G.M. Malliet

I am looking into other sites to publish this newsletter, in concert with the Substackers Against Nazis group. In the meantime, I’m just going to share a few short posts on a weekly basis.

In Iceland, I was surprised to see G.M. Malliet on the last day’s program. I grew fond of her work a decade ago, after her Max Tudor mysteries proved to be engaging enough that I could read them in the short breaks I got while chasing around two small children.

Malliet was participating in a panel on the “cozy”—that is, the kind of mystery Agatha Christie and other Golden Age crime writers used to craft. Another word for the cozy, therefore, is classic. A cozy has certain recognizable features: it’s a whodunit set in a closed space like a country house or a village, with a limited pool of suspects, and a detective who discovers the murderer’s identity and reveals it at the end. It is more puzzle than thriller. For marketing purposes, the designation helps tip off the reader that there is unlikely to be much in the way of gore. Murders, yes; visceral descriptions of the act of killing, no.

The night before the Malliet panel, the Canadian writer Louis Penny gave a talk in which she mentioned that she felt limited by the term cozy and rejected it for her own work. Originally, her Inspector Gamache series was marketed as a set of cozies. Penny objected that her stories were philosophical explorations of the human condition, especially such themes such as loneliness and what constitutes community. She seemed offended to be classed with cozies, which, to be fair, may not have been quite what she intended to convey. When I looked up G.M. Malliet’s oeuvre online in anticipation of her panel, I noticed that Penny had blurbed several of her books.

To me, there is absolutely nothing wrong with a cozy. Apart from being the classic of the genre, the cozy often achieves a perfection that other crime novels lack, precisely because it is not trying to be high art. No less a source than W.H. Auden reminds us of this, in his essay about the “magical satisfaction” provided by detective stories. A well-crafted puzzle is certainly more pleasing than a story that reaches for narrative heights only to fail.

Malliet’s cozies, in particular, are delightful because they are so amusing. Even the name of the town where the stories are set—Nether Monkslip—makes me chuckle to myself every time I see it. There is a certain absurdity in the the idea of a small town vicar with a past career in MI5. The cozy is a perfect canvas for arch or dry modes of observation, and Malliet makes the most of it. Somehow she creates both a vertiginous distance from her characters and surprising levels of sympathy for them. Often we get very darkly funny sketches of victims and suspects, but occasionally they are redeemed when seen through Max Tudor’s forgiving eyes. And that movement gives Malliet’s stories a greater depth than one might expect, if measuring purely by genre.

I had ample reason to go to Iceland without the cozy panel, but Malliet’s presence there made the event speak directly to me.