Lately, some friends and I have been discussing the mystery genre from the perspective of writers and storytellers. Since I wrote my M. A. thesis on classical British detective stories of the 1920s and 1930s, I like to think I know a bit about the mystery genre.
A mystery is a story about someone solving a murder, and it’s always a murder in a “real” mystery because that’s the gravest (pun intended) injury one can do to society. One of the distinguishing features of mystery/detection fiction, as opposed to suspense/thriller fiction, is that points of view are carefully controlled. First person narrative suits mysteries very well because it restricts what the reader knows to what the sleuth (amateur or professional) knows. Even in mysteries told in third person with multiple points of view, the voices of the criminals are silent. The killer or killers are the cancers attacking society, not people we want to get to know.
There’s an important distinction between detective mysteries and cozy mysteries: detective stories have to have a detective, by which is meant a professional of some stripe whose job it is to detect (cop, PI, bail bondsman, skip tracer, psychological or geographical profiler, forensic accountant, pathologist or IT expert, for examples). Because the skills and resources available to professionals, especially today, are vast, the pool of potential criminals can be vast at first but will always be narrowed by deduction and science to a few manageable suspects. [expander_maker id=”2″ more=”Read more” less=”Read less”]Read more hidden text[/expander_maker]
The motives for murder are always personal. (They’re also often distressingly mundane: greed heads the list, followed by revenge, jealousy and pride. Readers tend to consider insanity a cop-out motive, and terrorism lends itself better to suspense, which is a whole ’nother genre.) Even if the perpetrator is a professional, once the person ultimately responsible is discovered, the motive for hiring the professional will be personal. The crime and the victims don’t have to have any personal connection to the detective(s), although when they do the emotional impact for the reader is heightened. Most people read detective stories for the detection, for the logic and the forensics, not for the emotion.
A cozy mystery has to have an amateur sleuth in the role of protagonist, although there can be professionals involved and usually are; it’s murder, after all. The primary reasons for restricting the suspect pool in a cozy are both logistical and emotional: The amateur sleuth doesn’t have access to all the fancy forensics tools the professionals have, and the crime is always in some way connected personally to the sleuth. 
Cozy readers want a sense of community that’s been violated, a hero who is a somewhat enhanced version of them (regular people), an emotional connection to the story. These readers also want emotional as well as logical satisfaction at seeing the crime solved.
The classical “rules” set down by the academic-minded men (yes, men!) who hoped to raise its status above “trash,” are still recognizable in today’s modern mystery fiction. Even with the addition of sleuthing and talking cats (Deal with it, folks! Cats are here to stay!), psychic sleuths, demonic perpetrators and (Gasp!) romance, mysteries are stories about detection. And that means that, most of the time, mysteries share something with that even more maligned genre (and even more popular!), Romance: a satisfying, even happy, ending.
Next time, blending mystery with love. (Stop making that face!)
© Kate Freiman 2025