Listening to Readers

by Sheila Connolly

Never assume you can’t learn something new, even when it’s about something you’ve been doing for years and think you know inside and out.

This past weekend I attended a group signing at a local independent bookstore.  Since I live in an area with plenty of outstanding writers, it was a great bunch of authors, but the event was not heavily attended (could it have been that football game down the highway a piece?).  On the plus side, those readers who did attend were serious about books and happy to talk to us.  From our side it was nice to have time to get into some serious discussion with our readers, when they didn’t feel that they had to hustle along and let the person behind get a signature.

To my surprise, I learned a couple of things.  First I spent some time talking with a local mystery buff, who has done a lot of personal research into the murder of Lizzie Borden’s parents, which took place not far from where we were.  She’s not a ghoul, but she’s been intrigued by the legal case, to the extent that she’s actually read the trial transcripts.  Her take:  based on the evidence presented, there’s no way Lizzie could have done the deeds, but there’s no way anyone else could have either.  I’d like to know more, if I can find the time.

But that wasn’t what struck me.  We got to talking about genre fiction versus what is loosely defined as “literature” and how they differ.  In a broad sense there is much overlap: there is a protagonist, and there are other people surrounding the protagonist, in one or another supporting role.  In mysteries, you add a murder to the mix, which generates a puzzle to be solved.

What was most interesting to me was how she saw the role of those secondary characters in a story.  In literature, they are there as figures who interact with the protagonist, and in doing so tell us something about that protagonist or stand on their own as interesting individuals, which tells us something different.  In genre, particularly in mysteries, and more particularly in cozy mysteries, these secondary characters take a more active part in the story. They are there as part of the local scene, but they have to earn the right to be there in the story by contributing a piece of information, whether it is an eye-witness account or a physical piece of evidence or an alibi for someone else.  They are players in the small drama.

In a different conversation I found myself discussing the place for “issues” in a cozy mystery.  The woman was talking about the time in her life when she was a nurse and had an extremely busy and stressful life, and when she got home at the end of the day all she wanted was entertainment, so she watched a lot of television sitcoms.

I can’t speak for all cozy writers, but I’m going to guess that many of us get frustrated now and then when we’re supposed to write “cute.’  You know what I mean:  nice professional young woman returns to her hometown to start or take over a small business, makes a lot of nice friends, flirts with the nice local detective, and solves a murder or two.  The conventions say we can’t include any sex, violence, or profanity.  Certainly we can’t insert anything like a cause or politics or religion.

But this woman in front of me was saying:  I come home and I don’t want to think.  I want to turn on the TV and be entertained.  She mentioned one example when by accident or design one network with a solid lineup of sitcoms scheduled issue-driven episodes back to back. This made the woman angry (to the extent that she still remembers the event, you’ll note).  She saw “real” problems all day, and she didn’t want to see them onscreen when she got home.  She wanted to forget them. And she buys cozies for the same reason.

Maybe people should stop looking down on cozies (come on, I know some of you do).  They fill a niche; they entertain and amuse people, and take them out of their own lives, just for a while.  And maybe it’s enough of a cause that we insure that whatever crime occurs is solved by the end of the book, and order is restored in the quaint village with all those lovable quirky people.  We cozy writers aren’t going to change the world, but we do make people happy. Isn’t that enough?

A New York Times bestseller!

Cozy Pets

by Sheila Connolly

Recently a friend who writes cozies said that she had received a number of critical comments, both on panels and in blogs, about the pets who appear in cozies.

I recognize that cozies are kind of a middle child, often ignored in the greater mystery community, despite their continuing strong sales and the steady emergence of new writers with multi-book contracts from established publishers. Writers keep writing them, and readers keep buying them. Why the reading public and even some peers think that it is more worthy to write about violence and gore and destruction is beyond me. As far as I'm concerned, all mystery genres offer the reader a chance to escape the humdrum or even unpleasant realities of ordinary life, and give them a satisfying conclusion (which is often missing from ordinary life). It's only the details that vary, and there's room for everyone.

But to attack the pets in our books is hitting below the belt. Maybe a few of them are kind of odd, like the ones that claim to be psychic or solve crimes on their own, but most are ordinary non-verbal friends and companions to our characters.

What's wrong with that? Take a look at some statistics. The ASPCA reports that over 60% of American household have at least one pet. There are about 75 million dogs and 85 million cats in these households. The Humane Society adds that there is at least one dog in 39% of U.S. households (the average is two per owner), and at least one cat in 33% of households (the average is 2.2 per owner). The bottom line is, a majority of households, and presumably most readers, have pets.

In fact, as reported by the U.S. Census Bureau, in 2010 out of 117,538,000 households, only 60,384,000 or 51% included a married couple, so you could say that more households include a pet than a legal spouse.

