It’s that time of year again: Daylight Savings Time. The sun drops below the horizon before 4:30PM now – long before many of us leave work for home. Car accidents increase because no one’s used to driving in the dark before dinner with glaring LED headlights in our eyes. Many people are pretty bummed about national and world events. Many of us have way too much leftover Halloween candy in our desks and constantly fight a sugar crash from stress snacking. That means it’s time to start counting our blessings, gather our loved ones around us, take a few days to relax, eat as much turkey and pie as we can reasonably hold, and read a few good books.
I’m not 100% certain why, but I find few things as comforting as a nice, cozy, escapist murder. Go figure. Maybe it’s because cozy murder mysteries only ever kill off the meanest people in town. Often, the murder victim is someone who threatens to disrupt the peace by turning the town green into a parking lot or by razing the Victorian mansions for a shopping mall. Nothing truly violent happens: the murders themselves are fairly bloodless and neat, like a sedate poisoning or suffocation with a feather pillow in the villain’s sleep.
Maybe cozy detective novels are relaxing because they’re usually set in places ideal for vacation or retirement: small, peaceful villages in the countryside, or in a resort area like a coast or in the mountains. Cozy mysteries usually feature lots of delicious-sounding food because the detective just happens to own a bakery, or prefers to question suspects while dining in local five star restaurants.
When the detective (usually amateur) does find the killer, they’re usually someone just barely less likeable than the murder victim – a local Scrooge character who refuses to see the light. By the end of a cozy murder mystery, the tranquility of the small town has been restored and the inhabitants sit down to a nice (possibly turkey) dinner.
Most cozy murder mysteries exist in series. This allows for funny and charming character development of the town’s quirky locals over time. That crazy bird-watching neighbor who also spies on their frenemies with their binoculars? They can develop even more annoying-endearing traits between books one and three, and even potentially become a murder victim or perpetrator because of their anti-social eccentricities. The comic-tragic nature of humanity that we all encounter every day becomes a low-key art form we can appreciate through the lens of fiction.
The cozy detective novel Turkey Trot Murder by Leslie Meier features a small town murder, a charming amateur detective/mom/reporter, Thanksgiving, and road races. It’s set on the coast of Maine, one of the most beautiful places in the world for Fall. The protagonist, Lucy Stone, is your everyday wife and mother in middle age – though the books start out when she is much younger, and take you through her life stages as she raises her children, negotiates marriage, and solves murder after murder while reporting her small town’s news. At the end of each book, you know that Lucy will find the killer, help her family, and end each day in her modest yet comfortable home.
Cozy murder mysteries aren’t your cup of tea? Many readers instead derive comfort from works of fiction that reflect the darker sides of life yet manage to pull the reader through them into hope and meaning. The novel A Man Called Ove takes heavy themes of everyday reality – loneliness, grief, depression, suicide – and reworks them into a message of hope and humanity. Read this book when life feels both too weighty to endure, yet too pressing to forget.
When I’m really down, I always remind myself: “At least I don’t live in medieval Europe.” Then, I read either a nonfiction history or historical fiction set at least 500 years ago. Nothing makes me appreciate modern day life more than the Plague.
My favorite works of historical fiction always feature strong female protagonists who managed to live fascinating and productive lives despite so many odds stacked against them: frequent war, high mortality rates, constant unmedicated childbearing, no legal rights whatsoever, etc. The White Queen by Phillipa Gregory is my go-to when I’m bummed about so-called “First World Problems”. Gregory takes the women who are usually mere footnotes in the male-dominated history books and creates realistic, compelling narratives of their lives and their worlds. Their lives are far from perfect, yet they persevered.
Finally, I would be remiss if I neglected to recommend the funniest and most down-to-earth Thanksgiving book ever written:
I am not even kidding right now. I reread this book every Thanksgiving holiday even if my third-grader refuses to. It quintessentially captures the ironic spirit of Thanksgiving by addressing important life questions like:
- What should we REALLY be grateful for in life? (Hint: the answer could be ‘pop biscuits’.)
- How many of us honestly like squash?
- What’s the polite thing to do when your uncle brings a new wife he met in prison to dinner?
- Is it OK for rich people to throw money at their classmates? and
- Should you name your turkey before you eat it?
Yes, it’s true that everything we really need to know in life we already did learn in elementary school.
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