The moniker “cozy mystery” evokes images of amateur sleuths, small towns, and eccentric characters. It’s a category with a long history of success in the general market, from the golden age of Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple to the modern sleuthing of Murder She Wrote’s Jessica Fletcher.
Now, cozies are taking the Christian market by storm—thanks in part to Barbour Publishing’s Hometown Mysteries series, which also include a pinch of romance. “The brand promises a small town setting, with characters who are like any average person, but who suddenly find themselves in the middle of a puzzling mystery,” explains Rebecca Germany, Senior Fiction Editor at Barbour. “The mystery is cozy, and each plotline also includes a sweet romance thread that is so popular with our reader base. Also at least one character relies on their Christian faith to get through their challenge.” Each book in the series written by a different author, the line debuted July last year. Barbour has released a book a month since then.
But what exactly defines a cozy? Several HM novelists took the time to answer this question and share the inspiration behind their latest titles in the Hometown Mysteries series:
ELIZABETH GODDARD
“A cozy usually involves an amateur sleuth whom the police don’t take seriously,” says Elizabeth Goddard (The Camera Never Lies). “They’re fun to read and include a puzzle to solve—the murder mystery—with plenty of twists and turns. In a cozy, the mystery is the thing! The author must write pure, unadulterated mystery, with clues, red herrings, and an amateur detective who is forced to
solve the crime and bring the villain to his just desserts. After visiting Crater Lake National Park, I knew I wanted to set a story there involving a photographer. But it wasn’t until I began living life in the story world through my character Polly that I even realized she had a gift of reading people through her camera lens and that it would assist her in sleuthing.”
NANCY MEHL
“A good way to describe a cozy is that it is a ‘gentle’ mystery,” Nancy Mehl says. “They’re reminiscent of Agatha Christie or G.K. Chesterton’s Father Brown Mysteries. They should also be ‘charming’, full of fun and offbeat characters. In my novel Blown Away it seemed right to start off with
a murder. But how to make this murder interesting? How about the murder of a clown? And what if I put him in full costume in someone else’s grave? The grave of another deceased clown? Those two thoughts meshed together to give me the idea for the rest of my plot.”
CYNTHIA HICKEY
Cynthia Hickey had the general idea for her mystery Chocolate-Covered Crime when she started—
but didn’t yet know who her villain would be. “I thought I did,” she says, “but as the story progressed, someone else came forward with a much better motive.” All the author knew for sure was that her character Summer would be planning her wedding. It wasn’t until Cynthia reached the half-way point in the manuscript that she decided on the final details and made sure her clues lined up. “Summer is by far my favorite character in all three of my books,” Cynthia says. “She’s gutsy, ditzy, big-hearted, and loves fashion. But most of all, she loves Ethan Banning and solving mysteries. The scrapes she gets herself into are always worth a laugh.” And, as far as Cynthia is concerned, that humor is part of what makes a cozy. “They’re a rollicking good time as you follow clues to solve a mystery. Leaving the gore and violence behind, the reader can still match wits against the villain.”
CHRIS WELL
“A cozy mystery is a whodunit,” notes Chris Well, author of Nursing A Grudge and Burying the Hatchet says. (He is also the editor of this very magazine.) “All the suspects are in some confined space or location, they know each other, and everything is done without gratuitous language,
violence or racy content. Some would also say a cozy requires an amateur sleuth, but I’d hate to rule out Hercule Poirot and Ellery Queen on a technicality—of course, Poirot is a retired policeman and Queen is a policeman’s son, so maybe they aren’t exceptions after all.”
Chris was inspired to write Burying the Hatchet by a mystery from the 1930s called The Three Coffins. “It’s considered one of the classic examples of a ‘locked room’ or ‘impossible crime’ scenario,” he says. “The body is found inside a locked room and the murderer could not possibly have gotten out of the room—yet he or she did. The solution to The Three Coffins was so outrageous the reader has to either hate it or embrace it— and I was so enamored with the author’s audacity I had no choice but to put both arms around that book, so to speak, and hold tight. As far as I know, my novel could be the very first locked room/impossible crime mystery written for Christian readers.
“In Burying The Hatchet, the variation on the ‘impossible crime’ is that every scrap of evidence makes a minister look guilty—yet, our senior sleuth—and the reader—knows that somehow, inexplicably, the minister couldn’t have committed this horrible crime. The mystery challenges Earl to examine his beliefs, as he separates the possible from the impossible.”
SUSAN SLEEMAN
The sleuth is often an amateur detective,” says Susan Sleeman, author of Nipped in the Bud. “And they might even be a bit quirky with a great sense of humor—there’s no better place for humor than in a cozy mystery.” The author is a gardening fanatic, so it was a no-brainer for her protagonist to share that interest. “I wanted to write a book that included gardening tips told in a humorous way,” Susan says. “As the book developed it became clear Paige Turner was single-minded in her gardening efforts. She often thought of people in terms of the plants they resembled, so I let her run wild with it.
“I knew who the murderer was from the start; what I didn’t know was how they’d be caught and how that would tie into my main character Paige’s love of gardening and the town’s annual Pickle Fest celebration. I’m quite happy with how the novel ends, and readers tell me they don’t know who the killer is until he or she is revealed.”
The Hometown Mysteries sleuths live in nursing homes, dress hair in funeral parlors, photograph weddings in National parks or even shelve books in libraries. But the eccentric characters aren’t limited to the two-footed variety: One of Elizabeth Goddard’s favorite characters in The Camera Never Lies is Murphy, her lead’s Jack Russell terrier. And similar to mainstream author Lilian Jackson Braun’s felines, a parrot takes center stage to help find the murderer of a pet store owner in Frances Devine’s April release Rest in Peace. FF
WHAT’S YOUR FAVORITE MYSTERY OF ALL TIME?
Nancy Mehl: “The Player on the Other Side by Ellery Queen. It’s perfectly written and perfectly plotted.”
Cynthia Hickey: “My favorite mysteries go all the way back to Nancy Drew. I read the entire collection as a child.”
Chris Well: “My favorite mystery series would be the Nero Wolfe books; what Rex Stout did as an author was brilliant.”
Elizabeth Goddard: “That’s easy: Your Chariot Awaits by Lorena McCourtney. She has a way with words that completely fascinates me.”
Susan Sleeman: “The Nancy Drew mystery series. If I hadn’t picked up a Nancy Drew book, I may never have discovered that reading is fun and then of course, I would never know the joy of creating stories for others to read and that being an author is the coolest job anyone could have.”