I used to read a lot of murder mysteries. As a lad I started with The Hardy Boys and Alfred Hitchcock mysteries for young readers and graduated to Agatha Christie with Sherlock Homes and some Hard Boiled detectives mixed in.
I’ve always been fond of the cozy mystery, no gore, gallons of tea, isolated manor houses, villages, poisoned vicars, and generally a pretty good puzzle to solve.
What I don’t like are some modern cozies that have gotten insipidly cute:
Romance novels masquerading as mysteries. All that yearning, flirting, mushy stuff just gets in the way of murder. A little stoic interest in the opposite sex goes a long way. A lot of modern detective series have started out alright (ie. J.K. Rowling’s) but have become over romanced by book three. What is it with the romance stuff?
Cats, dogs, tortoises, etc. being the detective. Enough said.
Cozies laden with dessert recipes: flans, crumpets, cakes, cookies, pies (I like pies just not plopped down between finding corpses). Doilies too.
Most of the above seem to be written by American authors. British cosy mysteries seem to keep closer to the traditional cozy model.
I don’t know where I’m going with this. I’ve read some modern humorous cozies that were lots of fun. I’ve read some early ebook cozies from very very small publishers that were well written, so there is good stuff out there. I think what we need are some subcategories to separate the more traditional cozy from the cat mysteries.
