Bloodless crimes and amateur detectives, why is cozy crime successful?

Selling more than 100,000 books in three days is within the reach of very few. This is what Richard Osman achieved in the United Kingdom with the launch of The Following Thursday, the continuation of The Thursday Crime Club (published here by Espasa), one of the biggest best sellers of 2020, also in Spain. Osman adds more than two million copies sold in just over a year after turning the group of elderly people who star in his books into great references of the so-called cozy crime or cozy mysteries, a sales phenomenon in much of Europe and the United States.

The most notable hallmarks of this subgenre arise in opposition to the crude realism and explicit violence common in crime novels, to offer old-style mysteries solved by amateur detectives. A necessary twist to the classic Cluedo board and that "it was the butler in the library with the poison", with an undoubted attraction among the public.

Here there is no room for the sleaze of the urban underworld or for the policemen about to retire soaked in alcohol. Instead we find a single woman in her fifties who leaves her public relations firm to retire in a small town in the English countryside or Elizabeth II herself deploying all her cunning to solve a possible case of murder committed in one of the rooms of Windsor Palace . We are talking about Agatha Raisin, the unlikely heroine of MC Beaton, considered the queen of cozy crime with 30 installments behind her, and another queen, in this case the queen of England, the protagonist of The Windsor Knot, by SJ Bennett.

Both, heiresses of Agatha Christie's Miss Marple and Jessica Fletcher of A Crime Has Been Written, have reached Spanish bookstores in recent months thanks to Ediciones Salamandra. Its editor, Anik Lapointe, offers some clues to understand why the words cozy crime (cozy means welcoming, comfortable or friendly) are not an oxymoron: "it is the nicest subgenre of criminal fiction. It tells us about the personal relationships of the People look for evil in everyday events, where it is least expected. There are usually as many good clues as there are false ones, because one of the pleasures of these novels is to uncover the mystery."

In recent weeks another title has been added to this list, Miss Merkel. The case of the retired chancellor (Seix Barral), in which David Safierehonda in this growing trend of turning public figures into amateur detectives. If the idea of ​​putting the German chancellor to investigate a case in rural Germany after leaving politics was not already suggestive enough, the humor with which Safier impregnates each page takes care of the rest. Can you imagine Angela Merkel calling her husband "cake"? Well, that is just one of the details of some adventures that, according to Safier himself, will continue shortly, after selling nearly 300,000 copies in Germany in six months.

Pulling from the stereotype with a certain macho stink, one might think that it is a genre whose target audience is middle-aged women who drink tea, participate in cooking classes and live with one or more cats. Prejudice aside, delving into the pages of Agatha Raisin and the lethal quiche or The Thursday Crime Club means discovering a sharp portrait of characters, attractive to all types of readers, with waves of typically British sarcasm sharpening each page. It is a tribute to the classics that avoids falling into parody and updates some of the tropes of the mystery novels that were successful in the 40s and 50s.

Also, nothing is as idyllic as it seems. If Raisin is an "expert emotional blackmailer" who confronts the Cotswolds with heavy doses of caustic irony, the villains of Osman's novels are portrayed with ruthless bite. For her part, the nonagenarian Elizabeth II of The Windsor Knot provides her incisive point of view of those around her. One of her assistants introduces her as someone with "lynx eyes, a nose for nonsense and a prodigious memory", something that she amply demonstrates at various points in the plot. Safier's Miss Merkel is no slouch either: she brings out her own razor-sharp vision of mankind by analyzing the six suspects in the death of an aristocrat who has turned up dead in his castle dungeon clad in medieval armor. .

The popularity of cozy crime in today's cultural scene seems unexpected, an echo of past times, perhaps more naive than this 21st century so far back. But it is worth looking further and realizing that behind the Nordic noir, the trails of blood in the snow and the language of autopsies and police interrogations, the black genre is much more diverse than it seems. These gentle puzzles are not the antidote to 'true crime' or the abundance of "violent, addictive, fast-paced thrillers, as the bands put it so well," according to Anik Lapointe. She herself finds the answer through a question, as good detectives usually do: "what better refuge for the traumas of reality than a postcard world where justice is done, villains are defeated and everything ends well? ".

The top five of cozy crime

The following Thursday.Richard Osman. In old age, murder cases. Four octogenarians face a second investigation involving an old friend, stolen diamonds and the mob.

The Windsor Knot.SJ Bennett. A hybrid between The Crown and the Miss Marple stories in which Elizabeth II reveals a talent for observation and deduction worthy of Sherlock Holmes.

Agatha Raisin and the cruel veterinarian. MC Beaton. The second installment in the series returns us to the idyllic town of Carsely and its not-so-idyllic inhabitants.

Miss Merkel. The case of the retired chancellor. David Saffier. In 2022, just a few months after leaving her position, Angela Merkel discovers an unknown vocation: investigating crimes.

The trick of the mirrors. Agatha Christie. The reissues of the "mother" of cozy crime bring us back gems like this one, set in a mansion where a strange family and a reform school for young criminals live together.

According to the criteria of