There’s something about a world in chaos that makes me long for order. Something about irrationality and cruelty that makes me long for good sense and kindness. Skip the politics, please, and just give me a sweet cozy mystery.
Full
disclosure: although I’m still wedded to mystery’s evil twin, the thriller,
I’ve found relief in curling up with, and attempting to write, this kinder,
gentler version. Yes, characters will be put in danger. Some of them will die.
But in cozies, danger and death are life’s anomalies.
It never
occurred to me that any reader could not understand what constituted a “cozy”
until multiple critique partners professed their bewilderment.
One demanded
to know how a mystery’s protagonist could be a middle-class wife and mother,
who loved her family and her job in a service industry but just happened to
stumble into a murder. Wasn’t the main character of a mystery supposed to be a
loner, a hardboiled, embittered detective dogged by multiple failed
relationships and, most usually, with a drinking problem? Did it even need to
be mentioned that this detective would be male?
In vain I
pleaded the case of armies of bakers, knitting club members, bookstore owners,
even psychics, who populate cozy mysteries. All of them amateurs at detection.
All of them, I realized with a start, women.
Where did
they all come from?
Enter the
queen of crime herself, Agatha Christie, and one of her most beloved
characters, Miss Marple. You’ve perhaps heard of Miss Marple – or Aunt Jane, as
she was known to her loving multitude of nephews, nieces, and godchildren?
Christie
herself would probably have been bewildered to be called a genius (although she
has been) but it’s hard to deny that some almost divine inspiration must have
struck her imagination when she invented Miss Marple. Like Christie’s other,
perhaps slightly better-known character, Hercule Poirot, Miss Jane Marple was
born elderly. Also, like Poirot, Miss Marple, although uncannily knowledgeable
about the physical desires of others, possessed not an atom of sex appeal. And
yet, though the elderly eccentric male detective left few, if any, literary
offspring, the virginal Miss Marple has become the mother of thousands.
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| Image: Ivan Elmar Cayahan, Pixabay |
Before her debut in six short stories in 1928 that became the nucleus of the book-length collection, The Thirteen Problems (published in the United States as The Tuesday Club Murders), there were no major independent female crime solvers. Not even in that early 20th century's golden age of detective fiction, or from other women writers, such as Dorothy Sayers. Women characters were usually dismissed either as victims or vamps. Even such canny and courageous women sleuths as Sayers' Harriet Vane or Erle Stanley Gardner's Della Street were mere adjuncts of male detectives.
Miss Marple
made her first novel-length appearance two years later in Murder at the
Vicarage. In the words of Dennis Sanders and Len Lovallo’s The Agatha Christie Companion: The Complete Guide to Agatha Christie’s Life & Work,
Jane Marple brought the queen of crime “a new audience – the woman reader – the
housewife and mother, the schoolmistress, the middle-class matron of English
society.”
Still,
except for some short story appearances, Miss Marple dropped from sight
(possibly counting the stitches on her interminable knitting needles) for more
than a decade, before making a fresh appearance in The Body in the Library.
Perhaps, Sanders and Lovallo suggest, she was overshadowed by the popularity of
Poirot, a character Christie grew to resent so much she wrote his death in Curtain,
during the World War II blitz of London but not published until a year before
Christie’s own death in 1976.
Since then,
“cozies” have multiplied and prospered, according to the “rules” formulated by
their progenitor, Jane Marple. Protagonists are chiefly women, amateurs operating
with minimal technical advantages, and in a physical or social milieu of
limited size. Friends, family, and even lovers are musts – no loners here. They
may have access to law enforcement contacts but are not themselves
professionals in these fields.
They differ
from Miss Marple generally in being younger. (The ages of both major Christie
characters, Marple and Poirot, were problematic. No doubt she never expected
either of them to be with her for decades!) They also generally work for a
living, often juggling both career and family. And they very often have pets.
But they
have never lost their ancestress’s dedication to goodness, common sense, and a
sharp set of eyes and ears. Long live Aunt Jane’s legacy!
