Writing the Detectives: What Makes Crime Cosy?

‘This is my boss, Jonathan Hart. A self-made millionaire. He’s quite a guy. This is Mrs. H. She’s gorgeous. She’s one lady who knows how to take care of herself. By the way, my name is Max. I take care of them. Which ain’t easy. ‘Cos their hobby is…murder!’

This was the opening narration of the wildly – and internationally – popular 1980s crime series, Hart to Hart, spoken in the gravelly Bronx tones of Lionel Stander, who played the Harts’ put-upon general factotum. Jonathan and Jennifer Hart certainly weren’t the first married amateur detective screen couple – that honour could be debated and certainly might include Dashiell Hammet’s Nick and Nora Charles, making their first screen appearance in 1934’s comedy-mystery movie, The Thin Man – and I think we can safely suspect that they won’t be among the last.

We know what kind of crime the Harts were solving – murder – but in what way (and preceding the description) might the telling of their investigations be described as … cosy?

Murder by its very act and definition is decidedly not cosy. Other series and dramas have told and shown us this, from Dragnet to The Killing, up to Luther (watch on BBC iPlayer) and beyond. But what is it about this particular genre of tv crime series, ‘Cosy Crime’, that makes it not only entertainment … even Dexter and Hannibal exist under that description…but comforting?

Stefanie Powers.

No, she isn’t the overall answer. But she is the link between Hart to Hart and the BBC’s newest cosy crime dramas, The Hairdresser Mysteries and The Detection Club.

Because Stefanie Powers, in a connection that might surprise the most ardent of TV trivia pursuers and casual viewers alike, both played Jennifer Hart … and appeared in the BBC’s Doctors, produced from the very same Drama Village, with its headquarters in Selly Oak, Birmingham, that subsequently gave birth to the Cosy Crime series of Shakespeare and Hathaway, Father Brown and The Sister Boniface Mysteries, and from which lineage now spring these two latest dramas.

Not that Birmingham hadn’t previously been home to BBC crime drama – the 1970s saw Pebble Mill Studios as the major overall drama production centre outside London and it produced the lauded – and controversial – Gangsters, but also the cosier Lord Peter Wimsey mysteries, as well as an adaptation of The Moonstone, often regarded as the first proper detective novel. And Pebble Mill handed the detective series baton over to the Drama Village, in the form of Dalziel and Pascoe, in the late 90s to the 2000s and from one century to the next.

And now that baton is firmly in the hands of the two new series. And both of which rightly and in their creators’ eyes, proudly, would place themselves firmly in the Cosy category of television crime series.

But what is ‘cosy’…and how is that ‘comforting?’

Crime has always held a popular fascination. In his essay, The Decline of the English Murder, George Orwell’s idealised consumer of tales of grim and callously conducted killings is settling down with his newspaper in his favourite armchair, following a Sunday lunch of ‘Beef and Yorkshire or Roast Pork and Apple Sauce, followed up by suet pudding’ followed by a cup of mahogany-brown tea, to ‘put you in just the right mood.’

The right mood, that is, for … cosy enjoyment.

His tone, not unusually, is satirical, the central conceit being that contemporary murders have not the grand-guignol and possibly epic dimensions of the killings of yore. And that they have become tawdry and at least in part, Americanised, in comparison. And merely serving the purpose of … entertainment.

But in citing the classic English murders, as his proof, Orwell also recognises that the fascination with murderous crime has deep and historical roots.

The Decline of the English Murder was published in 1946. Britain was shattered and exhausted by war, society was in flux and there was a hunger for a change of the old orders, that saw Churchill lose the general election the year before in a landslide.

But Orwell’s imagined reader, his consumer of tales of grimly – if now somewhat cheapened and mid-Atlanticised – murders, is sitting down with his newspaper after that most reassuring and homely of British traditions, the Sunday Lunch.

In the warp of times, that is a reassurance, like the mugs of tea and jam sandwiches provided for the bedraggled soldiers returning from Dunkirk, six years previously. And likewise, the consumption of a good old tale of murder – but more, the account of its investigation and solution - is also an act of reassurance, not only in the abilities of the forces of law and order, but in the very order of things itself.

