In hard-boiled, you usually have a story of passion. My Canadian editor loves hard-boiled, and marks me hard-boiled. 'My American editor would call me cozy,' she said. She likes to think of her books as belonging to both subgenres. 'The bishop, of course, existed, as did his canons and secretaries,' she said.

So when a friend suggested she wed her mystery writing to her academic calling, Isaac and Raquel were launched in last year's 'Remedy for Treason.' It helped that Sale's friend was also a scholar who happened to have English transcripts at hand of a large number of 14th Century ecclesiastic and municipal Spanish records, from which Sale has drawn her novels. But Toronto cop lore didn't catch on with American readers or publishers. Sale, a Canadian academic with a doctorate in medieval studies, began by writing police procedural mysteries, seeing them as a device far better suited to examining contemporary life than literary novels. Her detective is a blind Jewish physician named Isaac, and his legman (no gams, thank you) is his intrepid daughter Raquel. Toronto's Medora Sale, who writes as Caroline Roe, takes readers into a more exotic world: 14th Century Spain. Edward Marston authors mysteries set among Elizabethan theater folk and has embarked on a new series featuring the legendary architect Frank Lloyd Wright. Author and former librarian Miriam Grace Monfredo ('The Stalking Horse') writes mysteries involving pioneer feminists of the mid-19th Century. 'Because she has a troubled relationship with her own daughter,' Talley said, 'she has an affinity for this girl and wants to know what happened to her.'Īs a subcategory of the cozy subgenre, historical mysteries have exploded in popularity in recent years. Personal and family concerns get caught up in Hannah Ives' pursuit of cases, which in her upcoming book opens with Hannah discovering the bones of a long-missing teenage cheerleader in a well. Like Talley herself, the middle-aged amateur detective heroine of her books is a cancer survivor who loves sailboats and lives in Annapolis.

Naval Academy, prefers the term 'traditional novel' to 'cozy,' and notes that the two 19th Century inventors of the murder mystery - Edgar Allan Poe and Wilkie Collins - probably would have their works described as cozies today, though that's not necessarily the word that leaps to mind after reading 'The Telltale Heart.' It's a closed circle with a limited number of characters, and they tend not to range across the United States with a shotgun.' 'No third cousins from Australia who show up at the end of the book and just happen to have done it. 'You have to play fair with the reader,' she said. Another reason for Sam Spade to hop a freight.Īccording to Marcia Talley of Annapolis, Md., author of the forthcoming 'Sing It To Her Bones,' in cozies the characters must know one another and serial killers are verboten.

Remedy For Treason by Caroline Roe