I feel like I have said this N times already but sub-genre is a concept that comes slowly to me. Hence, I never quite grasped the concept of cozy mystery until recently and my first time experience didn’t amount to anything even close to liking. I felt the pacing was too slow and there was no element in particular that I liked.
It’s a bit hard to talk about a definitive work that changed this but perhaps it started with the Miss Marple series by Agatha Christie. All right, so back in her days there was no such thing as a cozy mystery and I’m pretty sure it won’t be classified under cozy mystery now (I just checked Amazon to make sure and yep, I’m not wrong).
For contemporaries, I don’t remember particular author names but I did read a couple just last year or early this year. I can’t say what finally made me click with them other than they are good light reading. I mean, it used to be that all mysteries were ultimately light reading for me. But in recent years, I feel like that is less the case given my penchant for staying away from the epic fantasy subgenre (I’ve already blogged about it earlier in Competition between Reading and Writing Fantasy) and there is an overall shift towards making series more standalone nowadays that makes the distinction between serious and light reading material almost redundant. Of course, there is always a mental shift that now allows me to sample book 1 of a series and then discontinue with it at whim.
And that’s it as far as cozy mystery and me is concerned. I haven’t actually put it on my favourite or comfy list or whatever but I’m not averse to picking up books from this sub-genre as I encounter them. As it will be always be with me, it’s entirely up to the backcover blurb or summary on my library’s catalogue.
Moonlake's Fiction Space 