Introduction: A cat. A craft. A cookie. A cozy / Phyllis M. Betz -- Contemporary cozy mysteries, Agatha Christie and the 1990s : six steps toward a definition / Marty S. Knepper -- The cozy from the margins : the archetypes of home and heroism from inside and outside the modern cozy / Susan Rowland -- Counterpointing the cozy : Louise Penny's Three pines / Paula T. Connolly -- Is the cozy a tailor-made style for historical crime set in the 1920s and 30s? / Jennifer S. Palmer -- Displaced controversies : the paradoxes of the cozy setting / Phyllis M. Betz -- This cozy England : England and Englishness in cozy mystery series / Susan K. Martin and Kylie Mirmohamadi -- Extending cozy boundaries / Katherine Heltne Swanson -- The body in the library : the library in the cozy mystery / Mary P. Freier -- Aurora Teagarden, the cozy and the southern gothic / Jessica Gildersleeve -- Clara and Solange : two very modern detectives in a very cozy world / Jon Wilkins -- A likeable man : Columbo as cozy detective / Stephen Cloutier -- The best of both worlds : being cozy and hard-boiled in Rex Stout's Nero Wolfe / Sally Beresford-Sheridan.
Summary:
"With their intimate settings, subdued action and likeable characters, cozy mysteries are rarely seen as anything more than light entertainment. The cozy, a subgenre of crime fiction, has been historically misunderstood and often overlooked as the subject of serious study. This anthology brings together a groundbreaking collection of essays that examine the cozy mystery from a range of critical viewpoints. The authors engage with the standard classification of a cozy, the characters who appear in its pages, the environment where the crime occurs and how these elements reveal the cozy story's complexity in surprising ways. Essays analyze cozy mysteries to argue that Agatha Christie is actually not a cozy writer; that Columbo fits the mold of the cozy detective; and that the stories' portrayals of settings like the quaint English village reveal a more complicated society than meets the eye"-- Provided by publisher.
This resource is supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act as administered by State Library of Iowa.