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?