Since pet ownership is something that many people share, a fictional pet should provide an immediate kinship for the reader. In addition, the character's relationship with that pet as defined by the writer can be a factor in establishing the character's, well, character. Villains kick dogs; heroes and heroines rescue them and take them home.

I'll concede that restless soldiers of fortune or wandering knights would have trouble caring for a pet. After all, if they don't have a fixed address, how can they take care of a companion animal? And we also need to recognize that animals possess varying temperaments as much as humans do, so the writer must be careful in pairing character to pet. I can't see Jack Reacher with a miniature Chihuahua, nor can I see Miss Marple with a Doberman or a pit bull. A cozy does not require a resident pet, but a pet does require a cozy: a small, settled town or neighborhood; a place where if the pet strays, someone will recognize it and return it to its proper owner.

I think a part of the puzzle is what readers want from a book. I see two broad categories: on one hand, you have the crash-bam-boom suspense/thrillers, where readers can be swept up in the breathless pace and at the end, heave a sigh of relief that it didn't happen to them; on the other hand, there are the cozies, with safe and recognizable settings, disturbed by a crime that sets the story in motion, until at the end order is restored. Two very different kinds of book, and different kinds of readers.

So, you grumpy mystery writers, don't sneer to us when we include "warm-and-fuzzy" friends in our books. We've got plenty of pet-loving readers.

What's my subgenre?

Sandra Parshall

I’ve heard that some editors no longer want to label a certain type of mystery as a “cozy” because they think it’s limiting.

Publishing is a label-loving business, though – everything must be categorized for marketing purposes – so if “cozy” goes, something must take its place. “Traditional mystery” seems to be the preferred substitute. It’s a broad term that covers everything from talking animal puzzles to Louise Penny’s Inspector Gamache tales.

At first I thought it was okay to apply the traditional mystery label so freely, but I’ve changed my mind. The trouble with lumping diverse books together is that readers won’t know what to expect. A true cozy is a far cry from the darker traditional mysteries I write. I wouldn’t want a dedicated cozy reader to pick up my books expecting to find recipes or knitting patterns in the back. I don’t want readers who enjoy darker mysteries to avoid my books because of the “traditional” label.

Maybe we need more categories, not fewer. Cozy is a time-honored label and shouldn’t be abandoned, and readers are directed toward their favorite type of cozy with the kind of taglines Berkley uses: a coffee shop mystery, a cheese shop mystery, etc. Sensitive readers won’t get any unpleasant surprises when they sit down with one of these books. It’s trickier to label the darker mysteries, the stories with an edge that lean toward suspense but don’t have the degree of violence and gore found in thrillers. I place my second and third books in that category.

I still consider my first published novel, The Heat of the Moon, psychological suspense. I was surprised when it was nominated for an Agatha Award, and shocked when it won, but I wasn’t about to refuse the honor on the grounds that my book wasn’t a traditional mystery. For that matter, it isn’t a murder mystery either, but Rachel, my protagonist, does solve a mystery, so I don’t feel guilty about that teapot sitting on a nearby shelf as I write this.

When my second book, Disturbing the Dead, came out, some reviewers called it suspense, others called it a thriller. I was interviewed about it by the International Thriller Writers newsletter (fantastic free publicity for which I am grateful). But I thought of DTD, and still do, as a traditional mystery.

MY third book, Broken Places, out next month, is also a traditional mystery. But like DTD, it has little in common with cozies. The small community where my characters live may be in the beautiful Blue Ridge Mountains, but it’s not the quaint, picture-postcard setting found in so many cozies. My fictional county has its wealthy citizens and its middle-class, but it also has poverty, ignorance, meth addicts, and racism. Everybody knows everybody else, but that familiarity is as likely to breed hostility as goodwill. Relationships are complex, with more hidden threads than you’re likely to find in cozies.

If editors are claiming the term “traditional mystery” for books-formerly-known-as-cozies, how do I label my novels to set them apart?

After my editor read the manuscript of Disturbing the Dead, she called it a gothic. That startled me at the time. However, when a Publishers Weekly reviewer described it as “a lethal gothic drama” I began to see that the label fit. Now, with Broken Places, I’m comfortable with the idea that I write gothic mysteries.

And what elements distinguish a gothic mystery? This type of book has often been set in the past, with a female protagonist who is in danger, but in its modern form neither element is required. John Hart and Thomas H. Cook write gothic mysteries, set in the present or near past and featuring male lead characters. What’s always required is a sense of dread and growing menace. In this respect, The Heat of the Moon could be labeled gothic too — it has a lot in common with Du Maurier’s Rebecca, a classic gothic (yes, I thought of Mrs. Danvers when I created Rachel’s mother) that is labeled these days as romantic suspense.

