Netflix has joined the cosy crime bandwagon with a star-studded adaptation of Richard Osman's smash-hit novel "The Thursday Murder Club".
Osman's book sales have already "caused a dent the size of Monaco in the Amazon rainforest", said Alec Marsh in The Spectator, so the streaming giant is "confident" that viewers will flock to its drama "until their servers start to melt".
'A multitude of cats, cakes and desirable properties'
Writing in 1946 on the 'perfect' murder, George Orwell said the murderer should be a "little man of the professional class" who is living "an intensely respectable life somewhere in the suburbs" in a house that allows neighbours to "hear suspicious sounds through the wall". The killer's motive should be shame after an adulterous fling and the murder should see him "slip up over some tiny unforeseeable detail".
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In cosy crime, the murder weapon is "more likely to be teapot than a metal bar" and the setting will be "rural" rather than a "big city", said Marsh, with "essential accoutrements" including a "cycling vicar", an "inevitable brace of spinsters" and "perhaps a Morris Oxford or Minor".
Shows like "Miss Marple", "Rosemary & Thyme", "Murder She Wrote" and "Midsomer Murders" were early televised examples of the genre, but it has now become hugely popular in the publishing world. Where the front covers of crime books once featured "eerie landscapes, sinister shadowy figures and young female murder victims", said Jake Kerridge in The Telegraph, these days they show "a multitude of cats, cakes and desirable properties", thanks to the "cosification" of the genre.
It "doesn’t take Miss Marple to work out who is responsible" for cosy crime’s current popularity – Osman’s four novels in this milieu have broken numerous publishing records and collectively sold more than 10 million copies worldwide. So a genre previously associated with "an elderly, gore-averse readership" has "become cool" and publishers have "scrambled" to replicate this success with more books in the increasingly favoured genre that "bear a startling visual resemblance" to Osman's.
'A sense of justice'
The genre "offers us order and closure" against a "backdrop of a wider world dominated" by individuals such as Trump, Putin and Xi" and where "we see heinous actions going unpunished", said Marsh. In cosy crime, the killer "usually gets their comeuppance and then "it’s time for tea, or a gin and tonic or evensong".
Cosy crime books share "a focus on the puzzle of the crime rather than brutality and gore," said "The Dog Sitter Detective" author Antony Johnston on Culture Fly. Alongside "a light touch, often with a wry sense of humour; and a "sense of justice" – all "qualities readers love and seek out".
"In our world of constant, instantly accessible horror, TV schedulers are turning more than ever to – excuse me while I gag – cosy crime," said Jude Rogers in The Observer. Viewers are "human" and we "crave shocks that activate our fight-or-flight instincts" but "gentler versions are nicer" when the news is dominated by "disaster, fascism and genocide". But do we really need more of this "twee genre"?
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