You know what cozy mysteries are, right?

No? Huh. Well, let’s just clear that up before we go on any further.

I don’t know who invented the cozy mystery genre, but I know who its two spiritual queens are: Agatha Christie and Angela Lansbury. I don’t think that they are its progenitors, because I think the label ‘cozy’ itself is modern, and draws on their influences rather than being able to plot a direct lineage to them… But their DNA is very much at the centre of what makes the genre tick.

Broadly, a cozy has a female protagonist. She’s not normally a cop, but she knows one. She can be any age, but she is not an ass-kicking Black Widow type; she is human and fragile and cerebral. She has a pet, and a hobby which is arty or crafty. A murder (or some other crime) is committed in the small, close-knit community that she’s in, and it normally happens off-camera, and she and her friends take it upon themselves to solve it. There’s never any explicit sex or violence, and it ends happily, with the offender unmasked and explaining their motives. The mood is light and fluffy.

There are variations, of course: the hero can be a bloke, or a group of people, the pet and the hobbies are optional, it can have magical elements, maybe there’s a little bit of swearing or death. But, nevertheless, someone’s going to die (or a wedding dress will be trashed or a cake destroyed or whatever) and our heroine is going to roll up her sleeves and ask about the neighbours until she gets to the bottom if it, while holding down her job at a knitting goods shop.

You can see why Murder She Wrote and Death on the Nile are its spiritual predecessors.

This is a popular genre. Like, unbelievably. It depends on how wide you cast your definition – after all, given Agatha Christie was the best selling author of all time, so if you include her it does rather get a boost – but even if you just count the modern stuff there is still an absolute ton of it sold every week on Amazon, from legions of authors. In sales terms, my genres – science fiction and fantasy – are completely overshadowed by it.

So. You think I’m going to do a hatchet job on this genre? Nope: to horribly misquote, I have come to praise cozy, not to bury it. (No, Julius Caesar was absolutely not the first cozy mystery.) I think its worth looking at pretty closely.

Let’s get one thing cleared up before we start: I think cozy is looked down upon because it’s considered a ‘woman’s’ genre. For whatever reason we’re OK with the copy-and-paste violence of Marvel movies, but if it’s drinking hot chocolate in the village of Little Upplington it’s trivial and beneath us. That says a lot about what, even today, our attitudes are.

But, leaving that aside, cozy has a lot of interesting properties, and it’s worth digging in.

As you may know, I frequently propose things with zero evidence to back them up, and double down on them. Here we go again! There is so much baseless conjecture in this one that I’m not even going to bother hedging as I go: you have been warned.

Today’s theory starts like this: there are at least three factors that we read fiction for. These are tension, wish-fulfilment, and intellectual satisfaction. Tension is the thing which pulls you along: you want to know how it resolves, and so you keep reading late into the night, despite knowing you have to get up at six the next day to wrangle the dinosaurs, and that’s always harder when you’re tired. Wish-fulfilment is the guilty pleasure side of things. Yes, I’d like to be a dinosaur wrangler, so I put that into the previous sentence, and maybe I can live that life vicariously through what I read. Then, intellectual satisfaction is the pleasure our brain feels when it’s fed, and we enjoy being challenged and seeing the pieces of a puzzle click into place, maybe having guessed how they will go ahead of time. This last one is obviously an important part of the mystery genre but is not so relevant to cozy, so we’ll leave it alone for today.

This set of three doesn’t cover everything, sure; say, humour or catharsis are also reasons to read. I think I will modify this list again another day. But I think there is definitely something to that set. These seem like reasons that we generate endorphins when we read.

Now the classic advice in fiction is to start the tension low, and then you hit the inciting incident, and it jumps up, and then you keep cranking it up until the climax, whereupon it drains away to the resolution. (This is called Freytag’s pyramid, although I will note that whoever Freytag was, they understood plots but clearly didn’t know what a pyramid is. Freytag’s triangle, or even better, Freytag’s sawtooth wave would be a better name.) This continual cranking up of the stakes is supposedly what keeps you glued to your Kindle as the night turns into morning and the stegosaurs fret in the barn.

And yet and yet. ‘Cozy’ is the opposite of tension, isn’t it? Where’s the compelling stress of finding out what will happen to our heroine if it’s all cable-knit sweaters and yoghurt?

So, now I’m going to throw in another badly-named structural theory: I’m calling this the ‘tension triple.’ To understand this, we have to put in a little amateur psychology.

Every reader has, I claim, an important tension tolerance level. This level is the most stressed they can be, but still enjoy a piece of fiction. It’s very person-specific and are also context-specific, and I think depends on a whole load of factors which includes how well-written that particular book is – I have definitely enjoyed some books with very high stress levels because they are so compelling, and found others too stressful to enjoy even though they were less tense.

I claim that, whether you know it or not, you partly make the decision to consume media based on this. Will it be too stressful? Will it be too boring? The stakes have to matter to you, but you don’t want to feel overwhelmed and ground down. Your tension tolerance is obviously dependent on your mood and the weather and how well work went that day and a million other things. Maybe you want to watch Saw, maybe you want to watch Friends.

Great. That’s the first tension level in the triple, and that’s to do with you. The other two are to do with the book itself.

A book (I claim – you know what, let’s just abandon the ‘I claim.’ I’m just going to preach) has two different tension levels. The first is the easiest to understand: it’s the tension level it gets to at peak. This is the highest level on Freytag’s pyramid/triangle/whatever. It’s the absolute peak crisis moment when you and the protagonists can’t cope any more; this is normally just before the resolution (which is why it’s really not a pyramid. A book which spends the same time ramping down as it does ramping up would be very boring) and it’s when the pressure cooker of plot is threatening to explode. As writers we all know it and we all strive to get there.

