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Amateur sleuths are the mainstay of so-called “cozy” mysteries, in which the four mystery genre elements—the sleuth, the setting or the sleuth’s occupation, the sleuth’s associates, and the crime itself—coalesce into novels that reassure readers about the existence of order and meaning in puzzles associated with human existence. These mysteries always involve a crime, but readers often find the crime itself less important than the novel’s major emphases: acquainting readers with the sleuth’s personality and background, the sleuth’s associates, and puzzles for both sleuths and readers to solve.

The term “cozy” was first used to describe a particular type of mystery fiction in 1958, when it appeared in a review in the Observer, Great Britain’s oldest Sunday newspaper. Since then, the word has proven to be useful to both readers and critics. However, it has acquired several slightly different meanings, so care must be taken in its use and interpretation. For example, some critics equate “cozy” works with those that are considered “traditional” within the genre, thereby emphasizing the fact that this kind of fiction developed during the early days of mystery fiction and flourished in what has come to be known as the Golden Age. Other critics quite appropriately describe such fiction as “cozy/domestic,” for usually much of the action takes place within homes, whether they be great country houses, modest vicarages, or temporary abodes, such as the train in ’s Murder on the Orient Express (1934). Moreover, although there may be serious consequences at the national or even the international level when persons of high standing in society are accused of criminal behavior, at their core novels about such cases typically involve personal sins and private enmities.

TYPES OF PLOT: Amateur sleuth; cozy

In her mysteries, Charlotte MacLeod created local communities that, along with her principal series characters, served as continuing elements within her fiction. Her development of these communities, with all their customs and eccentricities, the new residents who bring change, and the movement of minor characters into major roles in particular novels, made her work distinctive. To define these communities further, MacLeod used domestic detail, conveying realism and evaluating her characters’ states of mind by the states of their domestic circumstances. A love interest in each series culminates in marriage, indicating the importance of stability in the domestic sphere of her sleuths, amateur and professional. MacLeod’s portrayals of domestic detail and marital relationships to support the development of her characters places her in a company that includes Ngaio Marsh, Dorothy Simpson, and Patricia Moyes, among others. The light touch MacLeod brought to her mysteries, in which humor and satire are as important to the overall effect of her work as the plot, further distinguished her fiction from that of her contemporaries and allowed her to present mysteries that were also comedies of manners.