With their intimate settings, subdued action and likeable characters, cozy mysteries are rarely seen as anything more than light entertainment. The cozy, a subgenre of crime fiction, has been historically misunderstood and often overlooked as the subject of serious study. This anthology brings together a groundbreaking collection of essays that examine the cozy mystery from a range of critical viewpoints. The authors engage with the standard classification of a cozy, the characters who appear in its pages, the environment where the crime occurs and how these elements reveal the cozy story's complexity in surprising ways. Essays analyze cozy mysteries to argue that Agatha Christie is actually not a cozy writer; that Columbo fits the mold of the cozy detective; and that the stories' portrayals of settings like the quaint English village reveal a more complicated society than meets the eye.

Best known for her Kate Delafield detective series, Katherine V. Forrest is recognized as one of the preeminent figures in lesbian popular literature. Yet her work has received little scholarly attention. This critical study explores Forrest's entire body of work, including her fiction and (perhaps more important) her writing about writing, popular genres and her readers. Her science fiction and romance novels are analyzed, with a focus on the reasons behind their enduring appeal. Her most famous romance, Curious Wine, originally published in 1984, remains in print-a longevity far exceeding the typical romance novel.

This critical analysis of the popular romance novel genre offers an evaluation of the field through the subgenre of the lesbian romance novel. The author describes the history of the lesbian romance novel and analyses both individual works by authors writing in the genre as well as describing the ways in which lesbian romance novels reflect and transform the techniques of heterosexual romances.

This work examines how lesbian detective and mystery fiction represents lesbian characters and experience within the confines of the genre. As this book points out, such fiction reveals the lesbian's increasing visibility in the wider society. Nevertheless, it can still be difficult to find a complete representation of lesbian life in mainstream literature. Often the best place to find the lesbian represented in books is within the pages of genre fiction--especially the detective story. This book looks at how the lesbian characters' public and private lives intersect--often at the point of coming out, or of moving from isolation to connection with the community. Also considered is the lesbian detective's typical confrontation with two crucial elements of the investigator's role: the use of violence and the acquisition and expression of authority within police systems. Other topics of discussion include the cultural environments in which the stories are situated, and the use of humor as a key weapon in the lesbian detective's investigative arsenal.