Tangled relationships and dysfunctional families, long-buried secrets, lots of twists and surprises — you’ll find all of these in gothic mysteries. That’s the kind of book I enjoy reading and the kind I enjoy writing. It may well be the only kind I’m capable of writing. I suspect that if I set out to create a light, humorous mystery, it would go dark on me by page 10 despite my best efforts. I can’t help it. Broken Places includes a scene with Rachel and a goat that would be hilarious if Donna Andrews had written it, and I intended it to be comic relief, but I think it feels more threatening than anything else.

So: I am an author of modern gothic mysteries. I can live with that label.

Mysteries with Extras

The winners of the free books are Sobaka, Margaret Franson, Sandra, Daryl a.k.a Avery, Kim, Lesa Holstine, and Gail Hueting. Please send your mailing address to sandraparshall@yahoo.com. Congratulations, and I hope you enjoy the books!


Sandra Parshall

When did mystery writers begin including recipes and/or useful tips for readers in their novels? These extras are so common now that it’s hard to pinpoint when the trend started.

Food has always been a favorite means of delivering poison, but it also figures prominently in traditional mysteries because this type of story usually has a domestic setting. Characters often drink tea, gnosh on cake or cookies, and sort out the facts of the case. What's different now is that readers expect to be given the full recipe for any food consumed in the book.

When I asked on internet mystery lists if anyone knew when recipes began appearing in novels, I received a lot of guesses and approximations but no definite answers. Several people said Dianne Mott Davidson was among the first to include recipes and that she had to talk her publisher into allowing it. Liz Zelvin and a couple of others pointed out that Virginia Rich included recipes in the front and back of her mysteries, which debuted with The Cooking School Murders in 1982. Nero Wolfe was a gourmand, and Rex Stout’s novels have a lot of food in them. The Nero Wolfe Cookbook, giving recipes for dishes featured in the novels, was published in 1973 and remains a favorite of many cooks, but the recipes were not included in the novels.

As for craft cozies with patterns, one avid mystery reader said that Crewel World by Monica Ferris, published in 1999, was the first novel she remembered seeing that included a needlework pattern. All craft cozies now feature patterns or tips, and the trend has expanded to include cleaning and decorating tips and advice of every kind. If a protagonist has a special skill, she must share it with readers.

Why? It’s a marketing ploy, of course, and primarily an American one. (Although the cozy was born in Britain, few mysteries of that type are produced by British authors now. M.C. Beaton writes cozies, but she doesn’t include recipes in her Agatha Raisin books. Considering Aggie’s ineptitude in the kitchen, that’s probably just as well.) Mystery lovers buy books for the stories and characters, but in a crowded market, the extras may entice readers and persuade them that they’re getting more than a good mystery for their money.

Here are a few recent cozies that have distinctive characters and settings but follow the trend toward giving readers something extra.

Turn Up the Heat (hardcover 2008, paperback 2009) by Jessica Conant-Park and Susan Conant, is part of the Gourmet Girl series and has 22 pages of recipes, some of them contributed by professional chefs. The heroine, Chloe Carter, is helping her chef boyfriend get his new Boston restaurant off to a good start when one of the waitresses is found dead in a fish truck. Booklist recommends Turn Up the Heat to “fans of foodie crime” and Publishers Weekly, in the language typically inspired by this kind of mystery, calls it a “delectable dish of detection.”

Death Takes the Cake, in the Della Cooks series by Melinda Wells, has 14 pages of recipes, most of them for cakes that sound delicious and look easy. Della Carmichael is owner of a cooking school and star of a new cable cooking show. In an attempt to boost her ratings, Della enters a televised cake competition sponsored by Reggi-Mixx, which happens to be owned by Della’s old college nemesis. When people warn her that competitive pastry-making is a blood sport, they’re not kidding, as Della discovers when someone is drowned in a bowl of cake batter. Because a friend’s husband is suspected, Della is determined to solve the crime and clear his name.

Fatal Flip is the March 2009 entry in Peg Marberg’s Interior Design Mysteries. No recipes here, but at the back of the book you’ll get tips on living in an old Victorian house and decorating a house to make it more attractive to buyers. The whole book is an education in “flipping” – the business of purchasing fixer-uppers, restoring them, and selling them. Marberg’s heroine, Jean Hastings, is a small-town decorator who is recruited by the local Fast Flippers to decorate one of their projects. Soon enough, one of the Flippers turns up dead and Jean sets out to find the culprit.


In Corked by Cabernet (2009) and A Vintage Murder (2008), author Michele Scott includes recipes between chapters as well as at the end of the books, and recommends wines to go with the dishes. The heroine, a former actress named Nikki Sands, is manager of a Napa Valley vineyard, and the reader learns something about wine-making while Nikki is solving some inconvenient murders.

