What is a cozy mystery?

- The sleuth is an gifted amateur from the community

- Talented to get people to talk in an unofficial way

- The murders all happen offstage – no gore and guts before your eyes

- Stumble across body and briefly described how they died

- You tend to have a closed setting, centered around a quilt guild, knitting, crafts, culinary, animals, a coffee shop, a book club… - this is what gives it the cozy feel and generated the sub-genre – its what ties the series together

- Limited number of suspects

- All people you know who got on each other’s nerves and you have to figure it out

- It’s an interactive process

Cozy’s have their roots in golden age mysteries like Ahatha Cristie, Miss Marple and Hercule Peroit

- You can bring the reader on-board and they can solve the mystery

- All the clues have to be presented to the reader as the sleuth uncovers them

- The important thing is the series hook, it remains constant throughout

If the sleuth is never really in danger, where does the tension/suspense come in?

- Sleuth can be put into danger as the story unfolds

- We have this idyllic environment and we have to introduce chaos all of a sudden – peace and quiet had been disrupted and it must return to tidy at the end

- All lose ends must be resolved at the end and idyllic setting restored

- The tension is that the “world” has come apart and everyone knows there is a killer in their midst and we’ve (the community” has to stop this

- This is so terrible, this never happens here

- The tension of how to get back to normal is where the tension arises

So the cozy mystery protagonist is like the guardian of the place, the protector, returning it back to normalcy?

- It helps to start the book by showing how people are happy and peaceful and you close it with a mirror image of returning to the beginning state

An interesting element of cozy mysteries is the social element in them

- There seems to be a lot of social interaction in these mysteries

- In Elizabeth’s series, the protagonist wants to be more aloof, but is dragged into it – this is very important – the society is asking for the protagonist to be involved, they are not a busybody

- You have to have a very active amateur sleuth that the people will support

- The have to be active and informally supported because they are not an authority figure like a policeman

- They have to go out into the community in a casual way

- They have to be out in the community, hearing the gossip because they can’t get their information by grilling people

- They have to talk to the suspects in a casual way

How do you get a protagonist’s goal/motive

- It helps if there is a pre-existing relationship between the protagonist and the victim or the perpetrator – it is an excuse to get them personally involved

- Perhaps they are the one who discovered the body

- Perhaps one of the suspects pleads for help

- Now they are immediately caught up without an excuse to “drop the whole thing” and let someone else do it – you’re personally caught in the middle

- After a few books, the readers just sort of accept this interfering behavior … it becomes “just what they do”

You have to drop in threads with the murder usually committed in Act Two or the end of Act One

- This person is really obnoxious, a strange, mysterious possibly priceless quilt that becomes known, a rent crisis happening, people coming to town who’ve been away for years – how do you set these up?

- I have to outline everything to organize how and when real clues and red herrings are introduced

- My outlines are usually in the neighborhood of 35 pages

- I have a self-developed template

- Start out with suspects and clues

- They talk about each other

- I have a special section for red herrings

- I brainstorm These

- The Series Tropes are included

- Don’t have the body on page one – you have to set up the background

- Enclosed opening and closing images – to ensure mirror likeness

- May have a second victim

- It takes 30 minutes a day for a week to a week and a half and the book id defined

How does the plot progress?

- It begins with a convenience factor, the first suspect is at the scene of the murder discover or is connected to it

- That suspect points a finger at some other one, saying you need to check this out

- The sleuth knows everyone in town, but not the hidden secrets, backbiting, …

- It has to be set up so the sleuth already knows all the people in the town who might be involved

- Just the mystery takes about 35k words, which is too short for a novel, so you have to weave in characters, waiters, false clues … to make the book “cozy”

How many suspects per novel is a good novel?

- Five is the magic number

- I kill the most likely suspect in the middle of the book

- Sagging middles disappear with the discovery of the body in the middle of the book

- Having an outline simplifies writing the novel – it gives you “rules” to follow

How do you misdirect readers? How do you introduce surprises?

There is an informal “code of conduct” for cozy mystery writers: Don’t go crazy with red herrings, ie, there has to be a financial motive and you find out at the end it was revenge – that will frustrate everyone, can’t do that

- Can have lots of different motive for different people

- Think if every suspect were the killer, what was their motive, means and opportunity – give a set for every suspect, so clues must differentiate

- Give reasons for all of the remaining suspect to have killed both murders, but one or two other suspects are now “off the hook”

- Have an argument that seems to indicate one or both has a more impelling motive to be the killer

- Can’t have your reader figure it out before the sleuth

Last question. The final reveal should evoke an emotional response from the reader beyond the intellectual “aha” moment. Do you try to plan the emotional impact as well as the intellectual?

- Often there is a “moment of danger” when the sleuth deduces who the killer is and the killer needs to eliminate the sleuth because they’ve been very careful – they’ve killed two people and can’t afford to be discovered. They’re not going down for this crime, they’re going to take out whoever is in their way. In that way, the reveal is caught up in this tense moment.

- But it’s also tense because the sleuth has to go through all her clues. So all the puzzle pieces have to come together is a satisfying manner. And it has to include something the reader has forgotten/considered unimportant, and is now revealed as crucial – and the reader has to be able to say, That’s right, now it all makes sense.

- No 1 – the tension is relieved because the danger is over

  No 2 – the mystery is resolved and the killer is led off in handcuffs

  No 3 – Now, everything makes sense