As we blogged last week, Friday through Sunday was the Southern Festival of Books in Nashville. In honor of our Cozy Corner column – where Joanne Collings reviews two cozy mysteries a month – I attended a session on Friday called “A Whodunit and a How-to: Cozy Mysteries.” Authors Jennie Bentley and Emyl Jenkins were the speakers.
In August, Bentley wrote a behind-the-book column 
for BookPage about Spackled and Spooked, the second installation in her series about home renovator Avery Baker. Jenkins is the author of The Big Steal, a dead-body-free mystery starring antiques appraiser Sterling Glass.
At the Southern Festival of Books session, both authors described the concept of cozy mysteries and how their personal interests have played into their writing.
The parameters of the cozy genre are quite firm, according to Bentley: “no bad language, no sex, no gore, no violence.” She said that most cozies have a “gimmicky hook with tips in the back.” (For example, Jenkins includes an illustrated guide to antiques at the back of The Big Steal.)
A real estate agent and home-renovating enthusiast, Bentley received a three-book contract from publisher Berkley Prime Crime. The third novel in her series, Plaster and Poison, will come out in March 2010. Bentley has recently agreed to write two more books about renovator Avery Baker, and she joked that prospective titles might be Mortar and Murder or Haunted House and Homicide.
Jenkins, who has worked as an appraiser for many years and who authored a book titled Emyl Jenkins’ Appraisal Book before turning to fiction, insisted that “people and their surroundings can be very important – what you chose to have around says so much about you.” Thus, objects play a key role in The Big Steal as her heroine seeks to recover missing antiques. At the Southern Festival of Books, Jenkins got a lot of laughs when she revealed what she avoids in her writing: The 5 Bs: blood, bodies, bombs, bad language, bedrooms.
Any cozy fans have book recommendations? If you were going to write a mystery without a murder, what would your hook be?
I write what the market would call fantasy. My latest publication, Randolph’s Challenge Book One – The Pendulum Swings, being a typical example. While I accept that gratuitous violence, bad language and sex should not feature in quality literary work, I do believe that quality fantasy should be a reflection of real life. In fact, I often describe my work as extended reality rather than fantasy.
On this basis, I find it difficult to come to terms with the cozy genre’s firm commitment to, apparently, exclude reality from fiction literature. Randolph’s Challenge doesn’t contain gratuitous sex violence or bad language, but it does have scenes that contain these aspects in their natural context.
Chris Warren
Author and Freelance Writer
Randolph’s Challenge Book One – The Pendulum Swings
Thanks for the shout-out: the panel was fun to do!
For the record, nobody – especially me – said that ‘gratuitous violence, bad language and sex should not feature in quality literary work.’ There are books out there that have one or more, and that are of high quality indeed, at least in my humble opinion. What I did say, was that they’re not welcome in cozy mysteries. Our readers expect a certain – for lack of a better word – sweetness from our work, and since that’s the genre that we’ve agreed to write in, that’s what we deliver. I don’t look at it as ‘excluding reality from fiction literature,’ but more as not dwelling on the undesirable aspects. My characters have sex, between chapters. They use bad words when the situation demands it. If those words are necessary, they stay in the book. And since I don’t like gore, I have no problem with not writing it; that’s why I’m writing in a genre where I don’t have to. Let’s try to remember that gratuitous violence, explicit sex, and bad language don’t give a book quality any more than it necessarily takes away from it.
Thanks, again.