THE COZY MYSTERY or No dogs were harmed in the writing of this book

If the private-eye novels of Dashiell Hammett and others are hard-boiled, then keeping to the egg analogy, the cozy is soft-boiled. Or maybe even poached. It is murder with a light touch in the snug-as-a-bug-in-a-rug comfort of a small town. The community, where, like Cheers, everybody knows your name, is the kind of place everybody thinks they would like to live. Maybe it has a town green in the center or a yearly festival that everyone attends. It is Brigadoon with quirky and engaging characters, at least until a body appears under a rose-covered trellis or behind a tree at a Sunday school picnic. The sleuth, nearly always an amateur and a woman like my Hatti Lehtinen, a law school drop-out and recreational knitter who, separated from her husband, has returned to her hometown of Red Jacket on Michigan’s remote Keweenaw Peninsula to run a bait shop. As the organizer of the knitting circle, Hatti is in a perfect position to hear any and all gossip that pertains to the crime. It doesn’t hurt that she knows everyone in town and is related to most of them. Another aspect of the cozy mystery is the juxtaposition of the worst crime known to man in the midst of a group of people who meet on Wednesday nights for potluck and Thursdays for bingo. The perp is never a serial killer. Instead, he is that most intriguing of individuals: a card-carrying member of the community who has gotten himself into a predicament from which he can see no other way out. Cozy mysteries can and do include relationship subplots and introspection. They include twists and turns and red herrings and carefully placed clues designed to help the reader figure out the puzzle. What they do not include are descriptions of blood and guts or the death of a beloved character, especially not of a child. And that brings me to the Cardinal Rule of Cozy Mysteries, as I understand (and approve) it: Never, never, never harm an animal. That bichon that appears in the kitchen in chapter one, had better be healthy and present on the final page. The calico wandering around the garden early in the story had better be curled in front of the fireplace at the end. No creatures can be victims. Not even snakes. And, believe me when I tell you that’s a big concession from me. Mysteries in general and cozies in particular are, I think, appeal to us because, at least between the covers of the book, the wrongdoer is punished, good wins out over evil and dogs live forever. In other words, for once, life makes sense.