Why I Write What I Write

By Dean (aka Miranda) James

For my inaugural blog I thought I would introduce myself to the readers by talking about the kind of mysteries I write and why I write them.

I write mysteries with almost no explicit violence or sex, and the murders occur offstage before the corpse is discovered. My sleuths are amateurs who sometimes get in the way of the official invesitgators of the crimes but who try not to interfere too much. The term often used for this kind of book is "cozy."

Someone once described the cozy as a "nice little mystery where nobody gets hurt." That's perhaps an apt description in some ways, but characters do get hurt -- especially the murder victims! A better way to express the sentiment, I think, is to say that, while the order of things is disturbed by the violence, by the end of the book that order is restored and life can go on, though not precisely as before.

Cozy mysteries are generally set in the everyday world in which most of the readers live -- small towns, urban neighborhoods, the countryside, and the occasional estate isolated by geography or bad weather. I have always loved this kind of mystery, ever since I discovered Agatha Christie, Margery Allingham, and other classic English detective story writers.

I cut my mystery teeth, however, on Nancy Drew, one of the classic amateur detectives. Through Nancy I enjoyed vicariously many thrilling adventures, and through the eyes of the modern amateur sleuth I get to do that again. I also like to think that my readers can do that by following the adventures of my hero, Charlie Harris, and his sidekick, Diesel, a Maine Coon Cat.

I like the settings and the atmosphere of the cozy mystery. They are reminiscent of my mundane world, but more exciting than my daily life. I like it that I don't have to wade through the blood, gore, and sex one finds in the harder-edged mysteries these days. I can always watch the evening news for that.

I do read other types of mysteries -- like the spy thrillers of Alan Furst, the psychological suspense of Ruth Rendell, and historical mysteries by Jacqueline Winspear, Anne Perry, and Laurie King, just to mention a few. But when I create my own mystery world, I like it to be cozier and more intimate than those broad -- and sometimes terrifying -- canvases.

 

Comments

[Marcia Talley]

Dean, I can trace my love of mysteries back to Nancy Drew, too. When I ran out of Nancys and Hardy Boy books, I went looking for more, and that's when a friendly librarian directed me to Christie, Allingham, Marsh, Sayers, Chesterton and other giants of the Golden Age of mystery fiction, roughly the period between the two world wars. When I went to buy my last car, I settled on a VW Eos which is a hardtop convertible. I INSISTED on blue. It didn't occur to me until later that it had to be blue because Nancy Drew drove a blue roadster. LOL.

[Elaine Viets]

Dean, I loved Nancy Drew, too, and read my mother's set of those mysteries.
I like cozies because they detail a slice of so-called ordinary life in a village or a country house or shop.

[Dana]

Thank you, Dean! I was also thinking about Nancy Drew and other early influences yesterday, after learning about the passing of Encyclopedia Brown's creator.

That's the thing I like about cozies; the blood may have dried on the library floor before the story opens, but life doesn't go on as it had before.

[Mary]

We had a few Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys at home, and I liked them, but it was the Agatha Christies from the library that hit the spot for me. No one aspect of them attracted me more than another. Setting, characters, story - I loved everything about them.

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