If I wrote a mystery—haven’t done it yet, but I might—it would be known in the trade as a “cozy.” The sleuth in a cozy won’t be an assistant coroner, an officer of the law, or a private eye. She—in a cozy it’s usually a she, though a male associate is permissible—will be a fairly ordinary person, if nosier than most, with a keen mind, active intuition, and ability to put two and two together. If her first sum happens to be three, she’ll stay the course till she makes it four. No worry if things in a cozy seem unusually coincidental, for life is full of coincidences. In a cozy, as in every other novel, plot and style and characterization matter—and especially the character at center stage.

I’d probably shape my own cozy around a book editor who rents a holiday cottage for two weeks in the English countryside, taking her widowed mother along. On their second day there, the editor (call her Amelia), venturing out to explore the neighborhood, stumbles over a corpse in an abandoned dovecote. And then the plot begins to thicken.

The cozy heroine is someone I understand, someone not unlike you or me. She could be a schoolteacher, a retired civil servant or airline attendant, but she won’t be an honest-to-God detective. She may hire a car so she and Mother can get about, but she won’t undertake a car chase, have a shootout, or search the national database for suspects. She won’t have sex during the novel either, not with Mother along. She may think about it, dream of it, get an email or mobile call from her stateside beau, but on this outing sex will not happen.

She’ll visit quaint tearooms, charming gardens, an old-fashioned pub or two for lunch—Mother has an orange squash, Amelia samples the local ale. She’ll drink a good many cups of tea, stop for elevenses in the morning, and remember to stand patiently in line at tourist attractions without jumping the queue. The most important thing she’ll do—the point of the story—is put one piece after another of the whodunit jigsaw together, fitting in the very last piece just a few pages before the end. And whodunit should be a total surprise.

I think of a cozy as a book to read at either of two times: late afternoon, when your brain won’t do any more work, along with a nice cup of Earl Grey, or at bedtime for just enough comfort and congeniality to help you drop off to sleep. No menacing murderers, no bullets flying, not even a cobwebby haunted house. Most people who buy cozies are women, so I gather most people who read them are, too. Cozies are “nice” mysteries, the kind you can give your Aunt Ethel or Grandma Mabel for Christmas or her birthday, confident it won’t have filthy language or immoral behavior to shock her out of her shawl. Quite excellent, really, for soothing ragged nerves….ZZZZzzzz.

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About the Author

Betsy Tice White – Betsy began her career at McGraw-Hill and went on to do freelance editing in the 1960’s for private clients and university presses. Before joining TED in the late 90’s, she was an acquisitions editor for Recovery Communications, Inc., specializing in books on domestic abuse, addiction and recovery, later publishing two books herself in this field. Favorite genres include mystery, thrillers, Christian/inspirational, historical, biographical fiction, humor, travel, women's fiction, literary fiction, mainstream fiction, and narrative nonfiction.

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(photo courtesy of flikr user Bach Tran)