About:
A featured speaker at libraries, conferences, and community events, Nancy is listed in Contemporary Authors, Poets & Writers, and Who’s Who in U.S. Writers, Editors, & Poets. When not busy writing, she enjoys cooking, fine dining, cruising, and visiting Disney World.
Visit her website: https://nancyjcohen.com/
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Book in review: Writing the Cozy Mystery by Nancy J. Cohen
This book is recommended for would-be genre writers who want details on how to produce a classic cozy. If you are thinking of writing a cozy mystery, then this is the book for you because it lays out all the necessary steps with clear examples for building better characters and a story. Everything that you need to know about writing mystery is in this book, one handy volume: helping you to develop characters, establish the setting, plot the story, and add suspense, how to plant clues and solve the crime.
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What did I like about this read?
This book begins by stating that the best way to begin writing mysteries is to read them. If you gravitate toward a certain type of story, likely that is the subgenre for you to write about…the subgenre that you’ll pursue as a writer.
Readers like cozies because they offer an escape from reality. In the cozies, the crooked criminal is always caught, and the sleuth emerges unharmed. The focus is more on the puzzle of solving the mystery than on the forensics. These stories satisfy our need for justice and provide a happy ending.
Traditional mysteries are usually linked to Agatha Christie novels, wherein the puzzle is the thing. And as a reader, they are expected to solve the crime along with the sleuth. So, a cozy is a type of traditional mystery.
It can be defined as a who-dun-it featuring an amateur sleuth, a distinctive setting, and a limited number of suspects, most of whom know each other and have a motive for murder. There are eight C’s to having a successful cozy mystery (although all or none are needed or exclusive to the success of the mystery); it is a suggestion. What are the C’s you’re asking?
This is the author’s fun take on the genre that is a Cozy Mystery: crime, clues, characters, canines, cooking, crafts, cats, and chuckles.
Mystery writers are trained, or they know when and where to place the sleuths within a distinctive milieu that becomes a character in itself. Whether it is a small town like Cabot Cove, Maine, where Miss Jessica Fletcher does her sleuthing on that television show Murder-She-Wrote, or a neighborhood in a big city, or a regional locale, and by assigning an occupation to our sleuth (Jessica Fletcher—Mystery Writer, author Jessica Fletcher from Cabot Cove, Maine) is one example. As a writer in a small town, she frequents the library for research as this would bring her into contact with other locals; and when doing grocery shopping or going to the post-office to mail her manuscript to her publishers, she might run into another Towner with a problem or gossips even about an affair gone sour leaving a body in its wake; or when Jessica is getting her hair done at the local salon and the women are there idly gossiping about the butcher’s frequent visits at Town Hall or such or the delivery boy having missed his daily paper route which he has yet to miss but on this particular morning he did and everyone at the salon is wondering why, what happened to him?
I have cited examples from my favorite television show to further exemplify what author Nancy Cohen is saying about settings, locale, and character building in relation to others.
There is a page titled: Character Development Tool, which I plan to use when next I am reading a cozy mystery to see if I can fill it out, partly or entirely, and I will report my findings with another post about how effective this Character Development Tool was.
For now, these are what are listed on the Character Development Tool:
Name:
Job Title & Education:
Physical Features:
Favorite Speech Phrases:
Lifestyle (clothing, residence, leisure activities, Significant others):
Goal (what does your character need or want?):
Motives (why is this goal important?):
Conflict (what is obstructing the path?):
Dark Secret:
Ruling Passion: (i.e., music, art, spreading goodwill, saving the environment)
Strengths:
Flaws: (i.e., unable to say no to friends)
Dominant Trait: (non-physical adjective + decision-making noun –i.e., a stubborn loner, a flighty dreamer, or a caring nurturer)
Growth and change:
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Wow, from viewing this list, I find myself lost already with some of them; this is some challenge and perplexing thing that I want to undertake when reading my next cozy. Which character will I choose to evaluate, the main character, the sleuth, the foe, or a minion?
There are lots of things to keep in mind when writing a cozy mystery; it is very complex, yet most of the story will seed/reach fruition from the subconscious once it’s been mauled over by the writer…fitting the puzzle together by the end with the bits of information gathered from the onset. The challenge becomes creating an appealing sleuth, surrounding her/him with an engaging supportive cast, and then developing the suspects, victim, crime, and villain; all of which will fall into place. Mix in your clues, figure out how to reveal them to your sleuth, and you, as the writer, will be on your way toward the grand finale.
Satisfaction will come when a reader writes to you and says, Your story kept me guessing until the end.
This was a very interesting book to review as the author’s works deal with hairdressing, hair salons, Bad Hair Day Mysteries: Permed to Death, Hair Raiser, Murder by Manicure, Died Blonde, and Easter Hair Hunt, to name a few of Nancy J. Cohen’s works to get the gist.
Website: https://nancyjcohen.com/
Instagram—https://instagram.com/nancyjcohen
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I hope to return and contribute to this Art of Writing topic monthly. This month has not been good for this ‘pretender’ who is not a writer, but takes lots of pictures of things of interest to post on another blog. I hope to share something better next time; after all, this is what writing is all about - sharing/stimulating, and supporting one another.
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Thank you!