A Cozy Family Gathering

On the Classic Mysteries podcast this week, the book we review, Georgette Heyer's "Envious Casca," is one of those marvelous English country house mysteries in which a nice friendly family gathering quickly turns murderous. It's sort of a forerunner of many of today's cozies, although there's a lot of quiet humor and a willingness to play with the stereotypes of the genre that make it a great deal of fun to read. You'll find details in an earlier post.

As it happens, the next book I picked up to read this week is a much more recent cozy that is very much in the same tradition. G. M. Malliet's 2008 mystery, "Death of a Cozy Writer," was the first of three (so far) to feature Detective Chief Inspector Arthur St. Just. It will seem pretty familiar to any reader of traditional English mysteries, and I mean that in a very good sense.

It features another of those lovely dysfunctional family gatherings. The family patriarch, an incredibly unpleasant but fabulously successful author of cozy mysteries, generally plays his four largely-unattractive grown children off against each other, threating to disinherit any or all of them with astonishing regularity. This time, this dysfunctional family is invited to the writer's mansion to meet the woman he has just announced he intends to marry. Is this starting to sound familiar? Do you get the feeling that murder might be imminent? To be sure - but perhaps not quite as you might expect. Along the way, Ms. Malliet takes a number of entertaining swipes at cozy mysteries and cozy authors, not to mention the cliches of the traditional country house mystery.

It's all handled with a good deal of laugh-out-loud humor. I do note, for the benefit of those inclined to read between the lines, that this is a cozy mystery about an author of cozy mysteries who has, solely from his writings, amassed a fortune of some seventeen million British pounds. I wish Ms. Malliet well in her negotiations with her publisher, Midnight Ink, but, after all, this is a work of fiction.

Comments

[Yvette]

I enjoyed G.M. Malliet's debut very much and recommended it highly. But I've recently read the second book in the series, DEATH AND THE LIT CHICK, and was a bit disappointed. I mean, it wasn't bad, it just wasn't up to the promise of her first book. I was expecting more.
I hate when that happens.

P.S. I've finally gotten my hands on a copy of ENVIOUS CASCA and can't wait to read it. I am just a sucker for grand old English houses filled with relatives and murder.