Cozy protagonists aren’t supposed to have secrets, and cozy mysteries aren’t supposed to be controversial. But my new cozy, THE NEST breaks these conventions.
Herman and Teddie are a playful, affectionate couple in their sixties, telling their own story in his-and-her voices. One morning they wake up to find the body of their landlord right under their balcony. Everyone says it was an accident—except them. And the homicide detective. But she wants to charge them with his murder.
Finding themselves in trouble, they’re desperate to know what really happened. But never having done any kind of sleuthing, they start asking questions and naively follow a thread of criminal mischief in the city that—they realize too late—poses a threat to their very lives. Their neighbors, their friends, even the police have secrets. And motives. The harder they look, the more suspects they find. But just as they connect all the dots, they risk falling into the worst trouble of all: If they reveal too much of the truth, their own secret will be exposed.
There are traditions that authors are expected to follow, to distinguish cozies from, say, literary fiction (no deep psychoanalysis!), hardboiled yarns (no gory details!), and romance novels (no throbbing manhoods!).
By tradition too, cozy protagonists are not professional detectives like Sherlock Holmes or Inspector Maigret. Nor are they amateur detectives, like Nancy Drew or Lord Peter Wimsey, who deliberately seek out mysteries to solve, but aren’t in it for money. Cozy protagonists are accidental detectives: ordinary people who just happened to be there at the wrong time or the wrong place, and are thrust into a mystery, forced by circumstance to get involved and seek the truth, often—as in THE NEST—against their will.
But having secrets? The day-to-day lives of accidental detectives are supposed to be (as it were) an open book. Some are single but few are loners; most have spouses or close families, or they are well-known in their communities. Cozy protagonists typically run a business, or make art, or pursue a hobby . . . something that has nothing to do with crime but which, somehow, is a gateway to confronting it. Not Herman and Teddie; they’re retired.
The typical cozy protagonist also has a friend, a relative, a neighbor—maybe even an ex—who’s a cop: someone in law enforcement to whom they can turn for professional assistance when the going gets tough. But Herman and Teddie don’t have any such connections, and they don’t trust the detective who’s out to get them. At least they have a lawyer, and they will certainly need her!
Like their readers, Herman and Teddie are mature, intelligent people. But they have this secret. . . It’s key to everything that happens, so they do let their readers in on it early in the book. But it will come as a surprise—maybe even a shock—because, most likely, it has never found its way into a cozy before now.
Hal Glatzer has been a mystery author since 1986. He was a journalist covering the computer industry when his first novel was published: a thriller about a hacker who gets into trouble hacking for organized crime. His Katy Green series features a working musician in the years before World War II, whose gigs land her in danger. Curious to learn why cities built — but no longer have — streetcar networks, he researched and wrote a bildungsroman to answer the question. During the pandemic he wrote five Sherlock Holmes pastiches, which were published in U.K. anthologies. He has written and produced stage play mysteries, as well as audio-plays presented in old-time-radio style. His latest novel, “The Nest,” is a cozy mystery with an unusual — possibly unique — twist. When Hal isn’t working as a writer, he works as a musician, performing “The Great American Songbook” from Tin Pan Alley and Broadway. After many years away, he now lives on his native island: Manhattan.
