Writing Cozies With an Edge: 3 Ways To Incorporate Unusual and Uncomfortable Topics Into Cozy Mysteries
While cozy mysteries require the use of certain tropes, writers can experiment with what’s expected of the genre. Here, author Harper Kincaid discusses 3 ways to incorporate unusual and uncomfortable topics into cozy mysteries.
Die-hard fans of cozy mysteries will want to torch this article.
Bringing edge to cozies? That’s like inviting Wednesday Adams and Henry Rollins to your favorite cat café for high tea. Or playing Nine Inch Nails during your town’s cupcake’s bake-off.
That’s because a central draw to the crime fiction subgenre is its celebration of stories with PG-rated charm: whip-smart, amateur sleuths with hygge-inspired hobbies, nestled deep in the downy comfort of quirky towns. The carnal rule of cozy mysteries is keeping the messy off the page. No profanity. No sex or drugs. And absolutely no violence. You can kill whomever you want, in any way your pebble-sized, black coal of a heart desires. Just don’t share the gory details.
At first glance, cozy mysteries may come off as saccharin-sweet, literary renditions of Hallmark Channel movies without the white-washed Christmas fetish. But cozy mysteries have a long tradition of embracing the weird and wonderful, some even with unconventional characters and scenarios. Rita Mae Brown’s Mrs. Murphy series has a cat and corgi crime fighting duo. Esme Addison’s Enchanted Bay series has a witchy apothecarist as the heroine. My own Book Binding mystery series has a neurodivergent nun and a book aficionado—two cousins—fighting crime.
But it takes more than idiosyncratic vocations and characteristics to bring in headier themes without weighing down your light-hearted caper. Here are three tips to keep your cozy mystery writing light on its feet while carrying more substantive luggage.
1. Keep the Trauma As Back Story
Maybe your protagonist lost her parents in a car accident at a young age, or they grew up in a trailer without heat or running water. As you are creating your characters, many will have significant enough problems in real time, but the traumas reserved for suspense or thrillers are best kept to backstory fodder. Not because their hurts are shameful. In fact, when done well, a character’s trauma history can inform their present without being a central focus.
Perhaps the character who grew up poor has a MacGyver-level skill set, someone adept at altering the flexible functioning of everyday objects in order to get out of jams. Or the orphan who knows every secret hiding spot in town, after spending years wandering by herself. Whatever you choose, your character should find a balance between acknowledgment of their painful past and resilience, without falling into toxic positivity traps like “everything happens for a reason” or “I’m actually glad this happened to me because my coping skills are now my whole identity.”
A good rule to remember as a writer: Every piece of your character’s history must be there to add to their story arc—not to be used as trauma porn.
2. Otherness Exists—Show and Tell With Respect
One of my favorite cozy mystery heroines is Libby Klein’s Poppy McCallister. She’s a whip-smart widow, who helps run a B&B and a gluten-free bakery while living with an autoimmune disorder. In my Book Binder mystery series, the heroine—Quinn Caine—has undiagnosed level one autism and her nun-cousin has undiagnosed ADHD (both will be officially diagnosed in future books). These heroines have invisible disabilities and/or illnesses, chronic conditions which influence what they eat, how they process information, their level of emotional energy they’re able to expend in a day, even how close they need to be near a bathroom at any given time.
Some cozy mysteries weave more visible disabilities into their work, like Ovidia Yu’s character SuLin, in The Frangipani Tree Mystery, an aspiring journalist who has a limp after suffering from polio as a child or Jane A Adams’ Naomi Blake series, which features a blind ex-policewoman.
Otherness includes, but is not exclusive, to illness, neurodivergence, or disabilities. Otherness can be the atheist in a small, religious hamlet. Or the new-in-town foreigner who has just arrived to a place not used to strangers. Allow these characters to share their world view, what life is like for them, without resorting to cliches or hackneyed tropes.
The most effective way to avoid stereotyping is to either write from your own experience as a member of that tribe or make sure to really do your research and have people who representative that community beta read your work. I encourage you to consult with a sensitivity reader, if you have the means to do so. Give your characters agency, respect, and dimension.
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3. No Subject Is Taboo if You Have Empathy
Cozies have many of the same rules as cocktail party conversation: Don’t talk about politics, religion, or anything else potentially divisive. Cozies are meant to entertain, catering to readers with a high preference for low angst. While I personally watch most suspense thrillers behind two hands over my eyes, that doesn’t mean I don’t appreciate a cozy author tapping into headier themes in their work.
Marshall Browne touched upon domestic terrorism in his Inspector Anders series, after his main character lost a limb in an anarchist bombing. Personally, I tackle multiple religious themes in my cozy series, from the cognitive dissonance between the personal values of one of my characters versus the church she’s sworn her allegiance, to the mounting tensions in two families over a pending interfaith marriage. These are important, central issues for some of my characters, but they should not eclipse the focus, which is finding the killer by the end of the story. But even if your taboo themes do take center stage, make sure you write your characters with empathy.
Remember, everyone is the hero—or heroine—of their story. The more you can feel for them-and hold space—even as they screw up—the more invested your readers will be. Just make sure they get a redemption arc and find their way back into the fold of the group, assuming it’s not your villain.
Keep challenging yourself as a writer. Take risks. Give your protagonists some fatal flaws and your villains surprising relatability. The results will be a series your readers invest in for years to come.
Born in California and raised in South Florida, Harper Kincaid has moved around like a nomad with a bounty on her head ever since. Kincaid earned her master's degree in Gender History and another in Clinical/Macro Social Work. She currently works as a psychotherapist.
