Can a Cop or PI be Cozy?
Can the star of a cozy mystery be a cop? Or a Private Investigator?
Here’s one of the biggest debates we have about what counts as a cozy: the occupation of the protagonist.
We’ve written about it before, but the topic keeps coming up.
If you go through the thousands of cozy book series we have listed, you might be surprised to find one of your favorite series missing. You read it, you loved it, everything about it was cozy for you, but it’s not in our list. Why?
There could be any number of reasons. We simply might not have heard of it (in which case, send us the info). Or perhaps it fell foul of one of our rules about cozies.
The problem there is that so many of the rules for being cozy are nebulous, subject to interpretation. On a good day we might call it cozy, on a bad day we might not.
What’s Your Job?
One of our main distinctions of what makes a cozy is the job of the protagonist. We feel strongly that the star of a cozy mystery is an amateur sleuth. They can’t be a police officer or a private investigator. They might know one, they might get help from them, but they can’t be one themselves.
It is an important distinction that the protagonist is an amateur, an Everyman or Everywoman. The greatest feature of a cozy mystery is the desire and ability of the reader to put themself in the role of the protagonist.
That’s not so easy when the star is a police officer or detective. Despite their popularity in media, most people don’t imagine themselves as police officers. They certainly do imagine themselves in the wide range of roles a cozy star has, from baker to teacher to quilter to owning their own store.
What’s Your Superpower?
Another problem are the powers which police officers are given. An officer has the ability to arrest or question a suspect, something an amateur sleuth doesn’t have. This often leads to our amateur having to sidestep to get their questions answered, when their chief suspect won’t speak to them.
On the other hand, police also have rules and laws which stop them doing certain things. They need warrants to search, which the amateur doesn’t, or they have to read them their rights before questioning. Amateur sleuths ignore rules of evidence all the time. Cozies end before cases go to trial, and you often wonder if the evidence the amateur sleuth gathered is even admissible in court.
So an amateur sleuth has advantages and disadvantages over police officers.
A private investigator is in the middle though. There are laws and rules which bind them too, not as strictly as the police but more than a person off the street. They may also have contacts in the police who can help them. They are also largely a thing of the past: private detectives a century ago seemed to do much more police-like work than they do today. The modern PI is rarely if ever investigating crimes when the police are involved.
On the other hand, someone like Hercule Poirot might be much closer to being a private citizen than a cop, and they might lean more toward being cozy. I suspect it might involve analyzing just how police-like they are, and marking them down the further along the line they are.
The Blurred Lines
There is a blurring of the lines here, but it is between amateur sleuth and private detective much more than between amateur sleuth and police officer. You can find any number of detective series where there’s little distinction between the protagonist being an amateur or a private investigator. There are series where the amateur investigates and is so good at it, they become a private investigator. Not so many (any?) where they become a cop.
Our biggest struggle in defining mysteries as cozy or not happens in those mysteries where the cop acts more like an amateur sleuth. Many of these cases happen in the quaint English village, where the local constable is investigating. Think of someone like Hamish Macbeth (yes, I know he’s Scottish, not English, but go with me here). He’s cozy even though he’s a policeman. I think the best distinction to find is that a) he doesn’t really act like a policeman, and b) he doesn’t have any other officers around. There’s no backup, no crime squad to help with the investigation. It’s just him.
All-in-all, it’s one of those debates you could have for days and still not come up with a definition to satisfy everyone. Some will insist their favorite private detective is cozy, and some will insist he’s not. To paraphrase the Supreme Court, I know it when I see it.
Do you have anything to say about this article? Agree or disagree with what we have to say? Let us know in the comments below.
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