The Curse Of The Cosy

The Curse Of The Cosy.

Or, if you prefer, “Cozy”. 

Once upon a time, writers wrote Detective Stories.  This pleasing formula was easy to spot.  The Penguin ones came in green covers with white bands, but there were plenty of other stories on the market.  (This is a British experience by the way – I don’t know how American publishers packaged their books.)  By and large, the title would give a clue as well;  The Body In The Library;  The Mysterious Affair at Styles;  Unnatural Death;  Death In The House; Warrant For X.  (Christie, Christie, Sayers, Berkerley; MacDonald respectively.) 

            It started, for all practical purposes, with Sherlock Holmes, but he was only one of hundreds.  Suddenly, as anyone who’s read the collection The Rivals of Sherlock Holmes will know, the world was full of keen-eyed misanthropes who lived in or near Baker Street and had to put on a dressing-gown to think.  Incidentally, if anyone fancies reading a really good  and very funny book, try ES Turner’s classic Boys Will Be Boys with particular reference to the chapters entitled, “Sexton Blake” and “More Detectives.” 

            Naturally, as hansom cabs were replaced by motor-cars, Victorian drug-takers were replaced by sassy, occasionally aristocratic, sleuths.  Holmes still held sway, even in an inverted form.  “No one,” says Sapper of his detective, Ronald Standish, could look less like a detective.”  Which, of course begs (ie implores on bended knee!) the question, “What does a detective look like?”  The keen reader might notice at this point that I’ve got my tongue firmly in my cheek; that’s the only way to read a great many of these stories, but read them I do and so do a great many other people then and now. 

            They were very good stories, you see.  Escapist, yes – and if you were broke in the days before the Welfare State you’d probably want something to escape to.  Naturally, with this enormous popularity, some very good authors turned to detective stories and, being very good authors, real people and real situations crept in.  Now, real people and real situations are what novelists have always written about;  the circumstances may be odd (as in Jane Eyre) or very odd indeed (as in A Handful of Dust) but they are, granted what’s gone before, believable.

            And that’s what detective stories do. Make stuff believable.  Plus there’s an intellectual challenge.  Whodunnit?  Why?  And there is, thank goodness, a real end.  Having a real end to things, is, as we all know because we’re all living it, isn’t Real Life.

            Let’s knock this “real life” business on the head once and for all.  Fiction, however grim, violent and challenging is not real life.  It’s fiction; it’s made up.   Real Life, that darling of publishers and television producers, is messy, inconsequential, full of coincidences and never stops.  But works of fiction are works of art.  Shakespeare knew that and so do the Brothers Grimm and Dickens and… Well, add your own great name here. 

            We want, as readers, to have a solidly convincing bit of life carved out for us from the Real Life around us and to have it Start, Muddle and End.  Aristotle said as much in The Poetics (he’s someone who really would have appreciated detective stories) and you can’t say fairly than that now, can you?

            And then…. George Orwell put his finger on it in his 1946 essay, The Decline Of The English Murder.  This essay is so good, I’m going to quote it at length.

 

It is Sunday afternoon, preferably before the war. The wife is already asleep in the armchair, and the children have been sent out for a nice
long walk. You put your feet up on the sofa, settle your spectacles on your nose, and open the NEWS OF THE WORLD. Roast beef and Yorkshire, or roast pork and apple sauce, followed up by suet pudding and driven home, as it were, by a cup of mahogany-brown tea, have put you in just the right mood. Your pipe is drawing sweetly, the sofa cushions are soft underneath you, the fire is well alight, the air is warm and stagnant. In these blissful circumstances, what is it that you want to read about?
Naturally, about a murder. But what kind of murder? If one examines the murders which have given the greatest amount of pleasure to the British public, the murders whose story is known in its general outline to almost everyone and which have been made into novels and re-hashed over and over again by the Sunday papers, one finds a fairly strong family resemblance running through the greater number of them.

 

Orwell then names some famous cases, such as Crippen,  Florence Maybrick and Joseph Smith.

 

In one way or another, sex is a powerful motive ….and in at least four cases respectability… (or) to get hold of a certain known sum of money such as a legacy or an insurance policy.

 

Agatha Christie, take a bow!  Those cases are real cases but don’t they all sound like The Body In The Library ?  And then Orwell picks on the current cause celebre, The Cleft Chin Murder.  (Google it if you want to know more.) 

 

…the whole meaningless story, with its atmosphere of dance-halls, movie-palaces, cheap perfume, false names and stolen cars, belongs essentially to a war period.
Perhaps it is significant that the most talked-of English murder of recent years should have been committed by an American and an English girl who had become partly Americanized. But it is difficult to believe that this case will be so long remembered as the old domestic poisoning dramas, product of a stable society where the all-prevailing hypocrisy did at least ensure that crimes as serious as murder should have strong emotions behind them.

           

            From then on, I would submit, detective stories, with their rationality and stability, have had to compete against “meaningless” crime.   Fair enough; it’s a big world with lots of books and lots of readers.  Both sorts of crime are “Real” or not, depending on how you want to argue the point.  No problem.

            And then Anthony Boucher decided to call the Crippen sort of crime “Cosy”.  Yes, I know what he was getting at – domestic setting, stable world, respectable  people – so far, so George Orwell – but it sounds, to British ears at any rate, fluffy and inconsequential.  You put cosies round things to keep them snug and warm; tea-pots; eggs; feet; not murders.  

            The word kills the whole genre by fluffy softness.  Would you, for instance, rather read an intellectual challenge, something that engages your mind as well as your emotions, or would you rather read a cosy? 

            Does it matter?  Yes it does, because although huge numbers of readers like detective stories (aka “cosies”), English publishers shy like startled pheasants at the word “cosy”.  It’s not something they want to be associated with because it sounds fluffy, inconsequential etc.  My agent, Teresa Chris, tells me it’s very, very hard to sell a cosy.  I’m not surprised.  Would you buy a bundle of fluff? 

So let’s drop this horrible term and call a whole traduced genre by either of its two proper names; Mystery and Detection.  At least there’s something to think about.