THE YEar COSY CrIME M
Bestselling writers
Anthony Horowitz,
Janice Hallett and
Richard Coles
help to solve the
mystery of why we
can’t get enough
rose-tinted intrigue
BOOKS
C
hristmas — the time for turkey,
sprouts and murder. Not
anything too gruesome, but
rather a Cluedo killing. That
is, the venerable, enduring
game in which Colonel Mus-
tard kills Miss Scarlett in the library
with a candlestick. It’s cosy crime and
it is dominating bestseller charts.
The king of cosy is Richard Osman.
His second crime novel, The Man Who
Died Twice, is one of the fastest selling
novels since records began, closely fol-
lowed by his first, The Thursday Murder
Club. Both revolve around a band of
elderly sleuths — typical of cosy crime.
In cosy — or “locked room” — stories,
violence happens offstage. All the
action occurs in the minds of thesuspects and the usually amateur
detectives (Marple, Poirot etc) who
turn up to crack the case.
“Cosy crime,” the literary agent Sam
Copeland says, “shies away from bru-
tality, sex and extreme swearing. And it
often takes place in smaller communi-
ties — villages and small towns. It harks
back to the quintessentially British
golden age of detective fiction of the
1920s and 1930s. It is rose-tinted crime.”
“Cosy crime is simply where the
horror is dialled down and the mystery
dialled up,” says the author Janice Hal-
lett, whose latest cosy The Twyford
Code is out in January. It follows The
Appeal, her debut, which is cosy to the
core. It is set in a small country town
and, cosiest of all, an amateur drama
group is at the heart of the action.
Anticipation is building for the
supreme cosy, which is due next June.
If cosiness were an Olympic event, then
the Rev Richard Coles, the radio and
Strictly star, would be our brightestmedal prospect. He has written Murder
Before Evensong, the first in his Canon
Clement trilogy. “I like writing about
the clerical role from the inside,” he
tells me cosily. “There’s something
subversive about it.” To tide cosy read-
ers over until then, The Christie Affair
by Nina de Gramont is out in January.
It’s a mystery based around the cosy
veteran Agatha Christie’s 11-day disap-
pearance in 1926.
Why is cosy on the rise? “Maybe the
appeal of cosy crime is that it earths
anxieties,” Coles says. “A familiar, reas-
suring world is suddenly turned upside
down until order is restored — in fiction
more readily than in life. Vicars make
good agents of that.” Cosy is rivalling
psychological thrillers, also known as
domestic noir — books such as those by
the Girl on a Train author Paula Hawk-
ins and the Gone Girl creator Gillian
Flynn — for the top spots on bestseller
lists. While domestic noir prevailed,
cosy was a staple on television. CosyBRYAN
APPLEYARD
12 19 December 2021