Victoria Houston writes fishing mysteries set in the fictional Wisconsin community of Loon Lake. Her heroine is a police chief who also is an ardent fly fisherman. With the help of a retired dentist, she solves murders. Houston has written nonfiction, but she found her true literary calling in Loon Lake, with the publication of “Dead Angler,” the first in a series of five novels. Her books have sold more than 100,000 copies.
Houston’s readers know what they’re getting, because her books fall squarely into a genre as clearly defined as thrillers or mysteries or romance novels or science fiction. Readers don’t have a name for the genre but the book industry does: She writes “cozies.”
You know you’re reading a cozy when an amateur sleuth helps solve the murder, when nobody swears and when oddball characters abound but are seldom frightening. People are killed, but only off the page. Cozies often unfold in small towns, and they frequently dole out information about hobbies. As for sex, there’s very little of that. Cozies now constitute about 75 percent of the hundred or so new books published annually by the Berkley Prime Crime imprint, up from 50 percent five years ago, says Natalee Rosenstein, vice president and senior executive editor at Pearson PLC’s Berkley Publishing Group.
Jane Dentinger, editor of a book club called the Mystery Guild, estimates that her members last year spent a bit more on cozies than the $2.7 million of 2002. “These are women who cut their teeth on Nancy Drew, went on to Agatha Christie and today don’t want the viscera of crime,” says Dentinger, whose Mystery Guild membership of 350,000 to 400,000 is 90 percent female.
The origin of the term “cozy” is murky, but it’s often associated with Agatha Christie, whose Miss Marple series is considered the English prototype. Jane Marple, an elderly spinster, drank a lot of tea while sussing out who killed that mysterious stranger in the library. Much as tea cozies keep teapots warm, literary cozies are comforting.
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Edited by Cara DiPasquale (cdipasquale@tribune.com) and Victoria Rodriguez (vrodriguez@tribune.com)
