate labels anyway. His essay explains it all for us.

To Coze Or Not To Coze

 By Alan Gordon, AKA Allison Montclair
[or is it the other away around?]

         I have been suffering from an identity crisis as of late. This shouldn’t be surprising for one who has been writing under a pseudonym for several years, but my current crisis is one of categorization.

         I write the Sparks and Bainbridge series, about two women who run a licensed marriage bureau in post-WWII London, and find themselves dragged into one murder investigation after another. The category question I have is: Are these cozies?

         What is a cozy, you may ask? Well, the mystery genre can be divided into sub-genres, each with its own opinionated and vociferous fan base. These divisions are arbitrary and the lines between them are porous. If anyone were to try and explain the cozy with one literary example and one dramatization, they would invariably come up with Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple and her televised descendant Jessica Fletcher of Murder, She Wrote. (Just summon up an image of Angela Lansbury and you’ve pretty much got it. Not the one wielding the bloody meat cleaver from Sweeney Todd, though!)

         The two rules that I originally associated with this sub-genre were 1: The detectives must be amateurs; and 2: No explicit sex or violence. But I came to discover that the self-appointed arbiters of All Things Cozy had other requirements for membership. Let’s see whether or not I qualify.

         1. Amateur detectives: Definitely. Gwen Bainbridge comes from a wealthy, aristocratic family, groomed to be married off to someone of that class. She achieves that, only to lose her beloved husband to the war, leading to her breakdown and institutionalization. As the series starts, she is still a Ward of the Crown. But her mind is a good one, despite her lack of university education, with acute instincts for assessing people. Iris Sparks, on the other hand, grew up middle-class in the East End, went to Cambridge, and spent her war years working in military intelligence. Useful experience, as it turns out, especially when their investigations send them into the more tawdry sections of London society. But neither is a professional investigator by any means.

         2. No explicit sex or violence: Here, the lines start to blur. Apparently, despite their reputed reticence, the British do have sex, which is why there are more of them each year. While I don’t include anything descriptive in the series, the ladies’ love lives play continuing roles. The series begins with Iris in mid-affair with a married man. Gwen, still in mourning, gradually returns to seeking love.

         As for violence, people do get murdered, but there is no gore and it rarely happens in front of the ladies. Rarely. Not never. And I’ve had fight scenes in most of the books. Iris has had training, and Gwen is learning.

         3. Small town setting: London? Clearly not

         4. Adversarial relationship with the police: Any non-professional would bump heads with the professionals, so yes. It doesn’t help that one of Iris’s exes is with Scotland Yard.

         5. Recipes: None. Rationing was still in effect, so that would be difficult.

         6. Pets: None.

         7. Children: Gwen’s son Ronnie is very much part of her life. He struggles with missing his dead father and dealing with his not always present mother. He is not there to provide any forced adorableness, although he can be adorable.

         8. Romance: Yes. I mean, come on, it’s a marriage bureau. The irony being that the two women running it are both unmarried.

         9. Comedy: Yes, but this isn’t exclusive to cozies. I try and keep it organic and grounded in the reality of the characters and situations, rather than broadly-drawn caricatures.

         Conclusion: Cozy-esque? Perhaps. Cozy-adjacent, certainly. But in the overlapping Venn diagram of mystery sub-genres, I would say Traditional Historical. Whether I’m right, you’ll have to judge for yourselves. To purchase the book, click the book cover below.

Dana again–Of Karen’s Down a Dark River I wrote, “Promising start to a new series set in Victorian London—interesting characters with strong backstories, a Dickens setting that doesn’t concentrate only on the bad, and a good plot with a villain you can understand.” I reviewed An Excellent Thing in a Woman, Alan/Allison’s latest Sparks & Bainbridge novel here.

#thiswritinglife Chatter Alan Gordon Allison Montclair An Excellent thing in a Woman cosy or not Down a Dark River Karen Odden