The second tension level in the book is the lowest. This seems obvious, but I think there’s a deeper truth here.

The peak book tension should, of course, match your tension tolerance level. This is why you will read some things on some days, but not on others. But the lower tension level of the book is what I’m going to call the ‘ambient’ tension level. Yes, it’s where the book starts at. And it’s also where it drops to in between the exciting bits; because of course in a book the tension ebbs and flows like the sea, building as it goes, surging and then relenting. A breather can recharge you, ready for the next bigger wave, make you want to keep going back into the deep blue. It’s not just a straight line up the hill.

But, more fundamentally than that, the ambient tension level is the tension level of the universe that the book is set in. In cozy, this is very low. It is sustaining to know that, even if the murderer strikes again, there’s still crochet club on Wednesdays.

Now, here’s where it gets interesting. Fascinatingly, I think that the low ambient tension level lets you push the peak tension level higher; that is, if the ambient tension is low, it’s a stress-free universe, then when the body count starts racking up the book will be more digestible for people with low tension tolerances.

At first glance it doesn’t make much sense. Surely, the higher the ambient tension level, the higher you can crank the peak tension level? No, I don’t think so.

We’re back to context-specific tension tolerance. And one of the things which lets us tolerate higher tensions is that it’s situational: the stakes are actually lower when we know the world will eventually return to a cozy, happy place, so that the author can really go at it with the grizzly murders. After all ‘there’s a killer on the loose’ are six words which you don’t want to read on your town’s Facebook page: this is high stakes stuff.

However, the low ambient tension gives you a seatbelt and a padded seat and a rollcage, and means that people with very low peak tension tolerance will be able to enjoy higher peak tensions. And of course, that’s who cozy is aimed at.

This is the key line so far, so let’s say it again: by having a low ambient tension, we increase the tension tolerance of our readers. In other words, the cozier it is, the nastier it can get, and people who don’t like stress will still read it. The same murder in a much less cozy world will be intolerable to the same people. So readers can enjoy stories that they wouldn’t normally. And that’s nice, right? It makes our work more accessible.

So, to do this we need to deploy the cozy!

There are two distinct types.

The first is narrative cozy. This is super easy: it will end happily. In my research on cozy I was astonished to learn that this wasn’t considered a part of the genre. I think that might be because the two classic cozy genres are romance and mystery, both of which need to have a happy end, so it just sort of comes out in the wash.

But of course it’s important for cozy to end happily! When you’re uncertain about the ending you have no guardrails, and your tension tolerance is decreased: you won’t trust the author not to suddenly do something awful. When we’re in cozy-land the book guarantees that the murderer will be found or the couple will get together, and the tension will be completely dissipated, and all the loose threads will be tied up: this means that even if the tension goes up, our reader will still enjoy it, knowing that this is just a road bump on the way.

But narrative cozy is, as I said, easy. The second is situational cozy which is more surprising. This is probably more what you think of: it’s that the world is an enjoyable place to be, at least for our heroine and her friends. This, combined with the narrative cozy, means that there are no huge chasms on the final page waiting for us. Now I think that the obvious trappings of cozy – the pets, the hobbies, the middle-aged boyfriends – trap us into thinking that this is what the essence of cozy is.

It’s not.

The essence of situational cozy is community. Everything else is just window dressing, and either enables the community or is a symptom of it. This includes the pets, by the way: a functioning community allows you to disengage from it when you need space, and this is enabled by looking after Mr Snuffles the triceratops when he gets a cold. (This is the thing I am least certain of in this piece, by the way – maybe the pets are a separate thing, some kind of additional secondary source of love.)

We’re finally back to my three things! This community is wish-fulfilment. I want to write about wish-fulfilment another day, because I think it’s just as interesting and important as tension in fiction, but we’ll leave it for now. However, just know this: the existence of the safe, functioning community is the magic ingredient which lowers the ambient tension of the book, and allows people who have low tension tolerances, to enjoy fiction.

Great. My universal theory of cozy says that a happy ending and a wish-fulfilment community are the two secret ingredients. And when you think about it this way, this is a tool that writers use a lot. Like, a lot.

In SF, the obvious one that jumps out is Becky Chambers Wayfarer books. Happy ending? Check. Community? Check. A common theme in that series is about someone striking out but receiving help from their friends. The ambient tension is low, the cozy is high.

That one’s easy. Here’s one that might come from left-field: The Expanse.

No, don’t make that face at me. It definitely does. As the series goes on, the situational cozy goes up: we’re constantly told how close the little family on the Rocinante is. My personal theory is that it reaches its peak in the most stressful book in the series, when (spoilers) the rocks are dropped. The cozy is one of the reasons that an unimaginable global cataclysm is tolerable. The biggest tonal shift when it was filmed was lowering the cozy, which is interesting on its own.

Read one of them whistle-boom-pew-pew-pew-argh-tell-my-cat-I-love-him style of military SF? The camaraderie of the soldiers in their unit is definitely situational community cozy, and this is the genre with the lowest number of magical snowfalls and toasty blankets per chapter. Just like for the grunts who are being shot by the bugs, it makes the carnage that much more bearable… And, of course, poignant, because if you lose the narrative cozy in this genre, you need the situational cozy to care about the people who have their innards pulled out by a critter hiding in the crater.

I’ve typed the word ‘cozy’ about half a million times, so I’m going to finish here.

In summary: don’t look down on it. It’s a tool like any other, and a great way to add a wish-fulfilment element your writing, which maybe can increase your reader’s tension tolerance. So put down that plasma pistol, pick up your knitting, and feed the cat; and let’s all let a little cozy into our lives and fiction.

Cozy

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