Eggs in Purgatory (December 2008) by Laura Childs is the first book in the Cackleberry Club series by an author already popular for her tea shop and scrapbooking mysteries. The Cackleberry Club is a cozy café created by friends Suzanne, Toni, and Petra after they all lose their husbands to either death or divorce. Not long after the café opens, Suzanne’s lawyer is found murdered out back. The murder exposes a scandalous secret involving Suzanne’s late husband and brings a refugee from a cult into her life. At the back of the book you’ll find recipes for the dishes Suzanne serves her customers while she’s trying to find the link between her dead husband and the cult.

Suzanne Price's Notoriously Neat (April 2009), third in the Grime Solvers series, contains the kind of tips I desperately need but am too lazy to use. The protagonist, Sky Taylor, is a professional cleaner in the town of Pigeon Cove, and throughout the book excerpts from Sky Taylor's Grime Solvers Blog offer advice for cleaning up all those nasty little messes that clutter our lives. The plot centers on the murder of Dr. Gail Pilsner, a popular Pigeon Cove veterinarian, and Sky's efforts to clear the animal hospital lab tech she believes is innocent.

If you’d like to enter a drawing for a free copy of one of these books, post your answers to the questions below in the comments section. If you have a strong preference for one or two of the books, let me know. Come back tomorrow and you’ll find the names of the winners posted at the top of this blog entry in red. After you look over the 2008 covers Liz will post tomorrow, scroll on down to find this entry.

Now my questions for you:

1. Does the inclusion of recipes or tips of various kinds make a cozy more attractive to you?

2. Do you look at the recipes and/or tips before you buy a book?

3. Have you ever bought a book because you wanted a particular recipe? If so, share! What recipe was it? And did you enjoy the mystery too?

Some Like It Hot

Sandra Parshall

Do you take the temperature of the books you read?

I can’t help classifying crime novels by the amount of emotional heat they generate. Some stories have clever plots but require a minimum of personal involvement on the reader’s part. Those are the cool books. Others plunge you deep into the characters’ trouble-filled lives, and “hot” is the only way to describe the experience.

Cozies are, by their very nature, warm to slightly cool. Humor, especially when it borders on farce, has a cooling effect because it distances the story from the real world, where the events surrounding murder are seldom funny. That’s not a knock on cozies and humorous mysteries but an acknowledgment of their purpose: to entertain and divert without leaving the reader feeling wrung-out.

You might think thrillers would all be at the opposite temperature extreme, but that’s not the case. In techno-thrillers, the fate of the entire world may be at stake, but the story often remains an intellectual exercise rather than an emotional experience. For me, political suspense usually feels just as cold as a techno-thriller, which is why I avoid crime novels with flags on the covers.

The kind of book I enjoy most gets to me at a visceral level and lives up to its hype as “riveting from start to finish.” I don’t want to merely read about the characters’ ride through hell; I want to go along on the trip.

Tess Gerritsen at her best pulls me into her stories and leaves me breathless. Thomas Cook’s novels are quieter but intense and spellbinding.

Lisa Gardner and Greg Iles both write hot but include patches of cool writing that provide a few minutes of relief and relaxation before they heat up again.

Ruth Rendell/Barbara Vine’s books are variable, but some of her psychological suspense novels, such as Going Wrong, The Lake of Darkness, and The Bridesmaid, are intensely creepy and gripping. Definitely hot, even though her prose is spare and might look cool at first glance.

P.D. James is usually cool all the way, although she has written a few passages from victims’ viewpoints that can raise the temperature of a book as well as the reader’s pulse rate.

Stephen White is a cool writer whose main character, a psychologist like White himself, is always thinking and reasoning.

Elizabeth George’s writing is warm when she’s in Barbara Havers’s viewpoint or that of a victim, but when she switches to Tommy Lynley or Simon St. James, the writing goes cold and cerebral even when they’re agonizing over the women they love.

When a book has a strong impact on me, I don’t usually slow down to wonder how the writer achieved that effect, but I’ll go back later to analyze it and, I hope, learn something I can use to make my own writing powerful. “Hot” writing explores primal emotions: love, hate, fear, jealousy, longing. Sensory details abound – readers always know how a character’s body, not just her mind, is reacting to an experience, and we always know how her world looks, smells, tastes, feels, sounds. Hot writing isn’t necessarily more violent than a cool story, but menace lurks everywhere, and when violence does erupt it is gut-wrenching and real, with nothing left out or sanitized. This is the kind of writing that reminds you how unpleasant murder is.

The genre of crime fiction has something for everybody. Books written with cool semi-detachment are as popular as those that shake you and leave you drained. Some readers, myself included, welcome an occasional cool book after a steady diet of high-emotion tales, and reading a warm cozy now and then resets my concept of what is normal so I don’t begin believing that everybody in the world is sick and vengeful. I’m not sure that many devoted cozy readers cross over to the dark side, though.

To each his own. But when I open the cover of a new book, nothing pleases me more than a blast of heat from its pages.

Do you see a cool/warm/hot pattern in your own reading?