Selling more than 100,000 books in three days is within reach of very few.
This is what Richard Osman got in the UK with the launch of the following Thursday, the continuation of the Thursday’s crime club (edited here for espasa), one of the largest Best Sellers of 2020, also in Spain.
Osman sum in just over a year more than two million specimens sold after turning the elder group that stars its books in large references from the so-called Crime Cozy Mysteries, a large part of Europe and the United States.
The most remarkable identity halls of this subgenre arise as opposed to the usual explicit realism and violence in the black novel, to offer mysteries to the old wealth resolved by amateur detectives.
A necessary turned turn to the classic cluedo board and that of “was the butler in the library with the poison”, with undoubtedly pull between the public.
Here there is no place for the sordidness of low urban funds or for policemen about to retire macerated in alcohol.
Instead we find a single fifty that leaves its public relations company to retire in a small town of the English countryside or the Isabel II deploying all its cunning to resolve a possible case of murder committed in one of the rooms of the Windsor Palace
.
We talked about Agatha Raisin, the improbable heroin of M.C.
Beaton, considered as the queen of Cosy Crime with 30 deliveries on the back of her, and from another queen, in this case that of England, protagonist of the Windsor knot, of S.J.
Bennett.
Both, heirs of the Miss Marple de Agatha Christie and Jessica Fletcher has written a crime, have reached the Spanish bookstores in the last months of the Salamandra editions.
Its editor, Anik Lapointe, offers some keys to understand why the words cosy crime (cosy means cozy, comfortable or friendly) are not an oxymoron: “It is the most sympathetic subgenre of criminal fiction. It tells us about the personal relationships of the
People, seek evil in everyday facts, where less is expected. It usually has so many good tracks as false, because one of the pleasures of these novels is to discover the mystery. ”
In recent weeks to this list, another title has been added, Miss Merkel.
The case of the Retired Chancellor (Seix Barral), in which David Safierahonda in this growing tendency to convert public characters into amateur detectives.
If the idea of putting the German chancellor to investigate a case in rural Germany after abandoning politics was not suggestive enough, the humor with which Safier impregnates each page is responsible for the rest.
Can you imagine Angela Merkel, calling her husband “bizcochito”?
For that is just one of the details of an adventures that, according to Safier himself, will have continuity shortly, after selling about 300,000 copies in Germany in six months.
Pulling stereotype with a certain macho tufo, you might think it is a genre whose target audience are middle-aged women who take tea, participate in cooking courses and coexist with one or more cats.
Apart prejudice, entering the pages of Agatha Raisin and the lethal quiche or in the Thursday’s crime club supposes to discover an acute portrait of characters, attractive for all kinds of readers, with waves of sarcasm typically Briton sharpening each page.
It is a tribute to the classics that avoid falling into parody and updates some of the troops of mystery novels that triumphed in the 40s and 50s.
Also, nothing is as idyllic as it seems.
If Raisin is an “expert emotional chantajista” facing the villages of the cotswolds with large doses of caustic irony, the villains of Osman’s novels are portrayed with ruthless bitacity.
For the part of it, the Nonagenarian Isabel II of the Windsor knot provides her incisive point of view with respect to those around her.
One of her helpers presents her as someone with “lynx eyes, smell for sandeces and a prodigious memory”, something that she grows in several moments of the plot.
The Miss Merkel de Safier is not left behind: she brings out her sharp vision of the human race by analyzing the six suspects of the death of an aristocrat who has appeared dead in the dungeon of her castle dressed in a medieval armor
.
The popularity of the Cosy Crime in the current cultural panorama seems something unexpected, an echo of past times, perhaps more naive than this 21st century so back from everything.
But it is convenient to see further and realize that behind the Nordic Noir, the blood resorts in the snow and the language of autopsies and police interrogations, the black genre is much more diverse than it seems.
These kind puzzles are not the antidote of the ‘True Crime’ or the abundance of “violent, addictive and climbing thrillers, as the bands say so well,” according to Anik Lapointe.
She has the answer through a question, as good detectives usually do: “What better refuge for the traumas of reality than a world of postcard where justice is done, the villains are overcome and everything ends up well?
“.
On the following Thursday. Richard Osman.
To old age, cases of murder.
Four octogenarians face a second investigation in which an old friend, stolen diamonds and mafia are involved.
The knot Windsor.s.j.
Bennett.
A hybrid between The Crown and the stories of Miss Marple in which Isabel II reveals some observation and deduction skills worthy of Sherlock Holmes.
Agatha Raisin and the veterinarian cruel.m.c.
Beaton
The second installment of the series returns us to the idyllic village of Carsely and its not so idyllic inhabitants.
Miss Merkel.
The case of the retired chancellor.
David Safier.
In 2022, only a few months after leaving his charge, Angela Merkel discovers an unknown vocation: investigating crimes.
The trick of the mirrors.Agatha Christie.
The reissues of the “mother” of Cozy Crime returns jewelry like this, set in a mansion in which a strange family coexists and a reformatory for young criminals.
