Cozy vs Traditional

Kim Malo

You know how sometimes the same topic pops up out of the blue in a bunch of different places, as if there’s a subject flu on the loose, infecting conversations all over. Genre has been the theme of late, with cozy vs traditional mystery the popular variant that's right up my alley.

The "what is a cozy vs traditional mystery" question first came up from someone complaining that they couldn’t find any consensus about the answer. The reason for this would be that there really isn’t any.

Some use the terms interchangeably, and some of those you  can virtually hear spit out the cozy label as a sort of pejorative indicating insubstantial, painfully sugary fluff—the cotton candy of the mystery world. It clearly makes their teeth ache and gives them mental indigestion just to think about it. What consensus there might once have been has been hurt by a broadbased shift in where the dividing line belongs, with cozy edging closer to the stereotype behind the pejorative, only without the spitting.  Agatha Christie was once considered the epitome of cozy, and some still think that, but for many others she's now the classic traditional mystery author.

Me, I’m a certifiable mystery wimp, someone who has as little interest in getting into the cracked head and black heart of a psycho killer as I do in dodging bullets and spurting blood through the shadows of darkly dangerous mean streets. In other words, I’m the cozy / traditional target audience, one of those who cares about the difference. While as a reviewer I think one of my jobs is to flag the things that help a reader fit the book I'm talking about into their personal genre universe. Which means having some grasp of what those things are likely to be.

I usually save the cozy label for books closest to the pejorative stereotype, or those in a subcategory that has all but taken over the modern cozy. The former are the books too light and fluffy even for me, like Nancy Atherton’s Aunt Dimity series. The latter includes things like Laura Childs' Tea Shop and Scrapbooking books—series “packaged” around a cozy hobby / craft, cozy profession such as pet sitter, or cozy specialty shop. The writing and storytelling are't always notably fluffy or cutesy,  but having the cozy hook at their core keeps them compartmentalized there. I'll admit to not being crazy about the way these sorts of series dominate the genre. It creates an impression that having such a marketing package is at least as important to the publisher as the things I care about—good writing telling an interesting story.

Traditional mysteries, like cozies, sit at the limited gore and violence end of the spectrum, with people and relationships still central to the story, but the feel is more real world. There’s an idealized, almost fantasy world element to the real cozies, based in a secure feeling that even though the stories involve a murder or two, it really is a good world where bad things are pretty much limited to bad people and things will always come out right in the end for the good ones. That real world vs "cozy world" feel is probably the key difference between the two genres for me. Traditional mysteries don’t dwell on grim and gore much more than cozies do, but it’s still generally recognized as part of the world they live in. They can still be funny and even light in some ways, but they're never actively cutesy or fluffy.

Traditional mysteries have one gray area that cozies generally don't, involving the sort of sleuth. I used to think that both meant an amateur, since professional detectives had their own genres. But authors like Louise Penny, whose protagonist is a police officer, tell stories built around events and relationships outside the precinct that just have more in common with traditional mysteries than classic police procedurals. So traditional she is.

Fortunately I have her latest, The Brutal Telling, here to read in case I want to think some more about that. It's a tough job, but as they say, someone has to do it.

Comments

[suzanne]

Interesting post -- and a nice distinction between cozy and traditional. I've suggested a Boiled Egg Scale: 3 minutes gives you a nice poached egg, 15 minutes, a hardboiled egg. Your idea of a cozy would be a 3, Louise Penny somewhere around a 5, and Mary Saums (a lot of big guns!) might be a 6.
I write an amateur sleuth but certainly don't consider the novels cozy (they resides somewhere in the 7-8 range.
Hope this doesn't muddy the waters more.

[Robin Agnew]

I think the distinction is actually a marketing one - as you mentioned those books that seem to be "built" around a topic often are. The publisher actively found an author who would write about soap or feng shui or whatever - the author didn't come forward and say "Hey, I've got a great book about soap making!" I think an author worth his or her salt of any type starts first from character and builds from there, which ever direction it takes. That's why Louise Penny is so good, right? I think cozy vs. traditional is as good a label as any, as I doubt any writer wants to be labeled as the purveyor of a specific "product".

[Kim Malo]

I don't think it's possible to muddy the waters more than they already are. And your egg scale certainly makes sense, with hard boiled such a well established idea. I just prefer coddled egg over poached for the super cozy soft end ; )

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What is interesting to me, at least, is the fact that I am seeing a hardeged cozy these days. All the usual hallmarks of the cozy WITH the killing on scene as opposed to off scene.

[Kim Malo]

Well, what do you mean by cozy / hallmarks of a cozy, though? If you're seeing this with the very fluffy, light books I said I meant, then that's not just interesting, it's weird bordering on surreal. But if you're calling cozy the books I speak of as traditional (as many certainly do), then it's not so weird to me, since those bridge the range between cozy and harder genres, blurring into their spectrum neighbors at the ends.

To me, one of the most interesting things about this whole genre discussion is how often people use the same words but mean different things.

[Meredith Phillips]

Very well said, Kim (you should be a mystery writer!;-) The distinction between cozy and traditional is important to us at Perseverance Press b/c we much prefer the latter. At an earlier stage in our publishing history we were offered mostly cozies so that's what we published (including books from the world of feng shui, biofeedback, pet detection, antiques, etc.) And we may do so in the future if circumstances so dictate. But my favorites as a reader tend to be traditional, what I've called middle-of-the-road, but trad is a better term, w/ its echoes of the kind of mysteries we all grew up reading. Altho Dorothy L Sayers would certainly epitomize those, I think THE NINE TAILORS may have inspired many writers to bring in interesting/unusual backgrounds. I know it did me when I wrote my only mystery, taking place at the Winter Olympics. I'm sure many have thought that their own specialties, whether real estate, dry cleaning, candlemaking, life coaching (!), scrapbook instruction (!!), fill-in-the-blank, would give them a background (and take care of the saggy middles w/ lots of info). If the mystery truly springs from their intrinsic circumstances, that elevates the book, but much depends on the quality of the writing. That said, I believe a true traditional mystery growing from character will almost always be a better book. BTW I like the "egg" scale, and will apply it from now on.

[Kim Malo]

But using coddled for cozy on the eggs... please ? Sorry, I just can't resist the analogy.
Anyway I think you guys publish some great examples of what I think of as traditional rather than cozy, in part because they're such clear examples - someone like Sheila Simonson has the small town setting, the story built on relationships, the minimal violence of the classic cozy BUT there is nothing whatsoever cutesy or fluffy about them and there is a lot of real world feel, including grit, to them. Even the Elaine Flinn antiques dealer series, which might be thought to fall in the "theme cozy" category because of the antiques, still has a lot more grit and real world feel than what I associate with the true cozy. And the stories are clearly about the stories, not the antique shop as a hook.

[Carola]

Now my Daisy books are being published in the UK, call me TRADITIONAL!