The Detection Club is set during the Golden Age of the detective novel, the 1920s and 1930s and features three of its most famous exponents, Agatha Christie, G K Chesterton and Dorothy L Sayers, as they join forces to solve real-life murders – to the despair of young Detective Inspector Greenway. In reality, the three authors were indeed members of The Detection Club, formed for the holding of social dinners, but also for the sharing of narrative and plotting techniques in the genre, but all agreeing to adhere to Knox’s Commandments, summarised by another member of the club, Ronald Knox, to give the reader a reasonable chance of identifying the guilty party for themselves.

Kit Lambert, creator of The Detection Club (the tv series!), welcomed the opportunity to deep-dive research into it and The Golden Age of the detective novel and recognising what he thinks was part of its great and immediate appeal:

‘Some say that detective fiction boomed in the aftermath of WWI because its heroes can make sense of violence and chaos and serve justice on those who inflict it on others. By solving the crime, our detectives turn chaos into order. And you just need to turn on your television or walk through your local bookshop nowadays to know that the demand for escapist detective stories is stronger than ever. In uncertain times, we are reaching for the same comfort.’

The genre has never gone away. And as Kit notes, it is now perhaps more popular than ever, certainly since The Golden Age and in television drama terms is the most popular – and produced – genre worldwide. But it does seem to reassert itself, in times of or just after times of upheaval. The Hairdresser Mysteries, created by Jim Cartwright, is set in the 1970s and it shares that uneven and uncertain decade with the earlier years of one of the all-time greats of television detective series, Columbo. But what does Lily Petal, suburban hairdresser, share with the eminent Los Angeles detective?

We could be them.

Because a great aspect of Cosy Crime, the comfort that lies in its DNA, is that, more than other crime genres, we are, as the members of The Detection Club (in real life) intended, invited in, to try to find the guilty party ourselves, through or alongside the detective protagonist. Which is why they themselves are often amateurs, like Miss Marple, or Father Brown, Jonathan and Jennifer Hart. Or Columbo.

But, as noted, Columbo was a stalwart of the LAPD.  Except his great trick was to appear as an amateur, at least to his chief suspects and a bungling one at that. Because he always allowed them to feel superior to him, the dishevelled little man in the stained raincoat, clutching the stub of his cigar. And he would turn away, seemingly in defeat, as his antagonist gloated in their own cleverness and escape, only to pause and turn back, the cigar in one hand, the other raised to his brow –

‘Just one more thing …’

And that was the moment the audience waited for. Because it was the triumph of the everyman, the criminal trapped not only by their own arrogance, but by the brilliant investigative mind that they underestimated. And at the close, that brilliance makes it look easy.

And Cosy Crime might be thought of as easy, an easy watch, mere entertainment as opposed to the rigorous challenges of gritty police procedural or the nascent despair of true crime-based drama. But it might also be said, that in its familiarities, it also brings us closer to crimes that lie just beneath society’s surface, the ‘weasel under the cocktail cabinet’, as Harold Pinter described the lurking presence of evil in the landscape of the everyday. Its setting might be the bucolic village of Miss Marple’s St. Mary Mead, the seemingly idyllic Caribbean Island of Death in Paradise’s Saint Marie, or the glossy 80s California of Hart to Hart, its humour and – crucially and effectively – its lighter tone might make it more easily digestible, but its subject is still the darker stirrings of the human soul.

But it also offers an affirmation, an assertion that order can be restored. And often by someone, if not completely like ourselves, then a protagonist who allows us to be them, waiting to re-establish the balance between light and dark, the reasonable life, against the unreasonable act. That act often being an unexpected and unjust death.

But one thing is for sure – in terms of their creation, moving from idea to the antagonistic (often!) and trying relationship of story and plot (Agatha Christie could be found on Hampstead Heath, thrashing out loud the convolutions of her own mysteries), to the dedication of casts and crews bringing them to life, Cosy Crime series are no less easy to create than their flashier and darker stablemates.

Because bringing any series to life on television can be … murder!