Kerry,
Re your comments below:
> I'm sure they did. You've made good points. But
I
> still suggest that
> cozies, have their own, separate place in
the
> mystery tradition. I
> associate the term with the almost
claustrophobic
> containment of place: on
> trans-continental trains, aboard ships, in
mansion
> drawing rooms etc. and
> the cozy little groups of people who inhabited
them.
There've been hard-boiled novels and stories taking place in
small, contained settings (Hammett's "The Ouse on Turk
Street" comes immediately to mind), and there've been cozies
that covered a wide territory
(one of D.L. Sayers's novels, the one where Lord Peter's
older brother is being tried by the House of Lords, covers
action on two continents).
I think what you may be perceiving is that, in Holmes and his
predecessors, since, to a degree Conan Doyle was mapping his
own territory, things seem freer-wheeling, while in the
"traditional" mysteries following Conan Doyle, particularly
those produced between the wars, the pattern has become much
more formalized. It's not so much the setting, but the
pattern, that's become claustrophobic.
And I suppose it was that very pattern that hard-boiled
writers, however self-aware they were, were reacting
against.
JIM DOHERTY
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