Cozy Mysteries
Who doesn’t love a mystery? My sister Carolyn loves to read Nancy Drew. My Mom has always read mystery books and watched murder mysteries. The last TV show I saw with her was Blue Bloods. Tom Selleck is one of her favorite actors, but she also enjoys the family dynamics wrapped up in a mystery that is solved in an hour or less. If you’ve ever wanted to write a cozy mystery, one without super violent crimes or blood splashing all over the place, the genre that you probably like—such as you find in Nancy Drew novels—Is called A Cozy Mystery. Or, as lovers of the genre say, “Cozies.”
All cozy mysteries have classic elements that make them what they are.
In this blog post, I will give you the nuances of cozies so you can outline and write your own. I will provide examples of other detective fiction that fall into this classification to spark ideas and clarify understanding. Here we go!
1. Choose your main character, the amateur sleuth:
The story will follow her and be from her point of view. Therefore, it’s a story about your main character getting involved in this mystery that has entered her life. She will have many attributes, such as:
· She is an excellent observer
· She is relatable to the audience.
· She is sociable and knows the people in town.
· She is quirky
· She has a hobby that can serve as an overall theme, such as puzzles, tea, cooking, etc.
Choose a quirk of hers that ends up helping her in the end. For example, consider Miss Marple, Agatha Christie’s protagonist from “The Murder at the Vicarage” (and many more). Christie describes her as “an old lady.” Because of this, she is someone many people in the stories trust and provides a relatable character for the reader. We, as readers, might be old ladies, or we have one in our lives. (However, writing suggestion: never describe your character as “old.” Describe their appearance, and the reader will infer their age.) Also, as a woman of advanced age, when Miss Marple asks seemingly innocent questions, when she finds herself in places she shouldn’t be, and when she’s caught eavesdropping, her age can be what helps her get clues. It can simply be a quirk of being old. And as you have noticed in these books, movies, and TV shows (Jessica Fletcher from Murder She Wrote), people will confide in these characters—providing the amateur sleuth with yet another clue.
2. Choose her (or his) confidant who is in the police force:
This person, typically, will pooh-pooh the main character when she starts asking questions and making accusations which is the driving force behind the main character doing it herself. Her contact could be on of these:
· her best friend
· a family member
· a boyfriend
· a love interest
· a spouse
You'll know what I mean if you’ve ever watched Crossword Mysteries: A Puzzle to Die For on the Hallmark Channel. In this story, the main character Tess (played by Lacey Chabert) thinks she knows that the daily crossword puzzles in the newspaper are being used to get messages to some bad guys. She goes to Logan (played by Brennan Elliott), a friend and detective, to tell him her suspicions, hoping that he will investigate the issue. He dismisses her right away, driving her to solve the mystery herself. I don’t believe this story handled this part well. Even though Logan had (very meanly, mind you) dismissed Tess, she constantly came back to him to give him many chances to take over the case as she sucked it up and took his verbal abuse. Okay, I’m going a bit overboard. He wasn’t that bad. But he wasn’t nice, that’s for sure. I feel that that police friend must be kind. They should not be condescending or mean. And if they are, they aren’t a very good friend to the protagonist, and she will go elsewhere to get help.
3. Decide where to drop the hints, or clues, within the story:
Like Hansel and Gretel dropping crumbs along the path so they can get home, you will need to give your readers hints along the way. If the amateur detective solves the mystery without sharing the hints, leaving clues, and foreshadowing to guide the reader toward solving the case, it’s not a mystery. It would be like waking up in Kansas and discovering that everything you experienced in Oz was merely a dream. Anticlimactic.
You will also need a red herring or two. A red herring, designed to mislead and distract from the real murderer or thief, helps prolong the suspense and, therefore, should be plausible. Here is a list of many effective red herrings:
· Introduce a character who seems suspicious. Dress them up like a bad guy. Give them a name that makes the readers question her motives and integrity. Maybe it alludes to something negative such as naming them after a well-known bad guy (or guys) like Ursula Hussein (Ursula from The Little Mermaid and Hussein from Saddam Hussein). An example of this is in Harry Potter. Sirius Black was introduced into the storyline after he had broken out of prison, something a bad guy would do, and was going to kill Harry, a definite bad guy action. But, spoiler alert, he didn’t turn out evil. Not in the slightest. But his name is villainous, and his clothes look typical for a bad guy. Now, Harry Potter is not a cozy mystery, but there are red herrings in all kinds of books. And this was a great example of using a character as a red herring. (Some mystery writers love to make the butler the red herring because the butler has gotten a bad rep. Arthur Conan Doyle did it in The Hound of the Baskervilles.)
· Introduce a plausible clue but distracts the reader and maybe the amateur sleuth. She may know it’s not a good clue, but she’ll keep it to herself so the reader can be distracted by something that doesn’t matter in the end.
· Make the guilty party someone that is close to the main character. Nobody suspects someone nice, perhaps, “old”, or someone in the sleuth’s main circle. Have that person appear on the first pages.
· And it is my opinion that Agatha Christie, in Murder on the Orient Express, introduced the most interesting of red herrings. Nobody at that time would suspect what happened on that train. Agatha Christie played the best red herring trick of all when she wrote that book. I will end this bullet here because I don’t want to ruin it if you haven’t read it or seen the movie.
Make the plot twisty but not too complicated. Since the emphasis is on the sleuth, not the crime, the readers want to solve the puzzle alongside their hero.
