Cozy mystery novelist Valerie Burns wasn’t one of those kids who always knew she wanted to be a writer. But she was always a reader. Growing up just three blocks from her neighborhood library in northwest Indiana, Burns spent two to three days a week there, devouring shelves of whodunits.
The first cozy she ever picked up was Agatha Christie’s “The Murder of Roger Ackroyd.” After reading all the mysteries she could find there, she was hooked.
“After that I was a goner,” said Burns, who lives just outside Chattanooga in North Georgia. “I just wanted every cozy mystery I could read. And after decades of reading mysteries, I kept thinking, ‘These are the kinds of books I wish people would write.’ That list just kept getting longer and longer.”
Christie wrote many cozy mysteries, though some of her novels are too dark and complex to be considered cozies. Mysteries in this subgenre of crime fiction are gentle and lighthearted, rather than brutal and bloody. Typically there’s a cast of quirky characters who live and interact within a small community. The amateur sleuth solves the crime through intellect rather than force. The happy ending finds balance restored.
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