(no subject)

[skygiants]

You know that thing where no matter what hobby you have, you can write a cozy themed mystery novel series about it? Like, there's knitting-themed cozy mysteries and gardening-themed cozy mysteries and accounting-themed cozy mysteries and so on?

I don't think 'cozy themed series' is a thing for fantasy novels, because it's kind of been subsumed by urban fantasy which is a whole separate thing, but maybe it should be a thing? Actually I would kind of love if that was a thing. (ACCOUNTING-THEMED COZY FANTASY NOVELS BY THE DOZENS.) And if it was a thing, then Barbara Ashford's Spellcast and its sequel Spellcrossed would fall squarely into that subgenre.

So the basic premise is that Our Heroine Maggie goes on a road trip and accidentally gets sucked into a tiny community theater in a charming small town in Vermont, which is full of charmingly eccentric theatrical types and wacky theatrical hijinks, and also it turns out powered by the charming and angsty fairy director who uses his MAGICAL FAIRY POWERS to help all these charmingly eccentric characters put on successful musicals while coming to terms with their personal hangups and growing as people. The first book is about Maggie getting over her low self-esteem by performing as the clambake lady in "Carousel," and the second book is about Maggie getting over her parent issues by directing "Into the Woods." While falling in love with/sorting out relationship status with the charming and angsty fairy director, of course. They are basically the coziest damn things I've ever read.

And, like, OK:
- it's wish fulfillment up the wazoo
- there are all kinds of ethical problems with fairy magic cheerfully being used to futz with people's emotional states and ability to perform high-quality theater that are really very BARELY glancingly addressed
- don't go in looking for numinous because there's really very little numinous to be found
- also many of the charmingly eccentric theatrical types verge on stereotype (I cringed, for example, at the subplot about the gay actor playing Neville Craven who kept accidentally giving off incest vibes during his scenes with Archibald in "The Secret Garden") (although actually the loud and intimidating but good-hearted Chinese choreographer who SPEAKS IN ALLCAPS was my favorite and I would very happily read all about her romance with her mild-mannered Swiss-German stage manager husband)

So if you're likely to be irritated by those things, stay away, but I had massive amounts of fun. The books just kind of exude comfort -- at least if you are a person who loves musicals and loves cheesy fantasy novels, which, I mean, there's no denying I am the target audience. There is an X painted on my chest. HERE I AM.

But also I think I'm a bit cozy comfort fantasy-starved? Seriously, cozy theme fantasy can become a thing any time now.

Comments

[graycardinal]

AFAIK, there isn't a mystery *series* extant with either a gaming or linguistics focus (though there was a run a decade or two back on lady English-professor sleuths). But there have been a handful of attempts to portray gamer/geek/fantasy culture in more or less straight cozy mysteries, with varying degrees of success.

The disasters:
Bimbos of the Death Sun, Sharyn McCrumb
Cat in a Kiwi Con, Carole Nelson Douglas

McCrumb gets the culture not just wrong, but disastrously wrong in her entry, in which the GoH at a fan convention (reportedly modeled on Harlan Ellison) is murdered. Worse, at least in the original edition, the copy-editor didn't know the proper spelling of Anne McCaffrey's name....

Douglas does a bit better at getting the atmosphere right, but the plot is severely muddled by middle-chapter-of-epic-serial syndrome.

The "not bad":
Crouching Buzzard, Leaping Loon and
We'll Always Have Parrots, Donna Andrews
Zombies of the Gene Pool, Sharyn McCrumb

Surprisingly, the sequel to Bimbos improved markedly on its predecessor, mostly by virtue of focusing on SF writers rather than fans (and, to all appearances, being far better researched).

The main focus of Donna Andrews' Meg Langslow series is on birds and animals, but the protagonist's brother runs a computer game company, and her romantic partner is an actor; these two books therefore focus respectively on game-developer culture and a faux-Xena-series convention, both drawn reasonably well. Andrews is also noteworthy for having written a second, shorter series about "Turing Hopper", a software-personality who forms a covert private-detective partnership with a pair of human sleuths. Though marketed as cozy mysteries, the exploration of AI themes is equal to anything in straight SF.

The home runs:
The Wedding Game, Susan Holzer
Murder at the War, Mary Monica Pulver

Holzer's novel postulates a murder among a circle of online correspondents (the date and tech put it in the CompuServe/AOL/GEnie era), solved entirely by online sleuthing -- in which the geek culture is totally convincing.

Pulver's is a cult classic, chronicling an imaginary murder -- and is solution -- at an equally imaginary (but utterly accurate) version of the SCA's Pennsic War, properly labeled as such. There are a couple of sequels, and all are ingeniously plotted, but the later books grow a bit past "cozy" on a psychological level.

[sovay]

Pulver's is a cult classic, chronicling an imaginary murder -- and is solution -- at an equally imaginary (but utterly accurate) version of the SCA's Pennsic War, properly labeled as such.

. . . Peter S. Beagle's The Folk of the Air (1986)?

[graycardinal]

Hmm. It's been a long time since I've read that one, but that's definitely a possible entry in the "cozy fantasy" lists.

[hebethen]

Oh my. /flutters

Thank you, encyclopedic fount of knowledge on that most intriguing of subgenres, the cozy mystery!