I have a bee in my bonnet about so-called "cosy" crime fiction, so I was intrigued by the promise of
an article on the subject in yesterday's Guardian. Inevitably, when I came to read the piece, it was about something completely different.
My rant goes something like this: when I started to read crime fiction, long ago, you could also refer to it as "detective fiction." There were variations, but mostly there were a group of people, someone would be murdered, and someone else would assume the task of examining the relationships between the survivors to find out which of them had both reason and ability to commit the crime. There were books in which the emphasis was on action, fear, suspense rather than motivation, but these were something slightly other (possibly thrillers). In the intervening period, the balance has changed, and now if you say "crime fiction," the reader will anticipate something noirish and violent. There may be a mystery to be solved, but equally all may be in the open, and the only question is who will survive and who will triumph. Classic, golden age type, stories in which the crime is a lens through which the characters and their world can be studied - these are regarded as "cosy" (which is to say, not very highly regarded at all). Once, at a crime fiction event, I asked a speaker, an expert on Scandi-noir, whether there was such a thing as Scandi-cosy? He said no, but he had to think quite hard about it: the question hadn't occurred to him before. The criticism, I think, is that "detective fiction" in this sense is cosy because by solving the crime, the detective restores order; such fiction is comforting, whereas noir crime is virtuous because it afflicts the comfortable. I think rather that tales of violence among gangsters, hard times on the margins, allow middle class readers (yes, like me) to feel that these are things that happen to other people; cosy crime brings murder and suspicion among people like us...
Anyway, the
Guardian article considered cosy crime to be inherently light hearted, humorous. That's my Achilles heel right there, of course. "For my money," says author Oskar Jensen, "today’s greatest exponent of playful detective fiction is Alex Pavesi, whose Eight Detectives is a gloriously original, intricate and often very funny series of practical jokes played on the reader."
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boybear lent me a copy of
Eight Detectives: I thought it clever, if cold-hearted and at times slightly macabre. It did not occur to me to consider it as humorous...
That aside, if crime is noir and cosy is funny, how am I to describe such classic crime as - well, I've just finished Ann Cleeves' (very early)
Murder in Paradise. Perhaps I should go back to calling it "detective fiction."
Bonus link, from the same page:
Tom Gauld's Christmas tree.
