“The Thursday Murder Club” and the resurgence of cosy crime

IN MOST CRIME stories, detectives worry about wily criminals, unreliable witnesses and meddling do-gooders. In Richard Osman’s bestselling “Thursday Murder Club” (TMC) series, the investigators have to contend with a more relentless and unforgiving crowd: old folk who want a quiet place to do their jigsaw puzzles.

The four members of the TMC are sleuths who work from the comfort of their retirement home. That requires them to take over rooms usually dedicated to more wholesome pursuits, such as conversational French, with grisly crime-scene photographs and conversations about poisons, corpses and stabbing.

From this unlikely premise Mr Osman, a British TV presenter, has spun gold. His four “Thursday Murder Club” novels have sold more than 10m copies globally; a fifth will be published on September 25th. The franchise has spent a total of 310 weeks on bestseller lists in America and Britain. A film adaptation of the first book, starring Pierce Brosnan, Helen Mirren, Ben Kingsley and Celia Imrie (all pictured), and produced by Steven Spielberg, arrives on Netflix on August 28th. The star power thrown at a yarn about pensioners in a quaint English village is a sign that the haunted antiheroes of Nordic noir are yesterday’s trend. Dark, gritty tales are out; cosy crime stories featuring grandparents are in.

Not everyone likes that label. (The genre’s nickname, “cozies”, takes the American spelling.) To some, it connotes low stakes, hackneyed writing and trite plots. Cosy crime is “not a term that I’m enthusiastic about”, bristles Martin Edwards, a British author who has written several series. “The label I’d prefer is ‘traditional mystery’.”

Both appellations, however, refer to stories in the style of the inter-war masters, such as Agatha Christie, Ngaio Marsh, Dorothy Sayers and Georges Simenon. They usually focus on amateur detectives. At cozies’ centre is a puzzle that the investigator solves and readers try to: the reader should be able to follow it back at the end and see what they missed. Deus ex machina and sudden revelations are frowned upon.

They tend to be written in series, which lets authors develop the characters. The interaction between the four members of the TMC—a fearsomely competent ex-spy, Elizabeth (Ms Mirren); Ibrahim Arif, a fussy yet insightful psychologist (Mr Kingsley); an ex-union rabble-rouser, Ron Ritchie (Mr Brosnan, dreadfully miscast); and Joyce (Ms Imrie), a retired nurse, who is the reader’s proxy—is natural, funny and enjoyable. Similarly, readers like seeing Jane Marple, one of Christie’s protagonists, puzzle through clues as her personal history is revealed throughout the books.

Cozies usually take place in a bounded area: often that means a village or small town, but it could be a locked room—a cosy subgenre in itself—or a strongly defined corner of a big city. Sandra Jackson Opoku’s “Savvy Summers” series takes place on Chicago’s South Side, where her protagonist runs a soul-food restaurant. Other culinarily inclined protagonists have run noodle shops, doughnut shops and pizzerias. Sometimes a hobby defines the setting: authors have written series centring on embroidery (“The Quick and the Thread”), coupon-clipping (“50% off Murder”), apiculture (“Death Bee Comes Her”), orchard-keeping (“Deadly to the Core”) and farming (“Murder, She Goat”).

Wherever the setting, the inciting incident, the murder, is usually committed off the page or quickly, for cozies eschew gore. They also avoid sex and profanity. One literary agent suggests that cozies began creeping back into fashion as romance novels became more explicit. Readers who prefer their books without lots of bonking turned to these mysteries.

But, as the moniker suggests, cozies’ most important feature is that they are comforting. There is never any doubt whether the hero will prevail, only how—so the how must be entertaining and twist-filled. Cozies end with villains caught, justice served and order restored. The murdered characters tend to be rotters whom nobody really misses.

Does this make the stories formulaic? Perhaps: though as any music-lover knows, structure can accommodate, and even encourage, profundity. The “Thursday Murder Club” series, for instance, grapples with ageing. It is clear-eyed about both the good—heedless lunchtime drinking, caring less about what other people think—and the bad. Elizabeth’s beloved husband is slowly slipping into dementia. She does everything she can to forestall and hide the decline because she wants to keep him with her as long as she can.

Hannah O’Grady, who edits mysteries for St Martin’s Press, an American publishing firm, was initially turned off by the genre’s predictability. Yet she has come to feel that many cozies are “actually subversive”: “The protagonist is usually a young woman not in law enforcement. She generally falls into this not because she’s passionate about solving crimes, but because the police aren’t doing an adequate job.” Police in cozies are at best a necessary adjunct. They are usually portrayed as hidebound, blinkered and indifferent, especially to older or female protagonists.

Though the genre may be enjoying a revival thanks to Mr Osman and his peers, it has delighted generations of readers. Christie, its grande dame, is the bestselling author ever, having sold over 2bn novels worldwide. Alexander McCall Smith’s “No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency” series, set in Botswana and featuring the shrewd and resourceful Mma Ramotswe, has sold over 20m copies; the 26th book in the series comes out on September 4th. When literary critics noticed these books, it was for their popularity more than their artistic merit. Mr Edwards says that “nobody paid attention to the plots” of his early books—traditional mysteries set in cities—“because that type of book was unfashionable. Now it’s very fashionable.”

There are two reasons why cosy crime is enjoying a resurgence. First, readers see themselves in the books. Robin Agnew, the co-chair of a fan convention called Malice Domestic, held annually near Washington, DC, explains that cozies are about appealingly ordinary people. “I love noir fiction but it’s almost operatic. It’s not what your life is like. And this is what your life is like.”

Second, look to their first flourishing, during the turbulent inter-war years. When the world is troubled and uncertain, people want art that provides succour and stability. Otto Penzler, a crime-fiction publisher and bookshop owner in New York, says, “When fires are everywhere…people want to go to a place where there’s a community.” In the pages of cozies, if not in real life, when “something terrible happens, it’s solved. The bad guys are removed from society and everything goes back to how it used to be. At least this place has remained calm and safe and good.” ■