Queen of the Cozies

Move over Agatha, you’re not alone at the top.

Before e-readers and before the cozy mystery niche developed, there was the Queen of Cozies, Agatha Christie. Mrs. Christie rightly deserved her title but did you know that there were others who wrote cozies around the same era? Writers who penned engrossing full-length novels and who stuck closely to the niche market (defined by Amazon) of a ‘cozy mystery’. Like Agatha, not all of these writers had feminine main characters, but one things was consistent, they didn’t focus on supernatural shenanigans but their hero/heroines, all figured things out by means of reasoning skills and their knowledge of human nature. Poirot accepted his his OCD and often used it to solve crimes, and Miss Marple was a busybody, true, but the stories they inhabited transported the reader to a world that entertained and often educated as well, without a cupcake in sight.

Princesses of the Cozy Realm

Here’s a (short) list of some of my personal favorites whose writings all fit neatly inside the niche market of cozy mysteries.

• Georgette Hayer
• Ngaio Marsh
• Emma Lathen
• Dorothy L. Sayers
• Margary Allingham
• Charlotte MacLeod
• Jane Langton