When I first started writing mysteries decades ago, I didn’t even know what a cozy was. And when I found out, I never thought I was writing them. Still don’t. A lot of my subjects are fairly dark. In Book 4 of the Alvarez Family Murder Mysteries, DEAD … If Only, the story deals with a rape and child pornography. I don’t beat it into the ground, but these two facts motivate many of the characters’ actions. So, as I say, I never thought of myself as a cozy writer, despite resolutions that end with everyone becoming a B&BP (bigger and better person). However, when my publicist flung me into the cozy mystery category and gave me new covers indicating that’s what I wrote, my sales picked up. Inside, my stories hadn’t changed. Not a single word. But here I was in the cozy mystery category. That was a real eye-opener for me.
There are levels of darkness in my books that, apparently, the reader can absorb or ignore. Or just deal with as a part of life. Readers are, by and large, a sophisticated lot and often take it as it comes. They accept that I write funny while dealing with serious subjects. In fact, they are often grateful for it. Life can be pretty dark and disturbing. If you have a laugh here and there, so much the better. As far as I can tell, I write the humorous mystery pretending to be a cozy. All right then. I cope and write on.
One day a reader sent me an email saying how glad she was I didn’t use any colorful language in my novels. I thought about it. Well, given the setting, yes I do. Or have. But probably not in the one or two novels she’d read. In one scene from Death Runs in the Family, Lee is helping her ex-husband with a serious problem. His gratitude runs along the lines of using every vulgar word he can think of because he’s that kinda guy. Fed up, Lee tells him nicely to stop talking like that or she’ll stop him and not so nicely. I couldn’t have him say words like gosh-darn it and phooey. It simply wouldn’t work in that setting. I had to use the real stuff to get my point across. But other than that scene, I don’t pepper my dialog with curse words for no other reason than I simply don’t. Now and then, if it’s necessary, I let ‘er rip with a damn or hell. But I try to keep it to a minimum. In my opinion, a plethora of explicatives can take away from the story. That might be all the reader remembers.
This is not just in books, either. A friend of mine returned from the theater the other day and was aghast the musical she’d seen seemed to use the F-word in almost every other sentence. At least, that’s what she took away; not the songs, acting, or choreography. Which is a pity. Unless the book and libretto were lacking and the writers thought they were covering that fact up with shock value. Young comics often hide their inexperience with the world. “Fu-fu-fu-fu-fu” seems to be all I hear. If they think they’re being shocking, they’re not. They are being boring and unimaginative. Give me Seinfeld or Rita Rudner any time.
Recently, I asked myself a question. Could I write a novel without using one single explicative? More to the point, could I substitute a clever word for what society has deemed a curse word and still have it come off as sounding plausible? In my last novel, Cleopatra Almost Slept Here, I found I did it once or twice without realizing it. Here’s a paragraph: Startled, I must have jumped three feet into the air from a sitting position, surpassing any previous record set at the Olympics. This is the problem with relaxing for a moment after a hard afternoon. People tend to sneak up and scare the Rumpelstiltskin out of you.
Brilliant? No. Entertaining? Hopefully. When I write, I write for me, first and foremost. But I do try to have a mystery sprinkled with the emotions of life wrapped up in a few laughs. And lately, I’ve been trying to keep my explicatives to a minimum because, frankly, I don’t want to be remembered just for them.
