Sylvester, the Psycho Cat in my series, makes brief, but important, appearances in each book. The pets provide humorous interludes, willing listeners, and avenues for foreshadowing clues or danger to come. By no means all, but many cozy mysteries include a cat or a dog as a character. I can’t imagine Clive Cussler’s hero, Dirk Pitt, spending time with a cat. Beth argues with herself internally while taking her daily walk, and she encounters different folks on the trail, both good and evil. The hiking/biking trail serves as a symbolic path Beth takes between her everyday home life and her dangerous investigating. The converted Trolley Track Trail meanders through Brookside. My stories take place in Brookside, a quaint neighborhood of Kansas City, Missouri. Readers learn to know the town as well as the characters. A cozy mystery takes place in an intimate village, town, or neighborhood that is visited throughout each story in a series. Details about the sleuth’s profession or hobby become part of the story (newspaper reporter, baker, librarian, house builder, knitter, bookstore owner, etc.) Beth is a landlady with rental properties that become crime scenes. Sure enough, the definition of a cozy fit my most beloved mysteries.īesides being G or PG rated, cozies often have an amateur sleuth, like Beth Stockwell, the protagonist in my Psycho Cat and the Landlady Mystery series. A revelation-I could write a cozy mystery, or a cozy.
It was then I dug deeper into the varieties of mysteries.
It sounded unnecessary and even distracting. I struggled to include some gratuitous sex and violence in my otherwise strategy and clue-driven first mystery. Until-people started telling me I needed to include sex scenes and gory details of the murders in my stories to appeal to today’s readers. That there are sub-genres within the mystery genre didn’t give me pause. Agatha Christie, Lilian Jackson Braun, Nancy Pickard, Nora Roberts, John Grisham, Diane Mott Davidson, Carl Hiaasen, Tony Hillerman, and on and on. Mysteries have always been one of my favorite genres. I started writing my first mystery at a workshop.
What, no detailed violence or bloodshed in my mystery-in this day of Mission Impossible XIV (or whatever number they’re up to) and CSI morgues in living color? And what about including a hint of romance rather than steamy, explicit sex scenes? Would anyone read it? Shades of Gray was made into a movie, for heaven’s sake.
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