4. Choose your setting:
These mysteries are often set in small communities where the sleuth knows everyone. Murder, theft (or both), or whatever crime that needs to be solved disrupts the natural order of their rural living. By the end of the book, the sleuth will restore order by solving the crime, explaining what happened, and tidying things. She may have to restore relationships that were damaged during the investigation. Many good settings include:
· American small town
· English village (Miss Marple’s St Mary Mead)
· Retirement home (Richard Osman’s The Thursday Murder)
· Cambridge University (The Maidens by Alex Michaelides)
· A high-rise apartment building in New York City(Only Murders in the Building, TV show)
· A high school (Veronica Mars)
Many debate whether the setting must be a small town/small community or if a cozy could be set in a large city. There are opinions on both sides. I would argue that as long as the immediate area is small, like a high-rise apartment building in New York City, the people surrounding the crime will be deeply affected. That itself drives the protagonist to solve the crime. It’s personal now. It has disrupted their calm.
5. Choose your crime:
Don’t worry. Whatever crime you choose to write about won’t implicate you or ruin your reputation as an upstanding citizen. Nobody will suspect you as a murderer if you decide to write about murder. Imagination is a beautiful thing. If you choose the crime to be murder, it’s committed away from the book. A cozy mystery is not about murder, gore, or violence. It’s about the protagonist. Whatever the crime, it creates an avenue for her to shine. Her best is coming forward to solve the crime. So, whatever the crime is, it just happens. So, don’t worry about describing blood pooling out the back of his skull, any bruising after the death, or even rigor mortis. That type of detail isn’t needed in this type of book. Here are some ideas of crimes that your sleuth can investigate:
· Murder
· Theft of an Egyptian artifact (or anything priceless)
· Murder
· Arson
· Murder
· Blackmail
· Murder
· Kidnapping
· Murder
· Bank heist
· Murder
· Train Theft
But mostly, cozy mysteries love to solve a good murder. And it’s the reactions of the community that helps it connect to the reader. You are there and want to help restore the calm to the gentle folks within that tight family-like community.
6. Create your criminal:
These are the hallmarks of a good criminal:
· An educated person
· Not a psychopath
· Motives are greed, jealousy, or revenge.
· The motives can be rooted in the past since these folks have known each other for a long time.
· Choose a name that will create a red herring. (I gave examples of that in #3)
· Choose their occupation.
· Choose if they are a man or woman.
· What do they look like?
· Are they friends with the protagonist? Are they friends with her friends? Are they new in town?
· How old are they? You won’t say their exact age in the story; it’s just good for you to know this while creating the story. You won’t want the criminal to be a child, though. That would enter the world of psychopathy, and that’s not what cozies are all about.
Have the criminal and the crime clear in your mind as you outline the story. You may want them steering the sleuth away from some of her clues.
7. Decide on your other characters.
There will need to be others living in the town. So you’ll need:
· Townspeople: multiple people that will be affected by the crime. The main character will know them very well and feel connected to them. When the crime happens, she will want to solve it because of the adverse outcomes within her circle.
· Cop friend/confident with the resources to help her: Already discussed in #2
· Sidekick: which is not the cop friend It is someone who believes her. She needs to be able to discuss things with someone. This sidekick may be the most fun to write. They can be the comic relief. They can sit and drink coffee/wine with the main character while she’s thinking/talking things through. In the Nancy Drew mysteries, she is often helped by her two cousins Bess Marvin and George Fayne. Her boyfriend, Ned Nickerson, also makes appearances to help her out. Veronica Mars (played by Kristen Bell), from the TV show of the same name, is often helped by her best friend Wallace Fennel (played by Percy Daggs III).
Giving your characters interests, dislikes, family members, jobs, a routine, and relationships will add depth to them, making the plausibility of the crime and the need to solve it even more vital.
8. Choose your victim.
Don’t make the victim the best person in the story because you don’t want your readers to feel bad once they are dead. Either the person got their comeuppance, or they were from out of town, or a recluse from the hills. The sympathy should lie entirely on the sleuth and not on the victim. At the same time, the crime needs to affect everyone in town in one way or another.
Give your victim a good name that may lead people to see it coming, sort of a foreshadowing. If his name is Mortey (morte means ‘death’ in Italian) Hoy (hoy means ‘today’ in Spanish), one may think that he will be the victim (if they know other languages). It’s in the name, but it’s not hitting you in the face.
9. The central theme is something that you can’t choose. The overall theme is ‘connection.’
The people in the town, building, school, or whatever your setting is, are all connected in a close relationship. It’s a break in that connection that creates the crime. It makes the murderer kill, the thief steal, the arson, kidnapping, or blackmail happen. To show this connection (because we all have heard to show, not tell), you can create these types of scenes:
· Small town past times like a town meeting, an Americana type of celebration, neighbors talking with each other over the fence, the Welcome Wagon visiting a new person in town, small town café/bookstore/coffee shop/playground.
· Cooking
· Crafting
· Gardening
· Parents talking as they pick up their kids from school.
· People visiting with each other at the local dog park
· Church picnic
And I’m sure there are so many other ways to show small-town dynamics. You can, however, decide to add additional themes within the story. These can support the main theme, or solidify the main character’s personality.
10. Begin.
Your book will be between 50,000 to 60,000 words, which makes for a perfect-sized book that is easy to read and enjoyable for all. If you get to a point where you don’t know how to move forward, I will be happy to help you toward your goal. My editing services include developmental editing and book doctoring. Just email me at amyjwebbber13@gmail.com, attach your manuscript, and I will be happy to review it. If I choose to take on the project, I will email you a quote back. If it’s just a quick suggestion, I’ll email you back ASAP.
Enjoy writing!
