A Shortlist of Cozies

When I started this blog, I thought that I would be spending as much time writing about cozies as about chick lit and other current fiction, but somehow I've lost track of the cozies. For those of you who aren't mystery fans--or maybe not fans of cozies--the simplest definition of a cozy is a mystery that isn't gory. Think of Miss Marple. Cozies generally take place in a closed-off setting, like a country house or small town, and they're generally solved by an amateur sleuth. The emphasis in these stories is often as much on character development and the unraveling of a puzzle as anything else.

Here are some of my all-time favorites:

• Patricia Wentworth's Miss Silver mysteries. Miss Silver is an aged spinster who runs her own detective agency and generally gets her information by infiltrating the family circle where a crime has happened or is about to take place. The suspects always underestimate her because they dismiss her as a flighty old lady, but she has an uncanny ability to understand the psychology of everyone she meets.

• Josephine Tey's Miss Pym Disposes. I *love* this mystery, and I tend to re-read it every few years just for the pleasure of it. Miss Pym is a writer who solves a mystery at an all-girls physical education school in England. The characterization is extremely well done and the solution is an absolute surprise. Sarah Waters wrote a brilliant piece in the Guardian on another Tey novel, The Franchise Affair, that made me start thinking about all the class issues in Miss Pym Disposes, but I would rank this one as one of my favorite mysteries.

• Agatha Christie (of course), especially Death on the Nile, And Then There Were None, and Murder on the Orient Express.

• The Circular Staircase by Mary Roberts Rinehart.  This is a very Edwardian mystery with an old maid as protagonist. 

• P.D. James's Shroud for a Nightingale and An Unsuitable Job for a Woman. I'll forgive James for the lifeless Death Comes to Pemberley, but only because her earlier novels are so good.

• The Vicky Bliss mysteries by Elizabeth Peters. Most readers are more familiar with the Amelia Peabody stories, but I return to the Vicky Bliss novels as a kind of comfort read. If you're into audiobooks, Barbara Rosenblat does the best version.

I'm know there are others that I'll think of as soon as I post this, but this is the list that immediately comes to mind. Which ones have I missed?