The Trouble With Cosy Mystery Series

Cosy mysteries can be a lot of fun to read. They’re usually not as grim and dark as a thriller or police procedural would be, they are more likely to include average people as investigators, and there are a lot of different setting for them to be played out in. However, there’s also a big problem with cosy mystery series. It’s the suspension of disbelief.

If you write or read a mystery series based around a professional or semi-professional investigator, it’s a given that your main character will stumble over crimes in the wake of their work. A police detective, a P.I., or a lawyer might be forced to investigate a crime, even if it’s not 100% their job to do so. No matter how long the series is, a professional or semi-professional (this category also includes journalists, for whom investigation is also part of their work - and they might be part of the crime department of their paper) is bound to stumble over corpses. Well, not necessarily bound to, but it’s not unlikely for them to be faced with murders, either as a result of another crime, or just as a shortcut to an inheritance and suchlike.

Not so the main character of your regular cosy mystery. While it’s nice to see a regular person take on a case and solve it for a change, it gets harder and harder to believe that a mystery bookshop owner, a coffeehouse owner, a mystery writer, or another perfectly regular person would stumble over one corpse after another. Especially with “Murder, She Wrote,” as it were (the full series runs about 700 episodes - that’s at least 700 corpses, if not more). Jessica Fletcher might just as well be the most prolific serial killer of TV series history. It’s possible enough to stumble over a corpse once in your life. It’s still possible, even though not quite as likely, to stumble over a corpse twice in your life. But 700 times? That requires a huge suspension of disbelief.

A cosy mystery series I read lately (the “Adrien English Mysteries” by Josh Lanyon) recognizes it and makes a bit of fun of it, too. The first time, Adrien is drawn into the investigation because the victim was his employee and he’s a major suspect. The second time, he’s the first to find the victim and it all happens on his land. The third time, Jake Riordan (the detective on the case and by then his secret boyfriend - Jake is deep in the closet for most of the series), is already pointing out how strange it is for Adrien to stumble over all those cases. The fourth time, there’s outright suspicion towards Adrien for being close to so many bodies. The fifth time (the series is complete in five novels and one novella released some time later), the body has actually been in the second half of the house with Adrien’s bookshop in it for longer than Adrien has been alive, so he’s not really a suspect, but nobody except for him is in any hurry to find the murderer, either, not after 50 years.

A similar thing (the amateur sleuth becoming a suspect by being around bodies so often) happens in the “Holmes and Moriarity” series, where Christopher Holmes seems to walk into corpses with suspicious frequency. People notice, the police as well as his boyfriend. It’s addressed - unlike the 700 dead bodies in “Murder, She Wrote.”

For cosy mysteries, it can be a much better idea to write one-shots. One novel with one case a specific amateur sleuth or team of amateur sleuths is solving. Like this, suspension of disbelief is easily manageable, provided the hook to pull them into the case is strong enough. The other solution to the problem would, of course, be to use professionals or semi-professionals, but you might not want to do that for a reason.

There are a lot of reasons why an amateur might try their hands at solving a case. The police might not even see a case, because someone disappeared, but there’s no corpse and no proof they were killed. The police might target the amateur sleuth or someone close to them simply because they’re lazy - or because everything points to the sleuth, despite being innocent. The amateur sleuth might be in danger from the person who did the crime and they can’t go to the police (or the police doesn’t believe there’s danger for them). There is no police around for some reason (think of locked-door mysteries and those ‘out in the country in a storm’ manors).

It’s easy enough to have the sleuth solve one case like that. Two cases are possible. Three get suspicious. From four onwards, you need a good reason for your sleuth to go on - without getting a P.I. licence or suchlike.

I can surely understand the allure of a series with the same main characters. They can develop more deeply, because there’s several books during which character development happens. You can give the reader a feeling of ‘coming home,’ too, since they will come to know and recognize all the regulars of the series - not just the sleuth, but also their friends, family, and neighbours. You can also have some story arc which overlays the whole series (the “Adrien English Mysteries” do that with the relationship between Adrien and Jake). You don’t have to come up with a completely new cast for every new book. But in those cases, you should perhaps consider a professional investigator as the main lead. An inspector or a P.I. and a cosy setting don’t completely go against each other. You don’t have to get all dark and gritty, just because your main lead lives off solving crimes (although those cosy setting with many murders also get strange - ask about Midsomer or the cosy town of Rosenheim in Germany). But think of Christie’s Hercules Poirot stories. Poirot, a former head of police in Belgium, who also works as a private investigator every now and then, is to be considered a professional, yet the stories are not necessarily gritty and dark and full of blood. Use more ‘normal’ means of killing, such as stabbing, shooting, or poisoning, instead of dismemberments and the nailing of the parts to seven different doors. As long as the tone, the characters, and the content fit together, everything is still fine.

Cosy mystery series rely a lot on the writer’s ability to make people believe their sleuth, despite not being professionally involved with crimes, will have to solve crimes over and over again. The more often it happens, the more suspension of disbelief it needs. That is a problem you need to keep in mind when you decide to write one.